Medvedev clicking mouses - pictures LazyBoy HiTech Blog, kugarov.ru & visualrian.ru Having started working 'up north', I am developing a third eye for financial transparency. In Norway, your income and tax percentage are displayed online year-round. One Norwegian acquaintance told me that upon request, he couldn't tell his parents what his salary was - he forgot - but his neighbors could. Now there's a school model of the "New Openness" with which the (Ru)Net is often associated.That Medvedev is an avid advocate of "New Openness," is something that we discussed earlier. This week he took a Norwegian-like step in financial transparency: as part of his campaign against corruption, he disclosed his own income, as well as that of his wife and son, on the Kremlin website. According to the online overview, his income is as modest as the design of the page on which it is displayed: he earned about 4,1 million rubles (92.000 EU) last year. Medvedev has another 2,8 million rubles (63.000 EU) in bank accounts, a 368-m2 apartment (shared with his wife), but no car - the Medvedev family only possesses a 10-year old Golf owned by the First Lady. That the president avails over a government-owned castle and Mercedes with chauffeur makes that no bitter pill to swallow, though.Good old Putin nimbly followed. As could be expected, the Prime Minister earns a little more than his colleague - and he scores higher on the car front, with two vintage cars and his recent purchase of a car at the crisis-stricken Russian car producer Avtovaz. What followed, too, were overviews of the incomes of other government members and their spouses.Just how accurate the facts on kremlin.ru and government.ru (whence the English name?) really are, is, ofcourse, hard to verify - and the impact of online transparency on corruption rates is equally hard to measure at this early stage. But that they are indicative of new ideas about the relationship between private and public is a fact. In a world where revealing diaries and drunk teen videos are available in colossal online quantities, there is no reason to be surprised when politicians give voters a virtual peep in what, in the country where I grew up, is one of your most intimate secrets: the numbers on your pay cheque.ER