The chaps from Google overslept this morning. It must be very tiring – spending half the night redrawing the logo, working out new price tariffs for the Internet, and all the other pressing things that impinge upon the busy life of fresh-faced young entrepreneurs.

A lot of the time, of course, what Google do is ensure that we are on duty 24/7. They’re far from being alone in this activity: all the phonecos, the ISPs, the software guys – they’re busy ensuring that we’re never anything less than, well, busy.

If you are part of the individually based electronic commentariat (aka, a blogger) this applies to you too. The advertisers paying for the space on your site were sold it by one provider or another who said there’ll be a certain number of hits….so there go the weekends. And all those competitors watching you creep up the charts….good grief, you don’t want them guffawing at 360 hits just because it was Saturday and there wasn’t much upon which to comment.

In order to ensure that such slow days are made faster, the news sites and stations bring us BREAKING NEWS from all over the world all the time whatever the time zone day or night. They give us weather forecasts for places 12,000 miles away. And they try to explain why Me Liu the Chinese solar garden light magnate is concerned about the deficit in Spain. As you can imagine, this is a tricky subject to grasp, and so they tell us eleven times a day.

I have a chum coming to stay this weekend. Mrs Slog will be in England and, as my friend is something of a francophile bon viveur, there is every chance this ‘space’ will be Slog Lite for the next three days. But I’m sure there’s loads you’ve missed – and the archive is very user-friendly, as is the search engine.

Naturally, if anything important happens, you’ll be the first to know. As I tend to brag, the future’s in the Slog.