As usual this week, Rupert Murdoch infuriated a lot of people by thinking out loud. He accused Google and Microsoft of “stealing” stories from News Corporation’s papers such as the Wall Street Journal and The Times and threatened to withdraw them from Google’s search engine.

Digital evangelists were apoplectic, with the crude suggestion that 78-year-old Mr Murdoch was senile a common theme. “Have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby Dick dumbshow against the internet,” wrote Cory Doctorow on the Boing Boing blog.