On Thursday MT held a seminar with the title 'Recession 2.0 - is there a silver lining in the cloud'? Snappy title, eh? It’s fair to say that after the dismal news contained in Wednesday’s budget, silver linings were in short supply. But the group of 40 guests wanted to look at whether the ‘new connectedness’ will help organisations get themselves ahead of the curve as the recovery comes.

It’s certainly true that the speed of this downturn’s onset and its truly global nature have been exacerbated by this connectedness – the always-on, instantaneous nature of modern communication - whether that’s automated selling systems for bonds and equities, or the way in which global bad news spread fast like contagion. However, staying close and connected will be vital to those businesses who want to speed the upturn. And this applies to the full set of stakeholders: employees, customers, investors and prospects.

The panel consisted of MT contributing editor Stefan Stern, Caroline Plumb of FreshMinds (the youngest woman ever to make it onto the MT ‘35 Under 35’ young women in business list) and David Beard from Sage’s enterprise division (who kindly sponsored the event).

Caroline was particularly interesting on the subject of the formation of collaborative networks, both within and outside organisations, that help to innovate and solve problems. The old idea of the company as a fortress was out-of-date, she said, and contributors from outside needed welcoming within the walls with ideas about how to improve products and services. Caroline cited the case of Dell, which acknowledged that shortcomings in its customer service had given it hordes of detractors. So it invited them into the fold to help make things better by allowing new ideas to be discussed, and even voted upon, in its online communities.

I still believe a problem shared is a problem solved. And I also agree, for example, that a phenomenon like Wikipedia is an amazing case of collective endeavour leading to the creation of something truly astonishing. Almost like a 21st century Gothic cathedral. But I do have my worries. I retain an old-fashioned belief that Henry Ford was right when he said that if he’d asked potential customers what they wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse’. Those great leaps from the bath, accompanied by a eureka from the creator, will still often come from individuals. Even the concept of Wikipedia has a single mind behind it.

Apple and its brave new world of Apps has shown how this outside contractor system can fall flat on its face. 'Solving Life’s Little problems one app at a time' is the advertising line for those helpful add-ons you can buy for your iPhone.  Then yesterday Apple was hideously embarrassed by the fact that some sicko nerd has developed an App which involves shaking a baby to sleep. The aim of the game was to quieten the on-screen infant by shaking the iPhone until a pair of thick red Xs appeared over each eye of a baby drawn in black and white. Hilarious. I laughed until I got taken away by the social services. That’s why developer nerds require careful control.

There was also a lot of hand-wringing about the state of the media, which is being undone as its business models are torn to pieces by this new connectedness. In view of the recent furore I created when I questioned the value of Twitter in the coverage of the G20 protests, I’m glad to report that there was some support for the idea that, while it’s crucial to stay connected and sharply savvy about what’s going on in the minds of staff and customers, the yelling Twitter-style Babel of the crowd does not necessarily lead to enlightenment or wisdom.     

In today's bulletin:
UK economy suffers biggest slump since records began
Microsoft sales fail to compute
Scaling your business with Susan Boyle
Editor's blog: Can the new connectedness save us?
Tightening the purse strings, with YouTube

Well, Darling, I can’t say I’m overwhelmed. Encouraged by the success of the vehicle scrapping scheme in Germany and France, Darling has taken the plunge (after a lot of pushing from Peter Mandelson) and has just announced a £2,000 incentive for scrapping an old vehicle. This isn’t a great idea. And I don’t maintain this simply because my old clunker is only nine years old and therefore won’t be eligible for a two grand voucher off a new set of wheels.

Already there are likely lads asking if they buy an old banger for 50 quid, will they be able to trade it in against a brand new set of wheels? The answer is almost certain to be no. Not even the Treasury is that daft. No, really.

But why should the car industry be favoured over any other area of manufacturing? We don’t have a huge indigenous car industry here anymore. It’s a fiscal stimulus to get a bit more VAT in. Why not allow punters to trade in their old DFS sofa for some homemade organic hemp furniture? Surely the Hon. Kirstie Allsopp would approve.

