“Astronomers meeting in the Czech capital have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet”.

Now I’m not saying it’s not interesting, or even not important, but what drew my attention to this story was that I walked away from my desk for a few minutes to talk to somebody down the corridor, and came back to find the BBC News Desktop alert had flashed this headline up onto my screen – a feature usually reserved for breaking news stories such as floods, famines, and pestilences. And of course ministerial resignations.

I wonder how many people were distracted from their work at this time by this? I wonder how much network bandwidth was used, and what the hit on the performance of the news web server was by all those people (including myself) simultaneously clicking to see the full details of the story?

Fair enough, it is indeed a news item, but surely a news item to be left on the home page for when people naturally go to look to see what’s happenned in the world in the last hour, rather than treated as being a major breaking news story with the nation on tenterhooks to learn the outcome…