Two things have been dominating my brain for the last couple of weeks: moving house, and playing Portal.

Portal is… well, it’s a revelation. I know, I know; once again, I’m really really late to the party. Everyone else in the world knew that Portal was brilliant back in October, and there have been any number of Internet memes generated about it since then. If you haven’t played it yet, go now and do so. It’ll take you under 3 hours, if you’re good at gaming, or, if you’re me, more like five and a half hours, and those hours will be alternately intriguing, frustrating, creepy, and immensely satisfying.

Moving house, on the other hand, seems to take an absolute eternity, and is made of pure frustration.

The two things seem to have become inextricably linked in my brain, though, to the point where I’m having nightmares about moving vans and portals. I’m not sure why it was a nightmare - actually, I’d love to be able to shoot a blue portal into my new place, an orange one at the old place, and just chuck all my boxes through. It’d save a two hour drive each way, which would be fantastic. I’d love to be able to just step from one place to another through portals, without having to travel all the time (commuting on the Victoria line has been hellish lately, which is part of the reason for the move) though placing the portals could be tricky, and without Chell’s magic leg-protectors, I’d probably do myself an injury within a day or so.

Every time I get really into a game or web service or computer program or whatever, though, it just makes me realise how utterly inconvenient real life can be. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use Google to search reality? (I suspect that thought will keep occurring to me over the next couple of weeks, because things tend to go inexplicably missing when house-moves are happening.) Or, better, use Google to search your brain for all the passwords and PINs and other identifying data you used when you set up various accounts and have now utterly forgotten? Having to call or write letters to every company with whom I hold an account to get them to change my address or send a final bill or whatever other fiddly task has somehow become necessary is driving me insane; if only everything could be updated online, life would be great. I guess, basically, what I’m saying here is that I’m lazy, and I wish the real world could be as easy to sort out as the virtual one.

Remind me of this when, next week, I’m tearing my hair out over my complete inability to set up a wireless network in the new place.

I’m late to the party here, but I figured I’d weigh in on the Max Gogarty incident at the Guardian. If you missed it, here’s a quick recap: a 19 year old wrote a not-very-good column for the Guardian’s Travelog section about his upcoming gap year trip to Thailand; comments discovered that his dad was a travel writer for the Guardian and smelt nepotism rather than talent in the commissioning of the column; all hell broke loose in the comments thread; senior Guardian writers weighed in, closed comments, and Max’s blog was abandoned after just the one sensational entry.

Now that the dust has settled on the whole incident, it all seems slightly silly. There’s nothing particularly outrageous about any of it: the blog wasn’t particularly well-written, but then lots of the Guardian, and indeed lots of Internet blogs, aren’t. (Though the Guardian piece was at least paid, so there’s a reasonable assumption of quality there.) That Max Gogarty’s father is also a freelance writer for the Guardian also isn’t particularly shocking or immoral - sure, Max probably had access to contacts your average 19 year old on the street doesn’t, but then why should that stop him from trying to do something he wants to do, career-wise? And it’s really, really not shocking or unusual that a pack of Guardian commenters went ballistic.

Read any article or blog on the Guardian’s website and you’ll find all sorts of vitriolic comments - maybe some of them are warranted, maybe not, but the point is, they’re inescapable. It’s not just the Guardian, either; it’s any website on the Internet where strong opinions are expressed, and there’s enough traffic to spark a reaction. Really, attracting Internet trolls isn’t a particularly mysterious process - you just need traffic, and then drama is practically guaranteed.

There have been all sorts of studies carried out and theories espoused as to what it is about the anonymity of the Internet that causes perfectly rational people to get so angry and rude, but then again, there have been lots of studies done and theories espoused about why it is that people like chocolate. The thing about people is, a lot of them are angry and loud in real life. A lot more would like to be angry and loud, but never quite seem to have the nerve, or to be able to think of the perfect comeback at the perfect moment. Taking away any consequences and giving people time to respond to something means all that vitriol can spill freely. The Internet doesn’t make people more cruel; it just takes away the immediate consequences of that cruelty. (Perhaps “cruel” is the wrong word: sometimes, anger is absolutely the correct response to a situation or statement, and sometimes that anger can more easily be expressed online than in person, and that’s not a bad thing.)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Max Gogarty incident was the response of the Guardian’s editors: the travel editor and the online editor both published blogs about the incident, expressing shock and disappointment over the appalling treatment of poor Max. Seems his trip to India was slightly marred by the outpouring of hatred online, and his blog was cancelled to save his feelings. The whole thing felt slightly like the Guardian was scolding its readers as if they were naughty children, or school playground bullies. (Those follow up blogs attracted plenty of comments, too, for the record.) But really, whose fault was it that an article was published that enraged the paper’s readership? From where I’m sitting, now, post-incident, safely not in charge of any department of the Guardian at all, it seems fairly obvious that an article by a privileged teenager about his merry-yet-clichéd jaunt abroad was going to cause the average Guardian reader to fly into a complete rage - and surely they know their demographic far better than I do.

Then again, wearing my cynical hat, the whole incident got a lot more attention from the blogosphere than most Guardian blog posts. And what’s the point of a website - or a newspaper - if no-one reads it?

