Ever wondered what the top most searched techie gadgets are? Well, I certainly have, so when Yahoo! published their list of the most searched gadgets of 2008, I had to take a sneaky peek. And goodness, was I surprised.

Not very interesting was number 10’s entry, ‘Garmin’. That’s a make of GPS, if you were wondering.

Still huge in popularity at number 9 was the iPod. Pretty impressive that they’re still topping the tables after 7 years of sales.

Covering up slots 8, 5, 4 and 3 were various games consoles. No big shock there then.

What did surprise me, though, was numero uno on the list, the top gadget that you’re all searching for, the must have technological item of 2008. It’s a…wait for it…digital camera. Oh.

I thought we all had one these in this day and age. Well, plenty of us have done away with them altogether in favour of our all-singing, all dancing mobile phones that can take a better picture than the brick-sized cameras we had a few years ago, I suppose. So why on earth are we searching for them again?

Maybe it’s because they’re cheap. Maybe it’s because there are so many of them out there, we need help in buying them. Who knows. But it seems that even in these days of super consoles, phones and music gadgets, we still want to take a good old picture. Hurrah.

The politics story that’s had everyone talking this week has been the online leaking of the BNP’s membership list or ‘activists list’ from 2007,  some of whom may no longer be party members or actually never were.

Whatever this document is (some simple Googling should yield the link to it), it makes for fascinating reading. Not only are 12,801 names pulished, but addresses, emails, telephone numbers, ages and even hobbies are also included.

‘Ctrl + F’ has never been such a compelling tool: ‘Do my postcode next!’ my housemates enthused as we crowded round to examine the list. A handy colour-coded regional map also available for scrutiny is useful too. Rather uncomfortably, for me at least, it takes the form of a creamy-yellow expanse, glaringly puctuated by a red splodge: Leeds, with 263 names - far more than any other city.

The hobbies listed range from the bizarre (growing mistletoe, medieval longbow, metaphysics, ’learning to fly’) to the unsurprising (no shortage of body-builders), to the eerily normal (gardening, classical music and boating all crop up regularly).

Other pieces of information give all kinds of insights: someone describes themselves as a ’lapsed MENSA member’ - always worth mentioning! Another name, an artist, is ’willing to paint pictures for raffles, etc’. More chilling, one is ’Willing to give teaching re. BNP home-schooling’.

Should the list have been published? Well, probably not. The inclusion of addresses and contact details has led to many cases of members receiving abuse, which, considering the list’s shakiness, is unacceptable. But published it was, and who knows? It might lead to more cases like that of BG from Cumbria, who ‘Will not be renewing 07 (took offence to newspaper reports about the Party)’ - hmm…