The other industry that will be reaching for its tin hat is the scrap metal business. There is likely to be such a huge amount of old steel coming into the recycling market that all their margins will be shot to pieces. But I suppose the real disadvantage of this scheme is likely to be that all the profits from any increase in sales of new cars will go abroad. It’ll be the Germans of BMW and Mercedes and the Japanese owners of Toyota and Honda who get all the benefit. A little help may be directed towards the desperate and beleaguered Jaguar Land Rover, but any profit from that is going to India.

I defer to MT’s old friend and dotty entrepreneur Ling Valentine in this: ‘It makes no logical sense to crush a perfectly good, 10-year old car just as an excuse to buy a new one. It’s an environmental crime, based on greed. All the dealers and manufacturers can see are taxpayers’ pound notes up for grabs. Dealers and speculators are said to be buying old bangers and registering them in friends and family names simply to take advantage of a windfall. What will happen to the 70,000 used cars currently for sale at less then £2,000 in AutoTrader? This scheme stinks, and the effect it has had on freezing sales this year can be attributed to a greedy industry headed by desperate people. Very few genuine owners of 10-year old cars will trade in against a new car, it just doesn’t happen. These industry heads should resign for causing a self-inflicted sales-confidence catastrophe’. You tell ‘em, Ling.

In parallel with this is the government scheme to encourage the purchase of green i.e. electric cars. There is, however, a big problem with these vehicles as they are available at the moment. Never mind that they simply change the carbon spewing venue from the exhaust pipe to the power station. They are too small, too slow and too expensive. You can barely fit Noddy and Big Ears into a GWhiz, however much it looks like their set of wheels. Electric cars have environmentally very unfriendly batteries and when fully loaded with a family of 4 or 5, plus luggage, their juice supply is unlikely to get you further than the end of the street.

PS According to our colleagues over at Autocar, Darling actually wants manufacturers to stump up half of this £2k - and they're not very happy about it...

In today's bulletin:
Darling hikes top tax rate as Government borrowing soars
Unemployment and borrowing soars - but IMF backs down
Editor's blog: Hello, Darling, want a new motor?
Diageo champagne on ice as LVMH denies Moet sale
Quadruple your money - give it to a teenager

Like Black Lace reunions and charity wrist bands, Twitter is a tedious fad we would do well to pull the plug on. News editors at the national newspapers have been desperate to keep up with the Joneses, i.e their proper broadcast media rivals, in offering up-to-the-minute G20 news of the crusties and anti-capitalist protestors surging on the Bank of England, busting into branches of RBS, and trying to knock policemen's helmets off. They've gone for Twitter because it's The New Thing, and because they don't have the resources in their depleted budgets to do it properly.

The result is an unwholesome mess - a garbled Babel of nonsense that leaves you screaming for a return to the times when we could read all about it the day afterwards over our Cornflakes on a page of newsprint. Both The Times and Guardian are guilty of this mindless dumbing down in the search for 'authenticity' in the form of immediacy. 'Jump against the war is the cry' squeaks one Tweeting twerp. 'AudioBoo. Turning nasty is.gd' another. Even the FT has succumbed with 'I can see the FT office from here.' Give me strength.

At one point a desperate Guardian correspondent who clearly isn't a believer wrote in exasperation: 'I wonder if it is possible to string a narrative thread together on Twitter. Probably not.' Exactly. Rarely have I seen a bunch of such randomly assembled, inane apercus. We learn nothing from them. Truly Twitter is like the ADHD kid in the classroom who just can't keep quiet but keeps piping up with inanities that nobody wants to hear.

With luck Twitter's days will soon be numbered. Not least because it is now the subject of a brilliant bit of satire in Viz magazine. Viz's new character is 'Fireman Fritter - He's Got a Twitter up his Shi**er'. The storyline is simple but telling: Fritter is so busy reading 'Tweets' emitted by Stephen Fry - 'He's going to buy some crisps... He can't decide whether to have the salt and vinegar or the ready salted' - that he clean forgets his responsibility to save those being burned to a crisp within a blazing building.