The Manchester blogger, theTelegraph and the Budget

For a short time this afternoon, visitors to the Telegraph’s dedicated online Budget coverage were treated to a stream of expletives and plenty of less offensive general silliness of the “widdle and poo” variety.
No its publishing system hadn’t been hacked, it was all part of an initiative to enable users of the micro-blogging platform twitter to post their own thoughts on this year’s Budget using the online tool Twitterfall.
By posting short messages known as tweets with the tags #Budget09 or including words such as Alistair Darling, messages appeared uncensored in the right hand side of this page.
Journalists at the newspaper watched as streams of inappropriate messages poured into the site before the decision was taken to pull the plug on the experiment.
One of the main protagonists was the Manchester blogger known as JoeThe Dough. He captured his first naughty tweet for posterity here on his Flickr account.
He’s since been rather apologetic about it saying: ” hmmm. Sorry Daily Telegraph. I think if you’d ridden that our for another hour, it would actually have been useful.”
And maybe it would – those who complain that newspapers are aloof and non-inclusive should welcome an opportunity to participate in such a nationally important debate as the Budget.
A Telegraph insider tells me the paper may re-instate the service later as previous use of Twitterfall during the G20 debate resulted in no such problems.
In the meantime, you can read more about today’s events here at The Guardian’s tech pages.