Website designers have an uncanny knack for never getting anything done and making the experience last forever. They are the plumbers of cyberspace. They never call, they don't write. "It's not a tempestuous fling I want, " you say, "just a website/flushing toilet." Enter MySpace, the DIY merchant/idiot's dream.

MySpace is a . . . oh, let Wikipedia do it! : "MySpace is a social networking website based in West Hollywood, California, offering an interactive, user-submitted network of blogs, profiles, groups, photos, MP3s, videos, and an internal email system.

It is the world's fourth-most popular English-language website and the sixthmost popular global website. It is the most popular website in the United States accounting for 4.46% of all internet visits.

MySpace has gradually gained more popularity than similar websites such as Bebo or Friendster to achieve nearly 80% of visits to online social networking websites.

It has become an increasingly influential part of contemporary pop culture, especially in the Anglosphere [what? . . . ed].

MySpace has 300 employees, is owned by News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch) and currently reports just over 105 million accounts, with the 100 millionth account being created on 9 August 2006, reportedly attracting new registrations at the rate of 230,000 per day."

Phew! Nice Market! The upshot of this is that you and I can go onto MySpace, register, set up our own page and hooray! . . .

we never have to talk to a web designer again. So far it has been used mainly by independent musicians, independent filmmakers and comedians who upload songs, short films, and other work directly onto their profile. Why is this? Well, it's the old Francis Ford Coppola at the end of Hearts of Darkness quote: "Someday a fat girl from Ohio is going to get her hands on a video camera and become the new Mozart." (OK, he was out of it, but you get the point. ) Seizing the means of production is not just an outmoded socialist concept, and in an increasingly market-driven and PR-led world, artists are finding it even harder to get seen and heard. The 1970s was the last time that content mattered over style in any of the arts. Would Jack Nicholson or Humphrey Bogart be leading men in today's cinema? Would Pink Floyd get past the fashion police to record even one album?

Can I please hear a song and not a rambling fourth-generation Xerox of one?

And as the music and film businesses implode through lack of ideas and innovation, MySpace comes along to represent those very things. When my band, the Camembert Quartet, set up a page, there was a huge response. People heard the songs and commented on them and "friends" (a big feature of MySpace) elected to have themselves featured as links. At one point both PJ Harvey and Emma Bunton (of the Spice Girls) left messages of praise and links to their pages.

It was then I knew that, with fans of that nature, we were either going to be the biggest band in the world or an obscure cult item (as it is we are somewhere between obscure and cult, of which I'm very proud).

Then my Irish friends kept linking themselves to the page and PJ and Emma got shunted down the list. Despite what I told my friends, that it was important to keep PJ and Emma in pole position, they kept linking. I've fallen out with a lot friends since then, and the PJ and Emma combo has rarely left my mind.

Anyway, I digress, and this is a family newspaper. The main thing about the MySpace phenomenon is, can it help business as it has helped the arts? Well Rupert Murdoch certainly thinks so . . . he wouldn't have bought it if he didn't. The biggest pay-off for him is that millions of people are providing free content every day . . . he doesn't have to spend a penny on media and his audience entertains itself while generating massive advertising revenue.

And in the realm of ideas, if your page gets 200,000 hits through being entertaining or informative, the Investment Dragons know they have a ready-made audience for your product.

Audiences are more intelligent than record companies and institutions think they are. You can smell a desperate attempt to foist lousy products onto the public (Robbie Williams . . . America) and when the public don't want them they just pump more cash into it until the public damn well do want it. With MySpace you can find out, within reason, just how feasible something is.

On top of that, it's good to talk, exchange ideas, and feel like you're not all alone in your world. It might be 'My' Space but it is egalitarian, outward-looking and, dammit, popular, and that is why I advise you to get yourself and your business onto it straight away. Well, it beats standing around in the RDS or waiting for good news regarding "your proposal", doesn't it?