Right now, the best thing about Chatroulette, the hilariously over-hyped randomised webcam-to-webcam chat engine, is that it's picked up enough mainstream media currency to begin being covered by the bottom-dwellers of the news reporting world. Yes sir, you know you're riding strong at the front of the Internet zeitgeist when the News of the World - the UK's famed bastion of high-quality of investigative journalism (/sarcasm) - decides to run a month late exposé on you. But thanks to the fearless efforts of Guy Basnett and Jennifer Wiley, writing under the banner headline "2 out of 5 chatroom 'pals' look like this ['this' apparently meaning 'penises']", we now know that

"Online perverts are waiting to confront unsuspecting youngsters clicking on to the latest chatroom craze - Chatroulette.com".

Oh yes, with an opening sentence like that, you know the article is going to be good. Some comments:

1. Define "youngster". At 24, I like to consider myself young (I'm gonna live 4eva!!!!!), but there's still probably a world of difference in terms of general 'penis tolerance' between me and your average 9 year old.

2. "Clicking on to"? "Chatroom"? ".com"? Holy shit Marty McFly, we've been sucked back to 1999!

3. "Unsuspecting"? I think you underestimate the capacity of most 'youngsters' to hear about Chatroulette, appraise the likelihood of coming face-to-face with a sad lonely dude masturbating in a bare room and then to actively pursue said likelihood. Just for, as they say, the lulz.

From all reports - by which I mean this report - Chatroulette is a 'pervert's paradise'. But I would have thought the sort of paradise envisaged by most perverts would have more in common with a Dionysian orgy than it would the idea of sitting there alone, desperately begging a string of uninterested women to take their clothes off for you. Which sounds less like paradise than it does my high school years. Then again, maybe we're dealing with some seriously banal perverts here. But it is hard to argue with this 'probe', especially when they've used such rigorous methodology:

"Our investigator logged on posing as a 15-year-old girl with the typical bedroom backdrop including stuffed toy and CDs. Within seconds she was subjected to a string of vile images and demands to strip off. "

Some comments:

1. "CDs"? Holy shit, Marty McFly, we've been sucked back to 1999!

2. "She was subjected to"... You do realise the purpose of the F9 function right? You don't actually have to talk to these people. Most Chatroulette "conversations" between "pals" go for less than a second. Which is about as much penis as you probably see at a given high school party.

3. "Demands to strip off"... So, uh, did she? No? EXACTLY. I mean, maybe these aren't conversations that one would want your 15 year old to be having, but if you really are that concerned then maybe you can play a more active part in monitoring your teenager's Internet usage. But I would suggest that, for most teenagers, rather then mentally crippling them forever a more likely response to the spectacle of a hairy dude wanking off would be a mixture of disgust and hilarity that is going to keep them entertained for, oh I don't know, perhaps 15 minutes? At which point the platform is either going to change (i.e. find a way of blocking objectionable content so that it serves some purpose beyond the purely novel) or fade into the mists of temporary internet fads. Like Omegle. Now there was a short-lived thrill.

Of course, it's not particularly difficult to tear apart a News of the World story (their readership being generally made up of sub-literate troglodytes who probably consider paper a food group), but the drive towards hysteria is still one that afflicts most mainstream news sources. Albeit usually in a less hilariously absurd fashion. Thing about Chatroulette is that it's a new, strange and different idea, subject to the usual rules of the internet, which suggest that the first people to use any new technology will be teenagers and horny men. It's been that way since the internet first began, and as far as I can tell the trail of destruction that one would expect to follow from such an inauspicious pairing has yet to eventuate. Which leads one to the conclusion that either these horny men are remarkably ineffectual online, or teenagers are a lot more canny and competent than adults assume. Probably both actually. Not that we should just stop worrying about it entirely, but there really probably are far more pertinent dangers out there.

But now, the fun stuff! Becasue Chatroulette does provide quite a lot of fun stuff. Aside from the whole penis avalanche.

Dude makes piano magic happen



Jon Stewart - brilliant as always - taking TV news to task for their Chatroulette histrionics

The 24 Best Chatroulette Screenshots



Catroulette: cats can use Chatroulette too!



Chatroulette Missed Connections: "I was a seedy old pervert, you were a past-your-prime News of the World journalist pretending to be 15"

I'm a horse/man. I use Chatroulette. You want to make something of it?

And finally, a random shot because it's great: