Veteran blog­ger Dave Winer has turned his atten­tion to the tv news of the future.

I love think­ing about the future, not least because grow­ing up in the 1970s I thought we’d all be eat­ing our food in cap­sule form and wear­ing strange halter-necked outfits.

Dave could actu­ally get what he wants by TIVO­ing the news, or watch­ing it with a laptop to hand.

In the UK we’ve had red-button inter­activ­ity avail­able for news for quite a while, enabling people on satel­lite to decon­struct run­ning orders. The response has been utterly underwhelming.

In the mean­time, things that might help juice up TV news are:

• bet­ter social book­mark­ing oppor­tun­it­ies to share stuff online
• more soph­ist­ic­ated metadata with video
• decon­struc­ted pack­aging, ie stan­dalone graphics
• bet­ter online text support

The only non-journalism blog on my roll belongs to my friend Char­lotte. It details her efforts to get her son Fred­die to eat his veg­gies. The blog’s due to get some cov­er­age in the Tele­graph this week.

If con­tent cyn­icism and rev­enue mod­els are get­ting you down and you want a reminder of the charm and whole­some­ness of the Inter­net and its abil­ity to cre­ate con­nec­tions in far-off places, then check it out. (And if you have any sug­ges­tions on mon­et­iz­ing it …)

Ten Alps has won a con­tract to provide an IPTV ser­vice to Kent County Coun­cil. Inter­est­ingly it includes a news ser­vice that will be inde­pend­ently con­trac­ted — a sort of Med­way Al Jaz­eera? If you look at Ten Alps’ pub­lic tv offer­ing you can see some of the kind of con­tent they’re provid­ing already.

I have to say, it isn’t the kind of thing that sets my pulse racing — it’s about as appet­ising as local author­ity cater­ing. It doesn’t have to be like that, of course, or does it?

A few years back, when some gov­ern­ment crisis other than the Home Office was tak­ing up his time, John Reid popped in to the Chan­nel Five News stu­dios for an inter­view. As Reid was per­form­ing his pug­na­cious exculp­at­ory role on behalf of the gov­ern­ment, his spe­cial adviser installed him­self in the editor’s office. The editor’s com­puter was logged in, and the adviser pro­ceeded to have what I sup­pose you’d call “a nose around.” Upon being dis­covered in mid-snoop, this indi­vidual couldn’t even man­age a blush.

That little anec­dote sprang into my mind after I caught up with a speech by the Met’s Peter Clarke, who is the UK’s National Co-ordinator of Ter­ror­ist Invest­ig­a­tions. Clarke fingered a “small num­ber of mis­guided indi­vidu­als who betray con­fid­ences” and by doing so, he said, com­prom­ised invest­ig­a­tions, revealed sources of life-saving intel­li­gence and “put lives at risk dur­ing major investigations.”

Could he pos­sibly mean people like our friend (to whom Mr Reid has shown the kind of loy­alty that one hopes is an indic­a­tion of his char­ity rather than his judgment)?

Said Mr Clarke:

“I have no idea where the leaks came from, but who­ever was respons­ible should be thor­oughly ashamed of themselves.”

Ashamed of them­selves? I’ll bet their faces are beet­root red…