The government is pushing Twitter as a cheap and easy way to communicate with the people of Britain — although, that might change if David Cameron’s Conservatives win power, as he thinks Twitter is for twats (I’m not swearing, he apparently didn’t mean it in the dirty word sense, just in the idiotic sense, apparently.)

Here’s ten Government Twitter feeds, in no particular order, despite the numbering.

1) @conservatives We’ll start with the Conservatives. Their leader may think it’s twattish behaviour, but his party does it. We’re not sure what that says about Cameron or his party…

2) @labourparty For balance, here’s the other guys. You’ll notice they have 1,684 followers, and don’t follow a single feed. Way to miss the point.

3) @thegreenparty Compare that to the Green Party, which have 4,211 followers and actually follow over 600 people, while @libdems manage to follow 735 to their 4,358 followers.

4) @ukparliament For everyone who wants to know exactly what’s happening in the Houses, but can’t be bothered to attend. Probably a lot of MPs and Lords following this one, then.

5) @downingstreet Don’t worry, it’s not actually run by the dull speaking PM himself - though limiting his speeches to 140 characters might not hurt his career. It’s run by his comms staff, who actually reply to questions.

6) @digitalbritain The department for business people who are running the Digital Britain project actually use the internet. Good for them. If you have a question - and who doesn’t? - about the network plans, they do actually respond.

7) @ofcom The best part of following Ofcom is getting the link to the weekly broadcast complaints - people sure do complain about some funny things.

8 ) @NHSChoices Find out when swine flu will kill us all, in real time!

9) @NDS_AllDepts Some rather altruistic man has gathered all the government’s news releases into one feed, so you can see everything they’re doing — or everything they’re telling us about, at least.

10) Tweetminster You’ll have noticed there’s no ‘@’ out in front of this one, and that’s because it’s something called a “website” — old school, I know. It’s a pretty brilliant one though, that gathers feeds from MPs. You can see if yours is on there, and gauge who’s being mentioned more on Twitter, David Cameron or Gordon Brown.

Any you think we should share, just chuck them in the comments. And don’t forget, you can follow IT PRO on Twitter, too!

Those sleepless nights since the pioneering cheddar was lost on its mission to the edge of space are over — the brave, brave cheese has been found, and is safe and sound.

In an important marketing mission, the cheese was sent to the edge of space (the close edge, not the far one) in a weather balloon earlier this week, but its GPS tracking equipment failed — the drama! — and no one knew if its journey was successful or if it had returned to earth safely.

We now know.

The cheddar was found 74 miles from its launch point, landing in a back garden in Cressex. The balloon that carried it had burst, suggesting the cheese was successful in its mission to get nearish to space. However, its video camera failed, so we’ll never know exactly what it experienced. (You can watch the launch here.)

But the pioneering cheddar is safe — at least until someone wonders what space cheese tastes like… (Mmm… bravery is tasty.)

Indeed, Dom Lane, of West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers group, said to the BBC: “I may try a bit to see if it has matured at high altitude and then it will probably go into a glass case at our production offices.”

Maybe it would have been safer in orbit, after all…

Tragedy has struck the space community. And the cheese community.

A wedge of cheddar was launched to the edge of space — it has an edge, apparently — using a weather balloon rigged with GPS and a digital camera. As it hit 30 kilometers high, the balloon was supposed to burst, and this pioneering cheese would float back to earth with a parachute. (Really, I’m not making this up.)

Alas, the cheese has disappeared. Shortly after takeoff, the GPS-tracking system failed, leaving the state of the mission and the whereabouts of the brave cheese unknown.

The project’s backers, West Country Cheesemakers, said they hoped to find the missing cheese between Wiltshire and Cambridgeshire — assuming it hasn’t drifted home to the moon.

Cheese chairman Philip Crawford said the dangerous mission was undertaken to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.

“We are very proud of our authentic cheddar which we make by hand on our farms and we set ourselves the very highest standards,” he said. “It seemed appropriate, therefore, that we should mark the anniversary of the first moon landing with a giant leap for cheesekind.”

And not just high standards when it comes to cheese, but marketing opportunities as well. But hey, everything’s better with cheese, even space.

TED kicked off in Oxford today. That statement either makes you go “Huh?” or fills you with disappointment that you’re not there (if you are there, and reading this, what’s wrong with you? go listen to the amazing people.)

For the uninitiated, TED is the Technology Entertainment Design conference, but that hardly sums it up. It’s a gathering of ridiculously intelligent, passionate, amazing people. They each get a quarter of an hour of stage time to share their idea or creation or whatever with the world. It started off in California - no big surprise there - but has a spin-off in Oxford this year.

To attend, you not only must shell out £2,700, but you also need to write an essay and pass the application process.

So I’m not only unable to afford it, I’m likely not clever enough. But don’t worry, TED is an inclusive bunch, for all the conference’s exclusivity. They’ve set up a website with videos of the presentations — it’s like YouTube, but full of clever, do-gooder content, instead of clips of cute kittens.

That might not sound great, but it’s just as easy to kill a few hours watching TED clips as it is YouTube crap, and you don’t feel like you’ve wasted your time after TEDding. (The videos are also available on YouTube, actually, so I should stop slagging it off.)

To get you started, here’re my favourite five videos:

1) The first just blows my mind, and is classic TED. Hans Rosling explains health statistics in a way which has been compared to sports play by plays… A perfect example of the passion these people have for their topics. Don’t let the 20 minute time scare you off — it’s worth every second. And actually funny.

2) Keeping with the data theme, here’s one from the UK’s own Sir Tim Berners Lee. I have a wee bit of a professional crush on this man — he’s brilliant and humble and sweetly funny, and this video proves all those traits. He stumbles through his own jokes, and then awkwardly leads a chant of Raw Data Now, but it’s still captivating and inspiring.

