The Government Accountability Office -- Washington's rough equivalent to Canada's Office of the Auditor General -- gave itself what you might think is an esoteric question: If a global pandemic like the H1N1 flu forces a whole pile of to stay home and telecommute using our home Internet services, could the Internet handle the extra traffic and, more importantly, could financial markets continue to function given their dependency on the availability of plenty of bandwidth?

Ian Capstick, a former press secretary for the NDP and now operating his own firm, MediaStyle, is running an interesting series on his blog. He's asking journalists the same three questions all related to the broad theme of how blogging and social networks fit in with the traditional day job of a daily journalist.

I mostly re-hash stuff I've already written about here and elsewhere about those issues but do check out what my friends Susan Delacourt and Bill Doskoch had to say about this brave new world.

At home, my old Cube is never going to run Snow Leopard, of course. But my iMac (2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM) is going to get the upgrade as soon as I'm satisfied about Snow Leopard playing nice with the following applications..

I began digitizing my vinyl record collection in 2008. For many records, various online services would automatically retrieve album art and other information once I'd dumped the digitized files into iTunes. But in too many cases, the information was either absent, incomplete, or substantially different from the original vinyl. So with the help of a digital camera and some image editing software, I'm digitizing the album art as I digitize the actual music. This site contains the digitized album art...

So, it looks like good, old-fashioned gumshoe work will be required here to find the Canuck with the biggest social media draw. Let's limit it, for now, to Twitter. Here's my ranking, with tweeps (Twitter followers) followed by the date I checked their Twitter home page:

How are Canadians or Canadian institutions doing when it comes to drawing big crowds on Twitter, Facebook or other social media platforms? I don't think we've really hit that mass inflection point yet. Comedian Rick Mercer, for example, has only about 7,000 tweeps or followers and a little better than half that when it comes to Facebook friends. David Suzuki has something north of 10,000 tweeps. But do we have anyone in this country cracking 100,000? How about 50,000?

Say what you want about its products, but as an investment, there's been few better than Microsoft Corp. And since it went public in 1986, it has seen its revenue grow every year -- until now. Meanwhile, Apple Computer this week reported that, for the nine months which ended on June 27, its revenue was $27-billion, up 8.5 per cent over the same period last year..

... the beltway media are missing this point: "The condescending reaction to the Dean insurgency by television's political correspondents can be reminiscent of that hilarious party scene in the movie "Singin' in the Rain," where Hollywood's silent-era elite greets the advent of talkies with dismissive bafflement. "The Internet has yet to mature as a political tool," intoned Carl Cameron of Fox News last summer as he reported that the runner-up group to Dean supporters on the meetup.com site was witches . ."

.. a University of Waterloo research team has combined the principle behind SneakerNet with USB memory sticks -- which, for ten or twenty dollars can store several gigabytes of encrypted data -- for project called VLink, which researchers say will help extend the functionality of the Internet to less-developed, rural areas of the world.

For a while now, I've been 'tweeting' whenever the government issues a press release announcing that it is spending some money. I'm making a couple of changes to the way I've been going about this ...