Archives for March 2008

Nicholas Hilliard was an English goldsmith and limner (no, I'm not sure either), best known for his portrait miniatures of members of the courts of Elizabeth I and James II. That's if you believe Wikipedia.

The Hungarian version of the entry on Hilliard was its ten millionth article, a milestone trumpeted by the online encyclopedia at a time when many are questioning both its reputation as an accurate source and its future direction. There are also plenty of rivals coming on to the web reference scene, but like Google in search, Wikipedia will be hard to topple from its perch.

What you cannot dispute is its speed and reach. A BBC colleague tells me that when Richard Widmark died last week, the Hollywood actor's Wikipedia entry was updated even before the death was announced on the airwaves. For journalists, it has become the second most useful online tool after Google - while remaining a useful source of stories about its own gaffes and inaccuracies, and what it describes as "vandalism" to entries for prominent figures.

And while most of those errors are corrected pretty swiftly by an army of amateur editors, there has been a vigorous debate among "Wikipedians" themselves over whether its completely open model can continue or whether it should find a way of favouring more "expert" contributors.

If David Gerard is to be believed, then the current model will prevail. Mr Gerard, an editor and administrator on the English site, told me: "We have never promised reliability - what we try to do is be useful." But he insists that reliability is improving all the time, and the original concept of a resource where the wisdom of the crowd would quickly prevail has proved itself: "We've got where we are by taking everything, by being as wide as possible. We get lots of rubbish... and then we clean it up."

Two other online reference works, Citizendium and Knol, are trying a different route. Knol was unveiled by Google last December as a tool which would "encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it".

The idea appears to be that anyone - expert or not - can still write an entry, but Google's ranking system will then favour the most authoritative pieces. There is also the promise of a share in ad revenue for authors - so that the market will, in theory, reward accuracy. The service is not yet up and running, so it is difficult to judge whether it will win readers away from Wikipedia, but if it can attract a critical mass of real experts, it must stand a chance.

Citizendium, started by Wikipedia's co-founder Larry Sanger, says in its manifesto that humanity needs a better online encyclopedia, other than one made up of "mere disconnected grab-bags of factoids". It insists on named contributors and has expert editors who approve articles.

The trouble is that it is very limited right now - just under 6,000 articles - and when I tried to compare its entries with the millions on Wikipedia I struggled. Eventually, I glanced at two subjects - quantum mechanics and cricket. In one of these - I will let you guess which - I have a modicum of knowledge, about the other I know little or nothing. But in both cases Wikipedia appeared to have more comprehensive and approachable entries.

Of course, the brutal truth is that it is the reference entry which comes highest in a Google search which will win the readers. And for the foreseeable future that is likely to be the Wikipedia version - whether it is accurate or not.

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"Spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam," sang the group of Vikings in the famous Monty Python sketch of 1970.

Eight years later the first spam message was sent, while it took another 15 years before unsolicited bulk e-messages were given the popular moniker.

I've been speaking to the man who first coined the term in the sense we understand it today, Joel Furr. And you can see the first recorded use of "spamming" as a term here.

Back in 1993 discussion boards were the popular method of communicating and sites became hit by "spammers" who flooded the boards with abusive postings.

A US man called Richard Depew devised a program which would strip out the abusive postings automatically, explained Joel.

"The thought was that if people were rude enough to post thousands of messages about crap they wouldn’t respond to polite 'don’t do that' messages," said Joel.

"But his program sort of broke and ironically it started posting thousands and thousand of its own messages and shut down many systems that were not designed to cope with that many messages.

“We were trying to reach him through the night to shut it all down - and eventually did so. In sober light of day I posted a summary describing it as "spamming" a discussion list.

"That was the first usage that was recorded. After that usage it did come to refer more directly to out of control messaging."

Until 1993 spam was not a real problem on discussion boards and e-mail spam was virtually non-existent because people's e-mail addresses were largely unknown.

"The world wide web sparked spam because people started to put their e-mail addresses on their site," said Joel.

He told me: "I would really like to see the problem be not so prevalent.

"We have this awesome tool to make it possible for people in any part of the planet to exchange ideas with one another and yet people are going out of their way to not use it because of the spammers, because of the jerks."

Spam is a blight on our digital lives But four years ago Bill Gates predicted spam would soon be a thing of the past.

It's pretty evident that that prediction didn't come to pass - so why not?

"When Bill Gates announced that the solution at the time reflected the problem as it stood then. The problem is that spam has not stood still," Mark Sunner, chief analyst at Message Labs told me.

"All spam is unsolicited and the thinking at the time was that if you can prove the sender is who they say they are - called authentication - then you can avoid spam.

"At the time that statement was true - but true only if spammers had stood still. If spammers had done nothing else then that prediction would have been true."

One of the main issues since Gates spoke is that e-mail authentication technologies, like Domain Keys, have yet to be adopted widely enough to influence the flow of spam.

And so we continue to live with a torrent of spam - not just in our e-mail, but on blogs too.

And for the man who coined the term, how does spam affect him today?

"Bit by bit we're having to stop using discussion groups because they are flooded with spam.

"I have about 3,500 in my spam folder this morning."

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Over the weekend blogger and businessman Loic Le Meur started an interesting conversation about social media and the decentralised way in which personal information was being spread.

He drew a handy map to show the different threads of his digital life.

Loic, who I spoke to a few months ago, is arguing that while all these tools have their place, it's hard currently to locate them centrally in one place. There are tools emerging, such as Friendfeed, which pull together these strands but it is still quite difficult to assemble your digital life in one place.

I know exactly what he means - tools like Flickr, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, BlipTV (the list goes on and on and on) are great ways to start conversations but they remain, more or less, as digital islands.

There are ways to bridge these islands - and using RSS is the obvious candidate. Almost every social media service today generates an RSS feed and tools like Friendfeed can pull them all together.

You can see my FriendFeed here. It's an amalgam of my posts to Twitter, my Flickr photos and posts to the dot.life blog. If I wanted I could add YouTube videos I have posted or favourited, my Delicious links, music I've listened to on Last.fm etc.

And your feed, together with the feeds of your friends, combines into one meta-Friend Feed, which itself is an RSS feed. So I can follow the lives of my friends, through whatever RSS feeds they themselves have aggregated onto Friendfeed, into an RSS Reader. Phew!!

It means the minute by minute lives of others can be monitored minute by minute whenever you are online.

You can do something similar by combining Twitter with a tool called Twitterfeed. It turns almost every RSS feed into a tweet. So every new story on the BBC News Tech section, or posting to this blog, or photo I post to Flickr is turned into a tweet on Twitter.

Social media tools are giving us ever more power to document our lives in ever more granular forms. And there are tools emerging that pull these micro-aspects of our lives together.

Loic bemoans the inability to site this cataloguing of his life in one place - ie his blog. I don't think this will be too much of an issue for too long as the creators of Friendfeed are about to release an API, which should see the tool becoming more flexible.

But I don't think this is the real issue. For me it is about the layers of openness we want our lives to have and how to control who sees our information and where.

RSS is a great tool but it has one declamatory mode. I want to be able to choose who sees different aspects of my digital life in one meta-destination.

For example: I want a tool like Friendfeed to let me control who can see my Twitter feed, who can view my Flickr photos, who can watch my YouTube videos etc.

What's needed is a more sophisticated public/private system for our digital lives. There are plenty of aspects of my life I'm happy to share with the world but some things that should be reserved for friends, family, work colleagues etc.

At the moment I have to resort to one-to-one tools like e-mail or instant messaging to share more private aspects of my life.

But wouldn't it be great if we could use Twitter or Facebook or Friendfeed etc to target different aspects of our lifes to different people?

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Has the blogosphere sold out and become just one big corporate playground? And have the very people who used to sneer at “MSM” (the mainstream media) been captured by big business – one of the charges they used to fling at their old economy rivals?

Three straws in the wind set me thinking about this. First I met a company which boasted of employing what they called a “digital marketing consultant” to hang out in the blogosphere spreading the word about their company. Then a friend dropped by and told me about his new business – writing blog posts for corporate executives too busy or inarticulate to do it themselves. And finally I’ve been hearing about the eagerness of some bloggers to accept freebies and trips from big companies

The digital marketing consultant is James Whatley, who has been taken on by the voice-to-text company Spinvox, in his words, “to listen to the web and encourage conversation around Spinvox.” But in a previous life he was “whatleydude”, a blogger about the mobile phone world, and he still uses that persona in his new role.

