social networking is a phenomenon that is not going away. As the initial excitement dies, its use will become routine. I noticed this week that newspaper accounts reporting the deaths of four firefighters, at the Atherston warehouse fire in Warwickshire, had drawn biographical details from Facebook entries. Photographs of the dead were being compiled on a Facebook group and friends were visiting the site of one of the firemen to pay condolences. Socially this is comparable with the in-memoriam columns in newspapers. Disseminating information in this way is important: the full disaster of the battle of the Somme in 1916 was not revealed by the government of the day but in the long columns of deaths recorded publicly by families in British newspapers.