While I’m on the subject of angry people on the Internet, I might as well talk about Anonymous for a bit. The online group, whose previous targets included feminist blogs, has turned its attention to Scientology; a couple of weeks ago, a protest was organised outside a couple of Scientology buildings in London, including the one just up the road on Tottenham Court Road. Protesters wore masks based on the one in V for Vendetta, ate cake, danced to Rick Astley, and generally made Internet jokes - and campaigned against Scientology at the same time. Websites used to plan and co-ordinate the events warned potential attendees that they’d have to be on their best behaviour to avoid being moved along by the police, so there wasn’t any violence involved, but seeing well-known Internet memes (including LOLcats on placards and Portal jokes) making the leap into reality was … well, strange, to say the least.

Whether or not their cause is worthwhile, there’s something unsettling about these protests - possibly because it’s generally assumed that people will say things online that they would never back up in reality. It’s easy to say that because something’s happening online, it doesn’t really matter; that it’s just the Internet, that it’s not real. Both the Gogarty incident and the Anonymous Scientology protests, though, suggest that’s really not the case. Like Soylent Green, the Internet - or at least commenters and posters on it - is people.

So, according to Nielson Netratings, Facebook’s domination of the Internet might be on the slide. Between December 2007 and January 2008, there was a 5% fall in visitor numbers - MySpace and Bebo have suffered similar drops in traffic. Could this be the beginning of the end?

Well, maybe. Then again, maybe not.

The sensible explanation here would seem to be that most websites suffer a drop in traffic over Christmas, particularly ones that people access from work. Because at Christmas, people have more interesting things to do. Another factor is almost certainly the fact that many offices have blocked access to social networking sites, so employees can’t access these sites during working hours. That’ll kill a lot of traffic to time-wasting websites. And the thing with websites like Facebook is that if you can’t access it regularly, there’s not an awful lot of point: the fun of it is watching things change, reading your friends’ status updates in real time, and writing messages on their walls about them. If you don’t check it for a few days, you’ll probably find that when you do come back, there’s not a lot to catch up on - conversations you might have had now won’t happen, because the moment’s passed. A lot of concerns have been raised recently about whether or not people should share any information online at all, due to fears of identity theft, and that, too, might have negatively affected Facebook’s traffic.

But I don’t think that MySpace, Facebook et al are going to be shutting up shop any time soon. It was probably naive to think that the all-consuming popularity of social networking was going to continue forever, because the zeitgeist almost moves on, often for no discernible reason. Dozens of social networking sites have already fallen by the wayside - who uses Friendster any more, or even, if we’re honest, MySpace? Something else will, almost inevitably, rise up to take the place of Facebook:  it might be yet another social networking site offering almost the same features as Facebook with one added, killer feature, or it might be something completely different. These things have a limited shelf life - it’s just that certain media outlets seem to have been a bit too quick to declare Facebook the best thing ever, and now seem to be panicking a bit now that it turns out that Facebook is just another website.

Truth be told, there’s just not a lot to do on Facebook. When you first sign up, there’s lots - you have to create a profile, filling in lots of information about yourself and putting up your most flattering pictures, but eventually, you run out of things to do, and end up visiting less often. Really, it’s a tool for keeping in touch with your friends - an online address book that lets you play games and look at pictures. The fact that its traffic is going into decline doesn’t mean a whole lot, except that the general Internet public is quite fickle about how and where it chooses to waste its time.

I can understand the appeal of e-cards: they’re free, instant, and if you want to send them internationally, it’s not a problem. There’s no messing about at the post office or trying to figure out when you need to post a card in order to have it delivered on the right day (does Valentine’s Day affect the post office in the same way Christmas does, for example?) - an e-mail is unlikely to get lost in the post, though it might conceivably get caught up in a spam filter.

But it seems Valentine’s Day, like every other event or holiday in the world, has become a target for malicious types. The latest incarnation of the Storm worm pretends to be an electronic Valentine’s card, and no doubt there’s lots of other malware and spam designed as shy greetings from secret admirers floating around out there on the interwebs. And all the warnings from security firms in the world won’t necessarily protect someone who’s feeling a bit down today and hoping against hope that that e-mail in their inbox might really be from someone they’ve got a crush on.

It all seems a bit mean, really. It’s cruel anyway, sending viruses disguised as news reports or greetings cards or whatever else, but somehow, malicious Valentine’s messages just seem that bit nastier.

It’s a bit late for this now, really, but if you’ve left it until today to sort out sending the object of your affections a token of your love - go and buy them a card from a shop, and deliver it by hand, okay? At least then they’ll know it’s not going to zombify their computer.

Fake Steve Jobs picked up this week’s Micro Mart cover - a replay of our cover last year which asked if Vista was 2007’s most pointless upgrade - and answered our question, saying that Vista isn’t pointless: “It’s the best marketing tool we’ve ever had.”

Well, there we go, then.

Apparently, all you need to do to sell things in February - no matter what the product is - is make a pink version. There’s a pink Blackberry Pearl; a pink iPod Nano; a heart-shaped mouse (which, okay, isn’t pink, but it doesn’t look particularly easy to use, either)… the list goes on.

I’ve said before that I actually like the colour pink, but I’m suffering from Valentine’s Day fatigue already. The most mind-boggling thing I’ve come across thus far is the paired t-shirts, pictured above. Available from ThinkGeek.com, the shirts detect their proximity to one another - too far, and the “life force” is depleted, but get up close and personal and the heart bar refills itself.

Can’t quite work out the point of that one, I must say. Valentine’s Day is still two weeks away - it’ll be fun to see what other unromantic products try to give themselves a lovey dovey makeover…