When he came in for an interview for the radio package I’ve compiled on this subject, he was engaging and enthusiastic about his work. Whatleydude insisted that he was always completely clear about his corporate role, as he went about his blogging activity, which also encompasses a whole range of social web services, from Twitter to Jaiku to Flickr.

“It’s openness and authenticity which is paramount,” he told me. His value to Spinvox, he explained, was that he was a genuine blogger who understood the etiquette of the blogosphere.

Then my friend Mark popped round. He is an experienced technology writer and consultant, and has just come up with a rather smart new business – “ghost” blogging. He showed me a recent post, apparently the work of a senior manager at a technology company but written by Mark after a conversation about the ideas he wanted to express.

He thinks this is a growth business: “Every company wants to be seen on the internet and most managers don’t have a lot of time.”

But a veteran blogger Tom Coates, whose plasticbag.org site has been around for eight years, told me this was a laughable approach because it lacked authenticity: “The value of having a blog as an executive is to have a conversation with the people who use your products, to be part of the community and to talk honestly. To have it ghost-written is utterly pointless.”

Mr Coates has railed against the tidal wave of PR material now landing in blogs, putting a sign on his site saying ”This is not a brothel” and promising that he will never write about anything on the suggestion of some company. He is realistic enough to accept that corporate blogs are here to stay – but wants honesty and authenticity to be the watchwords of those who participate.

But how honest can you be about, say, a technology firm if they fly you round the world at their expense? Earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas I was bemused to find a large team from one UK gadget blog, staying at one of the big hotels on the strip.

How had they afforded it, I asked one of the team. “Oh, we’re on the XXX press trip," came the explanation, naming a major electronics firm. Now, as far as I can see, the blog in question didn't give said manufacturer an easy ride, but I also couldn't spot any disclosure on their site about how their coverage had been funded.

In summary we've got bloggers switching seamlessly between personal and corporate roles, we've got blogs which might seem personal but are written by someone else, and we've "independent" technology bloggers who are happy for the technology firms to pick up the tab for their trips.

I know, I know, many of you will say this has all been happening for years, and the mainstream media are just as guilty of conflicts of interest. But there's still a tendency to see the blogosphere as wonderfully authentic and free of spin compared with the old media. Is it?

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Video games have been the focus of pretty much all of the coverage of the Byron Review, including our own.

The reason is simple - when it comes to legislation, only the games industry is being affected.

For the internet, specifically virtual worlds, social networks and video sharing sites Dr Tanya's emphasis is on education and awareness.

As I've said in a previous report this is because regulating the net and the morass of user generated content on it is a task no government in its right mind would want to tackle, because it is a geo-political nightmare.

And if you read the official statements and reaction from different quarters of the internet industry all of them are universally applauding the review.

Why? Because they know they have been let off the hook, so to speak.

There's no legislation, no hint of regulation, no potential fines, no requirements to implement technological change.

In fact the online industries can go on exactly as they have done before, as long as they sign up to a few awareness campaigns and keep on promoting the safety features all of them say are already in place.

Here's a few of their responses:

Bebo welcomes the recommendations laid out in the Byron review. It represents a significant step forward and reflects and formalises the collaborative approach and shared responsibility taken by Bebo and industry already with government and other relevant stakeholders. The review sets out realistic timings and goals to ensure that internet safety standards continually improve.

The Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA UK) – the UK’s leading Internet trade association - is delighted to see that the key recommendations given in its submission to the Byron Review in November have been acknowledged and that Dr Byron recognises the complexity of the issues.

Facebook recognises the need to support parents and teachers in negotiating and understanding the online world that our children are growing up in and to provide practical advice on how users can replicate their offline controls online. User privacy has always been important to Facebook and the technology has been designed to replicate real-world connections online, with the ability to select personal privacy settings and provide complete user control.

Google is deeply committed to protecting children on the Internet and providing all of our users with a safe experience online, through empowerment, education, and protective measures. We have developed technological solutions, like the Google SafeSearch feature to letting users "flag" inappropriate content on YouTube; we have collaborated with child safety organizations, like BeatBullying, Childnet, the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP), and the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), to educate users about safe internet usage; and we work closely with law enforcement authorities around the world to prevent child exploitation.

Do you notice a theme? It's basically the industry saying: "We're doing all we can but happy to co-operate in any way possible."

This is not an entirely unreasonable position. After all these websites and association do have many, many measures in place to try and ensure safety.

The problem is that children are ignoring them and parents are not enforcing them.

The government doesn't want to be the online nanny and Internet Service Providers and social network definitely don't want to be given responsibility for what their customers get up to online.

So it's as you were for the online world.

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I blame the parents. That's the real conclusion of the Byron review. She says we lack confidence and awareness when it comes to the digital world.

We plonk our children down in front of the internet as if it's the television when it's more like opening the door and letting them play in the road unsupervised. We don't take the trouble to understand the games rating system, and we let our ten-year-olds play Halo 3 without a murmur.

Guilty? Well as a technology correspondent who also happens to be the father of two mad keen gamers and web users - aged 17 and nine - I thought I was in the clear. I knew what they were up to online and I understood what kind of games they were playing. But now I'm not so sure. I've realised that I've only just got to grips with games classification and I'm pretty ignorant about where my sons are surfing.

For some years the sound of warfare has echoed down our stairs from a teenager's bedroom, home to a couple of consoles and a PC. I've given up monitoring closely what he plays or where he goes online. I suppose the key moment was when he stopped using the household computer in the living room - where we could watch what was going on - and got his own in his room when he was 15. Too early to allow unfettered access? Well I suppose it's a question of trust - and we thought our son was pretty sensible. He is impatient with the idea that he and his fellow gamers can't distinguish between virtual warfare and the real thing - and I think he has a point.

But what about the nine-year-old? He is mad keen on video games and likes to lean over his brother's shoulder to watch him playing. I quizzed him about violent games (Halo 3 arrived in the house a few weeks ago) over the breakfast table this morning. "I don't play them," he said - he's still at the Super Mario Phase. "And Adam won't let me watch him playing them."

So on the gaming front I'm lucky enough to have a responsible teenager policing his younger brother. But what about the internet? We haven't put filtering software on the computer nine year old Rufus uses, as he only spends time on neopets or other innocuous sites. "Oh, and I like YouTube," he revealed to me this morning. Alarm bells began to ring. At today's press conference Dr Tanya Byron revealed that she had asked the Schools and Culture Secretaries whether they knew what the age limit was for watching YouTube. They didn't know - and neither did I. It is 13. Rufus says he only watches "funny videos about cats and dogs", but we all know that there is plenty of material on YouTube that you wouldn't want any child to see.

Now I've just been hunting for that age restriction on the site - and it is buried a long way down. So businesses like YouTube and the social networking sites need to give far better and clearer guidance. But I think Tanya Byron is right to emphasise the need for parents to get their act together. We may think we are up to speed with technology - but our children are often ahead of the game. It's up to us to keep up.

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You have to feel a bit sorry for the video games industry.

It's a vibrant, creative industry that employs thousands of people in the UK and contributes hundreds of millions of pounds to the British economy but tends to get vilified by the media as a corrupter of children.

It is well regulated - currently through two systems - and adheres to strict marketing and advertising laws yet feels the brunt of recommendations by the Byron Review.

Dr Tanya Byron's recommendation that the BBFC's role in classifying games be expanded is designed to reassure parents and to make video games ratings easier to understand.

But it means more legislation for an industry that feels it is already doing more than any other to ensure its products find their way into the right hands.

Contrast this with the online world: the internet is indeed a sprawling, unregulated morass of media in which responsibility for content is pretty much given over to individuals.

Social networks and video sharing sites are littered with examples of inappropriate content; sex videos, happy slapping videos, pornographic pictures etc.

The government and Tanya Byron know full well that regulating the internet is a non-starter and so education, awareness and advice are the keywords of the Review.

But the games industry must now accept a new tier of regulation.

