apologies for the lack of blog post last week, but I felt I should take a week off in respect of common sense, which died last thursday, courtesy of the Crown Prosecution Service. Now that I've calmed down, it's time to happily blog away without a speck of paranoia that my random conjecture and assertions will be in any way taken at face value by anyone. I don't know if any public speaker would want to construct a speech without recourse to a handful of metaphors, so all you training managers out there about to give a presentation or two had better choose those hypothetical situations carefully and make them as inoffensive as possible, otherwise you'll be getting a very non-imaginary knock on the door.

Ok ok. Enough railing. But I will make one last point. I'm reticent to use the 'freedom of speech' defence because, much as I believe in everyone's right to freedom of speech, I recognise that Paul Chambers was silly to tweet what he did in the first place, but also that the authorities were even sillier to follow up in the manner that they did and, to use the angle often beloved of several daily newspapers, waste all that taxpayers' money. On that basis, common sense was lost amid the bluster and paranoia.

The whole episode has reinforced the issue that social media are used in myriad different ways, and plenty of people use them as a sweary-sounding board, a whipping boy for the written word, a pen-punchbag. Something cathartic. And Twitter's biggest negative is also its biggest positive. The immediacy can be very easily lost in the ether, and what could be a TrainingZone Any Answers thread with ten solid gold replies that all irreversibly change the direction of your business for the better forever one minute, could be a rant about the inevitable delay to an airport's worth of flight departures.

It's up to you, dear member, to apply the appropriate filters. Oh, and follow us on Twitter here