BBC College of Journalism Blog - A vigorous and robust discussion about journalism from every perspective.

It's no real surprise that the Press Complaints Commission should have sided with the press and rejected Sarah Baskerville's complaint - she's the civil servant whose egregiously chatty and revealing tweets found their way into the Daily Mail and Independent on Sunday last November.

Ms Baskerville had claimed that she posted the tweets in the expectation that they'd be read only by her 700 or so followers and not the 2 million-plus readers of the two newspapers. And that therefore she had some (limited) expectation of privacy (of sorts).

The PCC's rejection means that, in its view at least, it's pretty much open season now for the press on people who use social networking sites. By posting anything, anywhere - however naively, with whatever unrealistic expectations that you're speaking only to friends - you're stepping over that invisible line, drawn by newspaper editors, that means you've forfeited any right to privacy.

Certainly it's an illustration of the practical fact that anyone whose job or role carries a degree of 'public expectation' can expect to see their tweets or Facebook posts, or whatever, up there in lights - accompanied by suitable tut-tutting. And, let's be honest, the press can find something tut-tuttable about any one of us.

I guess my problem with this is that it's hard to see the news value of or genuine public interest in the Baskerville tweets. They're not particularly attractive - but they are utterly banal and trivial.

Quentin Letts had a go at justification in his Mail piece ... and he is a master of irony.

So he told us how she'd tweeted:

"about her drunkenness, boasting about how pointless she thinks some of her work is and how much she dislikes the Government's deficit reduction".

OK ... well, maybe something around civil service impartiality there - but I'm having trouble building up a lather. I mean, this isn't Gus O'Donnell we're talking about, is it?

So what else?

Apparently she was tweeting:

"in the middle of a management course - paid for by us taxpayers to help her do her job better".

... and the tweet in question was "promoting" a Labour MP's attack on Downing Street 'spin'.

OK ... ish. So, wasting taxpayers' money and more impartiality.

Other transgressions include calling the course leader 'mental', indiscretions about staff issues and the drink. Ah, yes, the drink. The drink and the tiredness. Those absolutely mark her out for a monstering in the national press. Oh yes.

But there's worse. Shades of Profumo since:

"All this was done, it should be stressed, under her own name, with easy links to her workplace. She publishes photos of herself, too. Are there not some security issues here?"

Well? Are there?????

But here's the clincher: she is an "acquaintance" of and has, apparently, co-tweeted with ... Sally Bercow: 

"Labour-supporting wife of the supposedly impartial Commons Speaker."

Say no more!

So, yes - probably irony. But the truth is we're all still trying to work out where the new boundaries of privacy and news and social exchange lie.

Ms Baskerville was self-evidently silly, naive and a danger to her own reputation to post the tweets she did. The reality is that a middle-ranking civil servant can never be 100% private. Any more than a BBC journalist or a teacher or doctor or vicar or or or ...

Especially in a world where more and more of what were once our private conversations - thoughts, even - are swirling around there on the web, available globally. Volume turned up to infinity.

And that's the problem we all have - journalists and non-journalists alike.

Had Ms Baskerville been vouchsafing her thoughts in the fashion that was customary pre-2005 - quiet conversations, notes, 'dear diary', even mouthing off in the pub - no-one outside of her very narrow circle of friends and family would have given a fig.

Her boss might have had a quiet word about one or two things - but you can bet your mortgage it wouldn't have made the pages of the Mail, let alone the Independent on Sunday.

What's different? Well, what's different is that these once quietly local thoughts - and those of hundreds of millions of others - are out there. And those papers printed it as 'news'; not because it deserved to be in a national paper but because they could.

And that's the real issue. We used to have some sense of what was news - salient, timely, relevant, significant, revelatory etc - and were easily able to distinguish it from mere information - chatter, gossip, rumour, wittering, bragging.

But we still haven't got our heads around this distinction in the new, networked universe. Around the idea that just because (almost) everything is knowable, everything isn't news.

And just because we can, doesn't mean we should.