Some in industry were lobbying for Pegi, the European self-regulatory system, to take over ratings for all games and there will be a certain amount of consternation about what the new classification system means.

On the face of it the new system is straightforward - all games designed for children 12 and over will now need to be reviewed and classified by the BBFC.

In reality it means the BBFC will shift from debating the age rating of about 100 titles each year to many, many hundreds.

It's a dramatic increase in workload.

No-one is doubting the ability of the BBFC to make those decisions - it's been called the gold standard in some quarters - but there is a certain amount of disappointment that Byron has not taken the opportunity to fundamentally re-examine how games are rated.

There is the suspicion that the BBFC has been retained in part, and had its role potentially expanded, because there is widespread familiarity with the age rating logos on the front of DVDs and on film posters.

But there is a danger that collapsing film and video game ratings into one symbolic system will actually cause more problems. Because games and films are not alike.

And the Pegi ratings will continue, except they will now appear on the back of boxes and not the front.

So to be clear – the two systems will continue to operate, except one will appear on the front of a box and one will appear on the back.

The word "fudge" has already been used by some to describe the thinking.

Some parts of the media are describing the Byron Review as a clampdown on violent video games and titles which feature sex, which is utter nonsense.

Those games - and they are few in number - have always been given 15 or 18 certificates.

The games industry has been saying for years that games are not films - but no-one seems to be listening.

So how does the BBFC rate games and what will the extra responsibility mean?

Currently the BBFC requires developers to submit titles for classification if a title contains any of the following:

• Gross acts of violence towards humans or animals
• Horrific behaviour or incidents
• Human sexual activity
• Criminal behaviour

The developer then has to fill in a form to inform the BBFC where in the game the most contentious issues appear.

The classifiers also have to provide a complete version of the game and developers are recommended to supply gameplay footage of where the contentious scenes appear.

The BBFC also requires viewing of cut scenes in the game.

But games are not linear media and it's not realistic to expect the BBFC to play and complete a game before delivering a rating.

"Examiners are required to sample game play throughout the game, not just at the beginning," the BBFC website explains.

What's more complex is the changing nature of games, and their increasingly open-ended nature.

For example, it's not unreasonable to suggest that games in the near future will allow gamers to play in a wide variety of ways, including never firing a gun, or wielding a weapon while other gamers will indulge in mindless violence.

The game will be the same but the manner it is played will be different.

So how does that affect a rating? Will the potential for violence be rated?

What happens in virtual worlds when two gamers decide they want their avatars to have virtual sex?

It may sound like a ludicrous scenario but it's the future and it's debatable if the ratings system that is being put into place can cope.

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Dr Tanya Byron is to release her government-backed review into the net, video games and children on Thursday and we'll be covering its findings online, on TV and on radio.

At the time the review was announced there was a lot of grumbling from people in the games industry unhappy that games were being lumped in with the net.

The crux of the dismay was that while the video games industry is a well-regulated, important creative industry the net is effectively the Wild West; so why the need to combine the two?

I spoke with Tanya Byron at the end of last year and I got the impression she would have preferred to separate the two out but time and money was never going to make this possible.

So what are your hopes and fears for the Byron Review?

More regulation? Cyber police? Fines for websites that don't enforce child-friendly policies?

My expectation is that the Review will walk a careful line between education and awareness with little in the way of direct regulation/legislation, and probably none at all.

But we'll all know more soon.

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“I wonder what he meant by that?” is what the German statesman Metternich is supposed to have said on hearing of the death of the wily French diplomat Talleyrand.

That was much my reaction when I heard today’s news that the not quite so comatose Yahoo had joined the OpenSocial platform. Both Yahoo and Google seemed to want to make an awful lot of noise about this not particularly stunning event.

After all, Yahoo had stood aside last October when Google launched a platform designed to help developers create applications that would work on any social networking site. But now it’s plunging in, and also collaborating with Google and MySpace to form what they call “The OpenSocial Foundation,” a kind of United Nations to guide the new platform.

In the joint press conference the three partners have just held there was heady talk of collaboration, of “going far by going together”, and of making OpenSocial “forever free and open”.

But guess who wasn’t mentioned? That’s right – Facebook and Microsoft. They have both kept well clear of the OpenSocial initiative, while insisting that they are both committed to various forms of openness.

So what Yahoo really means by this initiative is “Hey, we’re not like those guys in Redmond who want to swallow us up - we are really, really sincere about collaboration.” Or, in the words of one of Google’s spinners, “openness is closer to some hearts than others.”

It’s another round in the phoney war between Yahoo and Microsoft, while we wait to see if Bill Gates will increase his bid. Yahoo and Google are saying they, not Microsoft, embody the future of the internet. The trouble is, while Google makes ever friendlier noises about the ailing search firm, it s not offering Yahoo shareholders a tangible alternative to Microsoft’s cash.

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We're getting reports that the BBC News website is now accessible to people in China.

BBC staff have said they can access the website, and I've seen sporadic reports on Twitter, saying the same thing. In fact, I've seen one five-day old report on Twitter from a user saying he can access the BBC site inside China.

Until now people in China have only been able to access BBC News, as well as other restricted sites, by using a proxy server.

So the big question then is: Is this by design or by accident?

Commonsense would dictate that this is a deliberate unblocking of the domain, especially given the site appears to have been accessible for some time.

But why? Given the recent unrest in Tibet one would expect a tightening of control, not a loosening.

Is this the much anticipated opening up of China? It's far too early to say.

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We know that YouTube has been blocked in China, as the authorities seek to control what they see as biased Western coverage of events in Tibet, but there is a wider battle being fought in cyberspace.

Tibet protest groups have been in touch to say they are under attack, with emails arriving containing attachments that are designed to infect or take over their computers. These attacks have been going on for months, but appear to have grown in intensity in recent days. Alison Reynolds of the International Tibet Support Network told me, "There are surges of activity which coincide with our busiest campaign periods and obviously now we are seeing a lot of attacks." She says most members of the movement know not to open attachments - but some do still get through.

Maarten van Horenbeeck, a security researcher, works with the Tibet groups to monitor these attacks, and says he is currently seeing three times as many as he saw last month. He says the attackers appear to be interested in emails and word documents stored on the machines they infect. He describes an attack on one NGO which involved a search for the keys to the system used to encrypt its emails.

Sometimes the original emails from the attackers appear to contain press releases from other Tibet campaigners - but when they are opened they install a trojan, enabling the machine to be controlled remotely. The security company F-Secure has blogged on the techniques being used by whoever is responsible and shows how well they craft their attacks.

But is this the work of the Chinese authorities? "Impossible to say," according to Martin van Horenbeeck. "Yes, the vast majority of attacks connect back to servers on CHINANet, a major Chinese network.

However, CHINANet, due to its sheer size hosts many vulnerable machines, so these are most likely all compromised themselves. In addition, there have been several samples that connect back to the USA, Taiwan or South Korea."

He makes the point that China has thousands of hackers - many of whom may be hostile to Tibetan groups - so there is plenty of scope for mischief. And here is what's interesting, and perhaps unique about China. It is a country which has allowed the web to flourish, while imposing pretty strict limits on the dissemination of information which it regards as subversive. So a generation of hackers which in other countries would be anti-establishment and would use the web to attack their own government, may be happy to lend the Chinese government a hand in any cyber-war. Forty years after the cultural revolution saw the Red Guards take to the streets with their little red books, is a new generation using the web to similar ends?

A friend who's a British reporter based in China - doing a great job amidst growing hostility to the Western media - says he winces when he hears overseas journalists like me trot out "the new cultural revolution" cliche. But isn't it rather apt here?

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Last.fm, Bebo and now SpinVox - three British technology companies (or at least with some British roots) which have made big money for their founders over the last year. But here's the difference - while the founders of Bebo and last.fm have sold up to giant American businesses, Spinvox is still independent and its owners are not yet cashing in their chips.

Spinvox is built on one very simple (and some might say niche) idea - turning voice into text. It started with a service which listens to your voicemails and sends them to you as texts and emails - and is now branching out into areas like allowing you to "speak" new blog postings. Not sure I'm ready for that kind of stream of consciousness.....