3) In this next one, Johnny Lee finds some cool new uses for a Wii remote, showing how much very advanced tech goes into the types of devices we now take for granted.

4) In the next, a guy I went to university with demos his rather amazing and remarkably fun desktop animation called BumpTop — you can download it free here. I’ve never had a desktop make me laugh before…

5) And to round out my five favourites — if you watch just one of these videos, make it this one. A team of MIT researchers chuck together some bits and pieces of mobile phones and cameras to make a portable projector, letting you take pictures with your hands, dial on your own fingers and more. If it doesn’t blow your mind, there’s something wrong with you.

So if you don’t mind losing a few hours of your time, wander over to the site. I’ve picked largely techie ones here, but there are hundreds of videos across all topics — there’s poetry from Felix Dennis (the very man who owns this site), education from Dave Eggers, and even a video on how mushrooms can save the world.

If you see any good ones, drop us a link in comments below.

You’ve got to shake your head and wonder what they were thinking…

Amazon had some rights issues with a few George Orwell e-books, so sneakily disappeared them without warning from customers Kindle e-book readers, depositing refunds into accounts with little explanation.

One day you’ve got a copy of 1984, the next day, it’s like it never existed… sort of like that bit in 1984 where the government deletes and changes information, erasing all evidence by sending it down the “memory hole” to be incinerated.

Amazon’s since promised to never, ever delete owned copies off Kindles again. But of all the books to make the first mistake with, of all the authors… did no one at Amazon have the ability to imagine the headlines?

Indeed, headline writers have had fun, with Amazon being dubbed Big Brother, Orwellian and, my favourite, the Ministry of DRM. Seen any good ones? Leave them in the comments…

So after a few false reports, it seems the Queen has joined Twitter — which is either a sign the microblogging site has hit the big time, or a sign it’s jumped the shark.

You can follow @BritishMonarchy now for pics of the changing of the guard, news on millitary awards and updates on what her grandkids are doing. Aww, sweet.

The best part is who the feed has chosen to follow. Maybe it’s a bit of a Twitter glitch, but the @BritishMonarchy page shows it follows no one — makes sense, she’s the Queen, we’re her followers, or something like that.

But then three feeds are shown further down… one for her son’s climate change project the Copenhagen Communiqué, another for someone named Paul Fright, and the tennis player Andy Murray. I guess she really is a fan…

If you’re more a techie than a royalist, you can follow IT PRO on Twitter here.

A Microsoft researcher has claimed that MySpace has become a “digital ghetto,” after white people abandoned it in favour of the more elite-seeming, culturally-superior Facebook.

Speaking at a conference in New York, Danah Boyd described the flight from MySpace to Facebook, claiming that the people who made the move are more likely to be educated, white and privileged:

The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us… It should scare the hell out of us… When people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another, they do not communicate with one another; this canon does breed intolerance.

Apparently, Facebookers mock MySpace users, saying only idiots would stick with the site, that it’s full of stupid people, Boyd said, after four years of research.

Is she nuts? No one left MySpace because of their upbringing — the site has always been more of a music network, hence the urban (to Boyd, ghetto) users. Anyone who abandoned MySpace likely did so because Facebook is simply better — it’s easier to use, has better features, and easier on the eyes, too. It’s bothered to innovate, and was one of the leaders in the whole app store revolution, too.

And, MySpace is still widely used — in the US it’s the top social network. That’s where social networking started, and MySpace started it all. But then it was usurped globally by Facebook, which added users who had never even touched MySpace.

Boyd herself admits the social networks are not the problem; they’re merely a reflection of society. “People are already divided and we can’t expect technology to automatically integrate them and create cultural harmony,” she noted.

Still, she said we need to recognise that different types of people use different networks, stating what is colloquially known as “the obvious”. To Boyd, the increasing use of the internet to expand communication could leave some people out (again, yeah, we know). For example, she said politicians pushing information via Twitter and Facebook will be leaving MySpace’s ghetto kids out.

She cites Barack Obama’s election campaign. Obama used Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, as well as websites, as part of his campaign. You can’t accuse his people of not offering a lot of opportunity to hear his platform — especially as several of those are on open platforms, which don’t require even a free membership to access.

But is he ignoring his roots by ignoring MySpace? Um, no. Because he actually has an active MySpace page. You think Boyd would have noticed that in her four years of research…

Boyd also apparently name-checked the Iranian revolution, which has taken off online via Twitter. Why? It’s quick, it spreads fast, it’s easy. Iranians are using it because it perfectly suits their needs; what should they do, create MySpace accounts and add a bunch of friends before planning their protests, so some kids in urban centres in the US can follow along?

Boyd has compared Facebook and MySpace as though they are equals, as though they were designed to be. MySpace was designed for teenagers; Facebook was created at Harvard. Then, Facebook expanded its remit, looking to draw more and more groups. MySpace didn’t.

The similarity to “white flight” which Boyd describes can be attributed to this, quite plainly. She does a disservice to the real racial issues in the US (and everywhere else) by suggesting otherwise. Ghettos happen because the rich (and often white) people leave, while the poor can’t. There’s no reason anyone is tied to MySpace; if they have internet access, Facebook is just as free.

Of more concern is the digital divide — the many people who can’t or won’t go online. Not only does this put them at a disadvantage financially because of the prevalence of online discounts, but as more and more public services move online, it may become more difficult for them to access benefits.

So there are real problems, and Boyd is right to note that social media won’t solve every problem. But Facebook vs MySpace is as made up a problem as some of the relationships on those sites.