As shown again this week by the rude Bebo page created in Bertie Ahern's name, the internet is the joker's new favourite hunting ground, writes Shane Hegarty.
The news that somebody had created a Bebo page in Bertie Ahern's name might have piqued the interest of the media this week, but the Taoiseach has been busy on Bebo for a couple of years now. More than a dozen personal pages have already been made in his name, and several more can be found on other popular social networking sites such as Friendster (description: "I like yellow trousers and pints of Bass") and MySpace (one plays Westlife on a loop).
Some are more respectful than the one spotted this week - which featured remarks about his love for figure skating, northside rap music and his Minister for Health - but it's safe to say that none of them have actually been put together by Bertie during a lull between meeting heads of state.
The internet is a prankster's paradise, and Bertie is in good company. Mary Harney has a fake site, as do Willie O'Dea, Charlie McCreevy, Martin Cullen, President Mary McAleese and Michael McDowell. It means that when you do come across a legitimate page from a politician, you hesitate before you believe it. Fine Gael seems particularly keen to get its message across via the hotbed of fun, frolics and mangled grammar that is Bebo. Although it leads to a certain incongruity. There's a councillor, John Bailey, whose photograph suggests he's just realised that he's wandered onto the wrong website.
And it's not only politicians who have to put up with invented web pages. Bryan Dobson, Charlie Bird and Anne Doyle have each been given Bebo sites, while their RTÉ colleague Derek Mooney has several, one of which says he's happiest when "going wild! I spotted a heron there yesterday. I nearly had a coronary!" Pat Kenny's personal pages, though, outnumber them all, with a couple of them using far more insults than he'd hear from any invading member of the Late Late Show audience.
Kenny has also had experience of that other main conduit for internet pranksters: his Wikipedia entry is constantly being vandalised. One major re-write made the newspapers last year, when among the less vulgar of the comments was how he was "once suspected of being the Midnight Commando, a Batman-style vigilante who fought night crime in late 1970s Dublin", and that he "once claimed to have travelled to space in 'a giant hat'. No one believed him".
That was erased, but more recently it was claimed he was a bomb-maker for al-Qaeda and, previously, that he fought a death match with Gay Byrne.
Although entries on this encyclopaedia are easily fixed, Wikipedia keeps everything in its history file, meaning that past comments are easily accessed even when they've been removed.
Increasingly, entire towns are falling prey to such mischief. The Wikipedia entry for Knock recently claimed that its population "don't believe this hocus pocus and simply view their shrine as a means of extracting massive amounts of commercial revenue from daft Yanks and general 'wrinklies'." It then went on to describe its women as being "drunk and disgraceful on any summer weeknight each year".
Somewhat more fantastical have been entries for Swinford, Co Mayo, where an armed militia were protecting the town from a plague of werewolves, and for Grange, Co Sligo, where "12 per cent of the population are of ginger ethnic background, a cull was called in 1998 where over 6,000 of the ginger members of the town were wiped out".
The humour of most internet japes, then, tends to be juvenile and foul-mouthed, with exclamation marks outnumbered only by swear words. When motivated by anger, this is especially the case. After the recent near-disaster in San Marino, the FAI's Wikipedia site was altered to include insults of the sort that would make a hooligan blush.
However, that match did inspire one of the smarter examples of web pranksterism, when Stephenstaunton.com offered visitors a petition seeking the Irish manager's dismissal.
Similarly, if you Google "French military victories", the first page says: "Your search - French military victories - did not match any documents. Did you mean 'French military defeats'?" And, for a time, searching for weapons of mass destruction brought surfers to a page that read "These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed. Click the regime change button, or try again later."
However, perhaps the most subtle example comes from the increasingly rare art of "Google bombing", in which someone attempts to influence the result of a web search so that a particular term leads to an ironic, but apposite, page. A blogger is credited with the first Google bomb, when he used it to link the phrase "talentless hack" to a friend's website. But most famously, during the 2004 US election campaign, a search for "miserable failure" linked first to the White House website, while a search for "waffles" led to John Kerry's.
Google has since amended its search engine to make this much more difficult. It's unlikely that Bebo will alter its site to make it harder for people to create pages in someone else's name, so that each time a Bertie Ahern site gets snuffed out another is likely to follow. And it's equally unlikely that Bebo will itself erase pages it knows have been falsified. God, for instance, has several dozen Bebo sites. It's highly unlikely He would have the need for more than one.