Anyway, this idea has apparently caught on with a number of mobile operators around the world, and Spinvox has now attracted big funding from some very big names. Goldman Sachs, perhaps the ritziest of the investment banks, and GLG, a big European hedge fund, are among the investors who have put $100m into the business, at a valuation of $500m.

Now that is a big price-tag on a company in its early years which has yet to prove that it can be profitable. It does claim to have some unique speech-recognition technology and has just taken on a Cambridge scientist who is a leader in the field. But when I met executives from Spinvox the other day they mentioned that a couple of other firms are also trying to move into this territory. Nobody big - just Google and Microsoft. The executives saw that as encouraging evidence that speech is hot right now. Others might see it as a warning that they are about to be steam-rollered.

Which makes it all the more brave (or perhaps foolhardy) for Spinvox's founders to decide they are staying in the game while others have cashed out. Bebo (like Facebook with Microsoft) could have offered a minority stake to a big investor and stayed independent, instead of selling up to AOL for $850m. Last.fm could have grown further before selling to CBS for $280m. But both decided that it was time to seek the shelter of a wealthy parent. There's no shame in that - after all, very few start-ups get as far as they did.

But watching Spinvox's attempt to continue growing - with the assistance of that hundred million dollars - as an independent British company will be a lot of fun.

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There have been a lot of reports of late about the future of iTunes, most of them sparked by a FT story which said Apple was considering bundling free music with each iPod/iPhone sold.

By free, it means doing a deal with record companies so that in return for a share of the purchase price of an iPod consumers get unlimited access to music.

If true, and I have no knowledge either way, it would turn the iTunes business model on its head because Apple and Steve Jobs have always banged the drum for music you own, not music you rent.

Of course iTunes has recently moved to a rental movie model, alongside a download model, so the potential to mix and match is there.

But business models aside the missing ingredient here is community.

At the moment iTunes is an old fashioned application - a stand-alone download that organises your music and videos and syncs your iPod or iTunes.

But it's an isolated, unconnected experience. You can use plug ins like Last FM to bridge the user divide, creating community playlists etc, but I'm surprised that Apple has never evolved iTunes into a more connected piece of software.

One of the reasons for this, of course, is that a single user has a pretty limited license when it comes to sharing his or her music.

You can share music across a local area network, for example, but that sharing does not extend to iPods or iPhones, or even the wider internet.

But a rental music model, or one attached to a physical device, would allow Apple to open up iTunes.

Friends lists, recommended playlists etc would become perfectly possible - as could Apple widgets for use inside social networks like Facebook or MySpace.

For example, I could download and listen to a friend's playlist he or she had compiled for me, because we both share a rental license for all our music.

And the wi-fi connectivity of new iPods, plus the cellular connectivity of iPhones, means in theory this could happen whenever, wherever.

I could have music pushed to my iPhone just like e-mail, and in return I could comment, tag, build a new playlist and push it back to my friends.

All of this is beginning to happen already with offerings from Nokia and Vodafone and with Rhapsody in the US, and if Apple doesn't move soon it might find itself overseeing a dinosaur - a digital jukebox offering music tethered to individuals and to specific devices.

I'd love to hear how you are enjoying your music; are you using a home server and accessing it via a mobile phone for example, or would you be interested in sharing your music widely?

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Anyone over 30 is sure to feel a nostalgic glow whenever the BBC Micro is mentioned.

For almost the whole of the 1980s the Beeb, as it was known, was one of the main ways people in the UK accessed computer technology.

It seems incredible now that the BBC, a broadcaster, partnered with a technology company and put its name on the machine at a time when computers were such an unknown entity.

I can't imagine that happening today - but then again, the BBC's involvement with Freeview, picking up the pieces from ITV Digital, has been arguably as forward thinking.

At the start of the 1980s the microchip revolution was beginning to crank into gear. But to most people a computer was something to be found in the office, in a factory, not in a home.

And an even greater number of people had no idea what to do with a computer.

But a handful of people in the BBC, among them producers John Criwaczekm, David Allen, and John Radcliffe felt differently.

I've been speaking to Tilly Blyth, a curator at the Science Museum, who is reuniting the heroes of the BBC Micro at the museum today.

She told me: "There was a doc that had been put together by Ed Goldwyn, who made Now the Chips are Down, and that caused quite major repercussions in government; questions were asked in parliament about what Britain was doing in the electronics industry."

The BBC drew up a set of specifications for a computer that could help introduce people to the power of the microchip and the corporation decided on Acorn after visiting companies like Dragon and Sinclair.

But the BBC Micro was more than just a piece of hardware, it was a network.

Dr Blyth explained: "It was about education and it ran through networks of people interested in programming - teachers in colleges, through training programmes on the BBC.

"There were a lot of workshops set up to understand the BBC Micro."

It's an exaggeration to say the whole nation was programming in BBC Basic but thousands of people got their first experience of computer programming because of the Beeb.

My personal memories of the BBC Micro are strong

I can remember being taught to programme using Logo, and sending messages back and forth between machines because the BBC Micro was fully networkable.

In fact, it was simply to "take over" a BBC Micro by using the REMOTE command.

One of my abiding memories is playing Elite on the machine. Written by two university students, David Braben and Ian Bell, it re-wrote the rules for what was possible on a home computer.

A friend of mine was lucky enough to have a BBC Micro and we would spend days trying to improve our rank - Right On Commander! - climbing our way up from Harmless to Elite.

David Braben has kindly written a column for us, in which he highlights the impact the BBC Micro had in its day.

He also issues a rallying cry: calling on the spirit of the BBC Micro to live on and entice more students into computer science, maths and physics.

And that's an interesting point. What can be done by the private sector, by IT, and perhaps even by the BBC to once again drive people's understanding of the computer revolution?

Is it laughable to suggest that the BBC once again partner with a computer company? Could more be done online, where the BBC enjoys a giant presence?

Suggestions welcome....

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Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg read our recent interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee or perhaps Facebook's founder realises that privacy will go on being the hot topic for internet users that it's become over the past twelve months.

Whatever the reason, Facebook has unveiled what it says is a new policy on privacy. The press release says the aim is to give users more control over the information they choose to share. It goes on to explain that the two main features are "a standardized privacy interface across the site and new privacy options."

Is that perfectly clear? Well, not entirely. What is a "standardized privacy interface" when it's at home? The 75% of users who never bother to change their default privacy settings probably won't care. But read on, and it seems the main change is the ability to differentiate between different groups of friends - and give them different levels of access to your information.

This is interesting because it tackles one of the issues that worried many older users of social networking sites when the phenomenon took off last year. Namely, do I really want to mix my different sets of friends - work, college, pub, family - in one great big melting pot? So you might share a joke with your managers at work - but do you really want them to see the photos of your stag night?

Now you can put them on a separate list - and, according to Facebook, they won't realise because your lists are known only to you. Which deals with that embarrassing situation where the boss asks you to be his friend and you don't quite know how to give him the brush-off. Now you just put him in a list all of his own.

Mind you, in my case I've found that mixing up a strange brew of old friends, new friends, colleagues and people I've never met, has its charms. I've been perfectly happy for them all to get exactly the same information - and quite careful not to place anything online that I would not want any single one of them to see. Dividing them back into separate social groups might - for me at least - diminish the appeal.

What is clear is that using Facebook and navigating its etiquette is becoming a lot more complicated. What started off as a nice clean whiteboard where you could leave simple messages for your friends has become a sophisticated and sometimes irritating game of social chess.

By the way, Facebook has also confirmed that it's launching a chat application. So now you'll also have to decide just which of your friends goes on your buddy list. Decisions, decisions.

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The controversy over BT, Talk Talk and Virgin's plans to introduce technology by US firm Phorm which monitors web behaviour of users in order to target adverts shows no sign of diminishing.

More than 5,300 people have now signed the Downing Street e-petition, expressing their concern about the technology.

Tim Berners-Lee, the architect of the web, has even contributed his opinion; although he was speaking about such systems in general, rather than this system in particular.

Privacy advocates have been pouring over every detail of these plans, and asking very particular questions about how the technology works, and debating wider issues about the nature of privacy and personal data.

A lot of the debate and analysis is taking place in the mailing lists of UK Crypto discussion group.

