Ex-internet entrepreneur Martha Lane-Fox has been made British Digital Champion, charged with getting the UK’s estimated ten million internet refuseniks online.

She has a new Digital Inclusion Task Force to run the campaign, and a posh office in Soho to run it from.

Sounds familiar…
I wonder – is this anything like the campaign announced in April 2008 at the government’s National Digital Inclusion Conference in London?

Martha wasn’t champion then, but there was a minister for digital inclusion – some Labour type called Paul Murphy.

Murphy’s bore
He told the conference that a government strategy to bring the last third of offline UK citizens into the digital age could be in place by summer.

He wasn’t the most convincing digital advocate –  he admitted, he’s “not a technical person”.

But he had been studying what was involved in the role since prime minister Gordon Brown appointed him in January 2008.

And he said: “The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I didn’t need to be technical at all”.

Fair point, I suppose.

You say inclusion, I say exclusion
The BBC reported at the time that  delegates “welcomed the appointment of the first cabinet minister to have responsibility for digital exclusion”.

The report didn’t say whether that was the same minister as the minister for digital inclusion. It wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t.

Been there, not done that
Anyway, the thing is, I was just wondering if Martha’s 2009 wheeze will be as successful as Murphy’s 2008 wheeze was.

It’s certainly got off to a great start.

It has a web site where people who aren’t online can … er …