The Register has also done a thorough job and has turned up some strong news lines, the most recent of which is BT's admission that it conducted a technical trial last year without the knowledge of customers.

The Register suggests BT "mis-led" customers last year about its involvement with Phorm.

If true, this may damage people's trust in BT but really has no impact on the technology and how it works.

We've had a fair sprinkling of e-mails about Phorm in the last few weeks. Some of them have urged us to almost take sides on this story, which of course we can't do.

We have to be balanced to both sides. Yes, we have a duty to readers to get to the heart of the story, but we can't assume guilt, or foul play etc.

There's also a question of detail - how much is too much for a mainstream audience? I think we've covered the key points very well, and the main issues. But you may have another view.

We are still following this story - as the Tim Berners-Lee news I hope shows.

And there are still unresolved questions that we are chasing answers on:

Will BT and Virgin make Phorm opt in or opt out?

Do website owners need to give their permission for their pages to be "trawled" by Phorm's Profiler?

If there are other questions you have, please let me know.

UPDATE: BT have contacted the BBC to ask us to change a reference in this blog in which we quote The Register's story. We have changed it only because the sentence was quoting the Register's headline, which the site itself had changed.

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I’ve been using Leopard, the latest OS X issue, for the last five months now and was interested in hearing your thoughts and experiences of it, as well as sharing mine.

My overwhelming feeling about the release is one of disappointment, especially compared with the benefits and features that Tiger, the previous iteration, introduced.

So what are the causes of my disgruntlement?

The first is the failure of Leopard to match expectations. I can’t blame Apple entirely for this, as expectations were my own.

But there’s no doubting the fact that Apple stoked the hype - and why not, they are a company selling a product after all.

My first expectation was that Leopard would at least match Tiger in terms of ease of use, responsiveness and stability.

But on every machine that I have installed Leopard, the computer is less stable, more prone to crashes, and "hangs", while start-up times are longer, applications feel more sluggish.

The spinning beach ball, representing an application "hanging", is now a close friend, rather than a casual acquaintance.

This is despite bumping up the RAM on each of my machines to 3GB. And it’s not as if my Macs are old. My iMac is the first of the Intel-powered machines, while my Macbook is just over 12 months old.

To be clear: I’m not saying my Macs are now crash-prone, glitch boxes. But there is a definite, measurable decline in performance since I installed Leopard.

And I’m not alone - these problems have been documented on many forums.

However, the latest issue of Macworld magazine reports that 81% of new Mac owners are very satisfied with Leopard.

Some of the key features of Leopard have proved less than useful - Stacks is a gimmick and quickly becomes impractical once a folder has more than a dozen files in it, while improvements to the Finder are still a work in progress.

In some cases Leopard seems to have taken a step backwards.

The new Front Row system has been crippled so that music can no longer be streamed from your Mac to an Airport Express plugged in to a hi-fi.

Why would they do this, unless they wanted to force consumers into buying an Apple TV?

There are also well-documented issues with Leopard and wi-fi networks - from periodic dropouts to problems getting connected at all.

It’s not all bad however; Quick Look has become adopted into my workflow as a simple way to check files, from video to photos.

And it’s now simpler and quicker to network your Macs thanks to the visibility of machines in Finder.

Spotlight, the tool to search your indexed hard drives, is more responsive while Time Machine has removed my worry about back-ups.

So am I alone here? Has Leopard been a disappointment?

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He's the greatest technological pioneer Britain has produced over the last 30 years - and Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been rewarded with all kinds of honours, from his knighthood, to the Millennium Technology Prize, to Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. What he is not is the most fluent of interviewees - so I was rather worried about our encounter the other day. I need not have been.

As you can see, he gave us a great story with his views on the importance of privacy and choice for consumers on the web. And, as we sat in the slightly incongruous surroundings of the Millers Association in a lovely old St James's building (getting the wi-fi working almost proved too great a challenge for the web's creator), he delivered a fascinating 25-minute tour of a whole range of issues.

Social networking (he's tried it - and thinks it may eventually be more for the old than the young), what's right and wrong with the web (it's great that user-generated content is taking off - but why aren't more people doing it?), why we need to study the science of the web (so mistakes such as allowing e-mail to be swamped by spam won't be repeated), whether web firms were right to compromise their principles to get into China (maybe it was worth it to bring a degree of openness to the web there). His mind seems to work rather like the web itself - one idea links to another, so you suddenly find him galloping off in an all sorts of different directions, and have to try to haul him back to the original question.

The man who could have made a fortune out of his invention but chose instead to stay in academia has firm principles. He believes the web is all about open standards and interoperability and he is determined to be seen as above all commercial interests. We had asked him to choose a number of websites that illustrated the web's growth - but he was adamant that he could not be seen to endorse any particular product, whether it be Google or Amazon or eBay. He'd even put a World Wide Web Consortium sticker over the logo on his laptop to avoid any product placement. (Here's a clue - it was a fruity logo).

For a television report you do need some pictures - so we asked Sir Tim to talk us through a map he has created as a way of depicting the growth of the internet and the web. It shows a few streams feeding into a small lake marked "internet", and from there into a bigger lake marked "World Wide Web". The web river then meanders through a green and fertile land land before flowing into the "Sea of Interoperability."

But there is also a parched area on one side of the map described as "wasted arid lands". Among its features are the "Patent Peaks" and the "Proprietary Pass". And right at the centre of this gloomy landscape is something called the "Tor of Cism". For the life of me, I can't work out what that means, but I have a feeling Sir Tim might have been passing on a coded message.

PS. For a larger version of the map, click here (pdf format).

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The news that Rockstar has won its long-standing battle to release Manhunt 2 in the UK brings to a conclusion a very confusing, and some would say black, period for games certification (censorship) in the UK.

On one side Rockstar said Manhunt 2 was an entertainment product which fell within the bounds of content established by 18 certificate films like Saw and Hostel.

On the other, the British Board of Film Classification, was adamant that the game "went too far" and was unremittingly bleak and callous.

More worryingly, the BBFC said the game had the potential to do harm.

And this was the crux of the matter. What harm could the game do? The BBFC seemed to suggest that the game would find its way into the hands of minors.

But this could apply to any form of adult entertainment, argued others.

So where does this leave the games industry and those who are responsible for ensuring we are protected from harmful content?

In a mess, is the frank answer. Who should we believe when it comes to video games?

Developers or the BBFC?

One could argue that the process has proved effective - as the Video Appeals Committee, an extension of the BBFC, were the ones who eventually decided the game should be released.

But the grudging nature of the BBFC's statement, that it now has "no alternative" but to grant the title a certificate, coupled with the fact the body went to the High Court, twice rejected the game itself and tried to overturn the original judgment of the VAC leaves the organisation with its credibility bruised and battered.

Perhaps more crucially, the BBFC's role as the body which classifies games is now under definite scrutiny.

There has long been confusion among consumers as to why there are often two certificates on UK games, from the BBFC and European body PEGI.

Dr Tanya Byron is expected to deliver her report into video games, violence and children later this month and I understand she favours handing responsibility over to PEGI.

The BBFC's dogged fight to ban Manhunt 2, even though it was an 18 game and even though industry figures lined up to defend the title, might come back to haunt it.

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I've just been talking to EA boss John Riccitello about all things Take Two. You can read the news story here.

Riccitello is quite a robust character and his line to Take Two shareholders on the purchase was quite clear:

Accept our generous offer now, don't be blinded by the impending release of GTA IV, and just think what Take Two's share price will be if we walk away.

For shareholders there's a real dilemma - if they wait and see what happens post GTA IV, the shares might very well rise but there may never be a buyer quite like EA.

Riccitello was keen to portray EA as stable, in comparison to the rocky roads trodden by Take Two over the last few years.

"This is a company that had large number of travails over years – financing issues, regulatory issues, legal challenges. It’s been a tough slog.

"EA is a bastion of stability in comparison. We have a very strong global publishing organisation that we think can do a better job of selling the games of those great creators."

He laughed off suggestions that EA was the Microsoft of games.

"80% of what we sell is product we didn’t have a year before. We make product every year that has got to stand up to competition in the market place.

"The number one group in headcount in our industry is artists. There are parts of our organisation where if they wear a shirt and don’t have a tattoo they are unusual.

"At Microsoft I’ve yet to meet anyone without a shirt and with a tattoo."

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What do broadband firms mean when they offer you “up to 8mbps”? And just how likely are you to get that speed if you sign up? I suspect most people’s answers to those questions would be “not sure” and “fat chance”.

I was pretty confused about the speed issue but after spending some time with BT broadband engineers I now feel a little clearer. BT Wholesale had summoned a group of IT journalists to its Gatwick headquarters to tell them about the exciting future that its new broadband products promised. But it turned out that all anyone really wanted to talk about – on both sides – was speed.

BT is obviously worried that the 8 million users getting their broadband from the ISPs who use its network will blame it for the fact that they aren’t getting the speeds that they expect. It appears uncomfortable with the advertising of headline speeds of “up to 8mbps” or “up to 24mbps”. Why? Because it knows that nobody will actually experience those speeds when they are using the internet.

The engineers explained that customers needed to look at two different things – line speed and throughput. Line speed is what the line between your modem and the exchange can theoretically achieve. So if that is 8mbps, you might achieve that if you lived right next to the exchange – but if you live three miles away, have a sub-standard modem or suffer electrical interference within your home (Christmas tree lights are one culprit, apparently) then you are likely to get much less.

Then there is throughput, which is the speed at which data arrives down the line while you are online, doing anything from reading web pages to downloading video. Throughput is what is measured by the various web speed-checkers, and it is bound to be slower than your line speed because it looks at what happens when you leave the exchange and head out onto the internet, where you can hit congestion.

Perhaps rather than advertising an “up to 8mbps”service, ISPs should describe it as “between 512kbps and 7.5mbps”. But that might be rather harder to sell. Ofcom is talking to the broadband firms about how they advertise speeds – and everyone seems to agree the current system is broken. But what should replace it? Your ideas would be welcome.

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Rumours that the social network Bebo would be swallowed up by someone have been swirling around for at least a year. Google, Yahoo, MySpace and Viacom have all been names as potential suitors. Now the truth is out – and it's AOL which has picked up the prize for $850m.

Last year, while compiling a piece about social networks for Radio 4, I met Bebo’s founders, Michael and Xochi Birch. They’re a charming Anglo-American couple who have managed to combine bringing up a family with starting a fast-growing business in California. In my interview with them, they first dismissed the latest rumour that they were about to sell up, then very charitably agreed to be my Bebo friends – I’d explained that nobody seemed to want to know me.

Anyway, I can’t say that our social networking relationship has been very close – I have to confess I spend more of my time on a rival network – but I have watched their progress with interest ever since. The first hint that they might not be as averse to a sale as they claimed was when they hired a senior Google executive Joanna Shields. She was named president rather than chief executive, but always gave the impression that she was running the show and turning it into a more professional outfit.

While Facebook made all the media noise last year, Bebo was in some ways more innovative. It recognised the potential of video, introducing its own interactive TV soap opera katemodern, and striking deal with broadcasters to bring their content to the site.

But its problem has been that it has remained a “starter” social network – hugely popular in schools (where some teachers have sought to ban it) but not really graduating to older users. How attractive this population is to advertisers isn’t clear – especially at a time when companies are beginning to look just a little more sceptically at the potential of social networking.

So Michael and Xochi Birch may have sold out just in time. While their share of that $850m makes them very rich indeed, it is another reminder that Facebook isn’t really worth $15bn. That valuation – implicit in the price Microsoft paid for a tiny stake last year – puts a price of $250 on each of Facebook’s 60 million users. Bebo has just sold each of its 40 million users for a rather more modest $21.50 per head.

I have sent a couple of messages to my Bebo friends Michael and Xochi over recent weeks, asking them if rumours of an impending sale were true. Unsurprisingly, they decided not to share that information with me in advance. But Michael, Xochi – if you’re listening get in touch – and tell the BBC what your Bebo users can now expect from this change of ownership.

UPDATE
In the conference call after the deal was announced one AOL boss promised to "supercharge the monetisation of Bebo." I wonder if that message will be passed on to users?

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EA is very keen to buy Take Two - and why not, the publisher has a great portfolio of titles, like Bioshock, and tremendous relationships with developer studios.

But there has been concern about this level of consolidation in the industry - what is the impact on innovation, on variety etc...

I'm expecting to speak to an EA executive later today about the firm's plans - so if there's a question or two you want to put to him or her, get it to me in the comments below.

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Imagine a website which starts in San Francisco in 1995, and keeps on growing. It now has 10 billion page views a month, and operates in 450 cities worldwide. Surely two things must have happened by now – the site must have sprouted every kind of Web 2.0 accessory, from videos to banner ads, and the owners must have built a huge fortune?

Well, nothing of the kind has happened to Craigslist. The listings and classified ads site has been a huge success on its home territory – though less so abroad – through sticking to a very simple formula. It offers free ads (to everyone except a few recruitment advertisers) and it looks as plain, uncluttered and – to be honest – downright dull as it did more than a decade ago. And its chief executive still lives in a rented house and does not own a car.

This week that CEO Jim Buckmaster popped into the BBC for one of a regular series of seminars that business journalists here hold with chief executives of interesting companies. Most of them arrive with batteries of assistants and powerpoints and proceed to spend half an hour belabouring us with visions of future greatness. “We’re looking at leveraging our dominance in the mobile widget space to give us huge earnings traction going forwards…” You know the kind of thing.

Well Jim was, let’s say, rather different. He was so laid-back I thought at one stage he might have nodded off, and information had to be gently prised from him. What’s more, he admitted that Craigslist had few ambitions, either to find new ways of boosting revenues or to make the site look shiny and new.

“We don’t even have a logo,” he explained, ”It’s easy to use and quick to load, and that seems to be what our users want.” He said Craigslist did not have to worry about shareholders or venture capital backers – and this gave it the freedom to concentrate exclusively on what its users wanted rather than trying to maximise revenue. “Other sites always have this constant balancing act where they’re trying not to annoy their users too much while satisfying their investors,” he explained.

The sit was founded - and is still partly owned – by Craig Newmark. But neither he nor Jim Buckmaster – who came onboard in 2000 – seems to want to cash in on the site’s undoubted success. “We don’t aspire to that kind of caviar, yacht and Gulfstream lifestyle,” says Jim Buckmaster.

Craigslist is one of the few survivors of the early idealistic days of the web. Will it still be around in five years time – and will it look any more interesting? That, I suppose, depends on whether it really has tuned into what its users want in a way that rivals have failed to do.

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In the august surroundings of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, in a lecture theatre decorated with 18th Century paintings, a crowd gathered on Tuesday morning to celebrate the birth of a new science.

It’s called Web Science, and is an attempt to start understanding and exploring the ever growing phenomenon of the world wide web. Who better, then, to be the main speaker at today’s event than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web?

Sir Tim began with a vivid picture of the way his baby has grown: “There are more pages out there on the web than there are neurons in your brain.” He went on to explain that he hadn’t been sure about using the word “science” in this new discipline because web science needed to reach out and include sociologists, philosophers and artists as well as the technical community.

“When we build the web,” he explained, “we choose a lot of the answers to philosophical questions. We are constructing a whole new world and we are writing down the rules. And a huge amount of the design involves the psychology of the user.” As an example he described how e-mail had taken off because users trusted each other to send only valuable material – but was now under threat because of spam: “The social assumptions have changed – people no longer assume that messages they are getting are messages they need.”

Sir Tim is working with the Southampton University computing science department, which along with Boston’s MIT, is leading the Web Science Research Initiative.

Professor Wendy Hall from Southampton (you can see an interview with her above) explained. “The web is the elephant in the room – it has transformed our lives, but we never see it. We feel the time has come to study it – to see its benefits and understand its possible dis-benefits.”

Her colleague Professor Nigel Shadbolt sketched out some early projects to illustrate the areas the new science might investigate. He showed a map of the blogosphere - "it's a butterfly shape" - which illustrated the way communities coalesce around certain blogs. He showed why research into Wikipedia needed a sociological angle – what drives the users to write entries? – As well as technical analysis of the patterns of its growth.

Professor Shadbolt also gave some insights into the semantic web – a project which Tim Berners-Lee and the Southampton University academics have been pursuing for some time, to a degree of scepticism from other parts of the web community. He described plans to give every fact on the internet its own web address, with the aim of building a “data web” where every connection was more clear and more searchable. “So you could ask questions like show me all the tennis players in Moscow,” he explained.

Of course, scientists have been examining the web for some time. Now, though, they are trying to work out how they can guide its future growth. Tim Berners-Lee puts it like this: “The web is basically a web of people. Because it’s something we created, we have a duty to make it better.”

But the web has grown and prospered without any real guiding hand, despite the attempts of governments and businesses to bend it to their will. So can the web scientists really do anything to shape its future?

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Last year I met Kris Tate, the young developer behind web 2.0 start-up, Zooomr, a photo-sharing site.

He had moved to San Francisco at 17 to get closer to the heart of the web community and built Zooomr as a way of sharing photos with friends and family.

He has worked to build a community around Zooomr and has introduced many features that big budget rival Flickr, owned by Yahoo, does not have, such as Twitter integration and localisation into more than 10 different languages.

But one of the criticisms of Zooomr was that it lacked the server ooomph of rival Flickr, and was often slow to use.

Kris got in touch with me this week to say he's made the move to Japan, where Zooomr is now based.

He's got new servers up and running and a new version of Zooomr released.

He said: "Japan has always been a centre for hardware technology, so it's rich in high-speed internet/connectivity and mobile devices as well.

"And although Japan may be a boon for hardware companies and solutions, it hasn't had much direction when it comes to software or community so, I've ventured across the pond to set up shop here.

"In short, I believe the next future of the web is going to happen in Japan. The biggest thing holding back places like Silicon Valley is the hardware and infrastructure, along with all of the big guys (Google, Yahoo etc) having already sucked up core talent."

I've been using the new version of Zooomr, albeit briefly, and it certainly feels more responsive than previous iterations. So if you're looking for a new photo-sharing site to join, then I'm sure Kris would welcome your participation.

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What would happen if everyone, anywhere, could have their own live television station from a mobile phone? So I could broadcast something as banal as my walk with the dog, or citizens could go live in conflict zones?

Well that is already possible – and in fact it’s happening. A number of services including Qik and Flixwagon, are competing to make "live" the next big thing in web video, and YouTube is poised to introduce its own live service.

The chief executive of Flixwagon popped into the BBC's Television Centre a few days ago on a brief visit to London from his company's base in Israel. I took Eran Hess up to our live News 24 studio to record the interview you can see above - it seemed an appropriate place to talk about software that puts live television in anyone's hands.

I had already been using Flixwagon for a few days and found it fascinating but slightly scary. You download the software to your phone, install it and off you go. Once you start broadcasting your output - or "flix" - can be seen within seconds on the Flixwagon site, and then reviewed later. You can choose whether you want your broadcasts to be public or private - and remember that because you are live, anything could happen in front of your phone, and be seen unedited by anyone. The difficult thing to work out is - what is the point? Yes, you can see my live dog-walk - but do you really want to?

"So, who really wants to go live?" I asked Mr Hess. "People do," he insisted. And he wasn't worried that the impending arrival of the company which made online video a hit in the first place would sweep Flixwagon away. "YouTube going live is an opportunity – not a threat. The whole idea of live is getting validation.”

I was less clear about how Flixwagon and similar sites would make money from live video, but Mr Hess seems to be banking on acting as a bridge between professional broadcasters and citizen journalists. So he has done a deal with MTV which has seen the station give phones with Flixwagon to what it calls "street journalists" to cover the primaries in the United States. Their clips are shown live on the web - whether it's an Obama victory speech or vox pops with New York voters - and some make it onto MTV itself.

Eran Hess also revealed that he had just done a deal with an Israeli news channel which will supply phones with Flixwagon to citizens in the towns of Sderot and Ashkelon where rockets fired from Gaza have been landing. It will be interesting to see whether Arab stations respond by putting the same tool in the hands of Palestinians in Gaza.

So a phone and a piece of software - and a 3g network - are you all need now to start putting your message across to a live audience. It promises to give new vigour to the whole idea of citizen journalism, and poses a challenge to existing broadcasters. Because of course these citizen journalists are not bound by any code of taste, decency, truth or impartiality, which could give their broadcasts a dangerous, edgy quality which might appeal more to viewers than the professional version of television news.

Welcome to a future where everything may be televised - live. I'm not entirely sure I like the idea.

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Dear Mr Jobs - or can I call you Steve?

So I gather thousands of developers are now going to be rushing to develop brilliant applications for the iPhone, backed by a $100 million dollar fund from one of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists.

Good news? Maybe, though look what happened to Facebook when it let a thousand flowers bloom in a similar way last May - they soon began to choke the nice neat garden which had attracted so many users in the first place.

Doubtless there will be some attractive applications - and of course it will be up to iPhone users to decide what they want, but as one of that small but select crowd myself, there are a few things I'd like you to get sorted first. Right now I carry three mobile phones with me wherever I go. An iPhone for calls and web-surfing, a Nokia N95 to shoot video clips, and a Blackberry to pick up my corporate e-mail. I'd like to do everything on one device - and while the announcement that corporate e-mail is coming to the iPhone will help, I've a few other things on my list.

1. Search

I have 4,000 contacts, and a stack of e-mails on my iPhone - why is there no simple search function to track them down, as there is on the Blackberry?

2. Cut and paste

Slowly, I'm getting to grips with the touchscreen keyboard. But if I could cut and paste text - again, I can do that on my Blackberry - it would be faster.

3. A better camera

The 2mp camera is frankly poor - and a software glitch means mine isn't even capturing pictures at the moment. The 5mp you get on an N95 is becoming standard - and video capture is also an essential for me.

4. 3g

On the wi-fi networks I use at home and at work, web surfing on the iPhone is a dream. On the very patchy EDGE network inbetween, it's frustratingly slow.

5. Cheaper roaming

Now this one is not your fault - and it applies to other devices too. But while I am paying £7 for every megabyte I use abroad, the mobile internet will be strictly off-limits away from home.

So sort all that, Steve, and I'll chuck away my other devices. Mind you if Nokia or RIM can produce a device that will do everything I want , with the elegance of the iPhone interface, then they can have my custom instead.

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UPDATE: Some people felt we hadn't got all the answers from Phorm on their ad tools. So we asked for your questions, and you've obliged.

We put a large batch to the firm and their answers are here.

There are a few follow-up questions/answers to come.

So - the next question for you is.... have you been satisfied with their answers?

EARLIER: As your comments on my Phorm posting and yesterday's news story indicate you still have plenty of questions and complaints about the technology.

The key complaints are:

An ISP handing over personal browsing information to a third party is just wrong - end of story.

Even if Phorm's intentions are honourable today, this sets a bad precedent which could lead to mis-use in the future.

Phorm's track record means they simply cannot be trusted

The key unanswered question is:

Even if we opt out of this scheme, is it true that the ISP is still passing our personal and private information to Phorm?

I'll put this very point to Phorm this morning. If you have other questions, get them to me and I'll ask them also.

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The iPhone - love it or hate it, I think you have to admit that the device is having an impact on the mobile market.

In the global phone market its footprint may be small, but in the smartphone sector, and specifically as a web-browsing device, the gadget is overturning expectations.

Until now the device could not be taken seriously as an enterprise phone - but today Apple has announced support for Microsoft's Exchange. What that means is that push and synced e-mail, contacts and calendar, as well as support for Virtual Private Networks, will be available on the iPhone.

What this really means is that Blackberry now has a serious competitor in the business market.

Of course, it's the price that will ultimately be the deciding factor.
Will the people in your company who do the buying and hiring of IT equipment want to buy phones from Apple?

Apple also unveiled the software development kit for its iPhone today, and had a few surprises.

The first was a version of Will Wright's highly-anticipated game Spore running on the device and then the announcement that Sega were producing games for the platform.

When I was out at the Game Developers' Conference last month many many developers told me they were itching to start producing games for the iPhone.

It looks like the iPhone could give mobile gaming a much needed boost and provide Nokia's N-Gage some real competition.

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Behavioural advertising through monitoring a user's web habits is an ethical and legal minefield. More and more systems are being developed that can assess our interests and passions from our web surfing habits and then target us with bespoke advertising.

And unless there's a radical shift in governmental policy around the world, this certainly seems to be the future of advertising online.

But the debate about what can be done with personal data, how it is used or stored, who does the storing and using, and what control we, as consumers, have is an important one.

In one sense it looks a straightforward proposition - no-one wants to see irrelevant adverts plastered on websites when online.

But take the model offline and it feels different: imagine a marketing man who trailed you through the streets as you shopped at different stores, or watched you as you played in the park with your children, and then came into your home and took notes on the TV programmes you watched, books you read etc.

And then imagine that he pushes adverts through your door, creates advertising hoardings and TV and radio campaigns targeting you directly....

Is that an uncomfortable thought?

Perhaps he says he doesn't know who you really are, that it's just your habits that he knows; perhaps he promises not to tell any of the advertisers about you, and that he will destroy his notes in a few weeks. He says he won't look at your bank statement, or ask your friends for more information.

He also says you can tell him to go away at any stage and he will immediately; but unless you do, he will follow you and note down your habits as a matter of course.

Do you feel more comfortable?

For some people the idea, offline or online, is just not acceptable.

Simon Davies, of Privacy International, told me: "Behavioural advertising is a rather spooky concept for many people."

He has looked at Phorm's privacy measures and has been impressed. I should also make clear he did this not as director of PI but as part of his role with start-up 80/20 Thinking.

But that model of behaviour tracking is being touted by US firm Phorm. It has signed up UK ISPs, BT, Virgin and Talk Talk to trial the technology.

BT told me that each users privacy is 100% secure. And that the service is a "benefit to users" because they get more relevant advertising.

Certainly the deal with Phorm has caused some controversy. The Guardian has an excellent piece here.

We're a bit late to this story - so apologies. But we've got an update live now about campaigner Simon Davies, who was asked by Phorm to look at the firm's personal information protection measures.

He has come away impressed with the steps Phorm has taken. But he does feel strongly that Phorm should be opt in and not opt out.

So what do you think? A threat to our privacy? Or good use of technology for improving services?

UPDATE: If you want to put your queries/concerns direct to Phorm.....

The company's CEO, Kent Ertugrul will be available to answer your questions in a live web chat via the Webwise site at www.webwise.com/chat on 6 March 2008 from 20.30 GMT.

UPDATE TWO: Chris Vallance of Radio 4's iPM has interviewed Kent Ertugrul. You can listen below.

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I've not tried the beta of IE8 myself but I'm interested if anyone else has....

Neowin reports that the response to it was mixed, appropriately enough at Mix 08 where it was launched.

It's very early developer beta, so probably not for ordinary users.

Two new interesting features that have been highlighted include webslicing, the ability to grab dynamic content from a page and then keep up to date with that content without having to launch the browser. Sounds a bit like Safari's web clippings...

And a new safety filter to protect users from phishing sites and malware.

The browser also has Facebook integration built-in.

Of course Firefox lets people do all of the above through extensions and toolbars, while a browser like Flock has integration with a whole host of social networking sites.

Perhaps more telling, Microsoft is making IE8 compliant with more web standards, which should make developers a lot happier and make the browsing experience for the majority of users a bit more enjoyable.

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I spent a day this week at a school in Tynemouth, on the coast outside Newcastle, helping pupils at Marden High School make a film about mobile phones for the BBC's School Report project. There’ll be more about this on the website on School Report day on March 13th, but one thing struck me immediately. Children are at the cutting edge of the mobile internet revolution and both teachers and the phone industry can learn from them.

We were using a group of 12 and 13 year olds to investigate how children used – and abused - mobile phones and they were knowledgeable, articulate and very demanding of the technology. They had conducted their own poll of the school’s students – more than half of the 920 11-16 year olds had responded and only 3 did not have their own mobile phones.

Their survey also asked whether the students had video, music or photos on their phones, and four out of five said they had all three. When I asked a group of them what they wanted from a phone they had plenty of demands: “Multimedia, the internet, Bluetooth, MP3s.” What about simple phone calls? “Boring!!” they chorused.

Many showed me pretty advanced handsets. So they are carrying with them sophisticated mini-computers and their usual route to the internet could soon be via their phones rather than their PCs. While adults are dipping their toes into the mobile internet rather gingerly, children are taking the plunge. Bearing in mind that texting took off when it was discovered by young phone users, the mobile firms would do well to examine carefully which web apps are proving popular with teenagers.

There are implications too for teachers. Marden High School – like many – has a policy which effectively bans mobile phones, although the Head Teacher admitted to me that it was not strictly enforced. “If we searched the 920 students,” he told me with a smile, ”we would probably find more than a thousand phones.”

While the teachers here are worried about aspects of mobile phone use such as bullying texts and explicit videos, they are aware that a ban is becoming untenable. And they are even beginning to explore how mobile phones could be used in lessons – one class was using phones to film simple animations.

The children of the mobile internet generation are getting used to being connected – to their music, their videos, their social networking sites – wherever they go. And that means we are all going to have to think hard about how we rewrite the rules.

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Could a tiny business based in London's Shoreditch take a bite out of Apple’s digital music empire? It seems unlikely and even 7digital will admit that it’s a David facing a Goliath. But this week’s deal between the download service and Warner Music could at least make Apple sit up and take notice.

The seamless integration between the iPod and iTunes – and the manner in which the Apple ecosystem makes rival devices and services less useful to music fans – has made Steve Jobs the most powerful figure in digital music, with Apple commanding around 80% of the market. The big four labels – who saw iTunes as a saviour when it arrived promising users a viable alternative to pirated tracks – are now chafing at the bit.

They don’t like Apple’s insistence on a single price for tracks and albums, and they’re waking up to the fact that they’ve handed the retail end of their digital business to one player.

So Warner is striking a blow for the whole industry by offering its catalogue DRM-free and in MP3 format to 7digital. Until now, it has made perfect sense for iPod users to stick with iTunes - tracks downloaded from other services just wouldn’t play because of their incompatible DRM. Now 7digital’s MP3s will play on an iPod – as well as on other music-players and on mobile phones.

In other words, you are buying a more flexible product – and to make it more attractive 7digital has cut the price of 158 albums to £5, as compared with the £7.99 you will pay on iTunes. I’d be surprised if that is anything but a short-term gimmick – though Ben Drury, the co-founder of 7digital told me it would carry on for some time.

Wandering around the compact offices 7digital occupies in Shoreditch it seems extraordinary that this is the headquarters of what claims to be one of the top three music download services in the UK. But that just goes to show how mighty Apple is compared to the rest, and how slowly the whole digital downloads industry has been growing. The likes of Napster, HMV, and Wippit have all struggled to make any kind of impact.

This little business with 28 staff may not be a major threat to iTunes - Steve Jobs is more likely to be worried about Amazon’s MP3 service, which is currently available only in the United States. But 7digital is part of a movement which is sweeping away DRM from music. Apple itself predicted that trend in Steve Jobs’ open letter to the music industry last year, and will be hoping that it too will benefit as paid-for downloads become as flexible as the pirated kind. But, at long last, competition is arriving in the digital music business bringing users the choice they deserve

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Sad news: Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has died, according to reports in the US.

His creation - together with Dave Arneson - was an inspiration to millions and I spent many happy years rolling the dice with friends in search of a miscellaneous magic items.

I had the chance to speak with him on the 30th anniversary of D&D a few years back and it was a pleasure.

An estimated 20 million people worldwide have played D&D, with more than $1bn spent on game equipment and books.

"I thought we would sell about 50,000 copies," Gary Gygax told me back in 2004.

Without the creation of D&D, the video game landscape would be very different indeed. Would World of Warcraft be the global hit it is today, for example?

Time to dig out those rule books, I think.

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I hesitate to write this, mainly because I fear the response, but does anyone who owns a Mac actually use any anti-virus software?

I ask because Kaspersky Labs have told InfoWorld they had readied a prototype anti-virus package for the Mac and could launch it "within days", if needed.

Is it me, or does that sound unnecessarily alarmist? Almost as if, they are expecting a tidal wave of Mac viruses.

Interestingly enough Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder and head of anti-virus research at Kaspersky, predicted a "significant rise" in Mac viruses back in April 2007.

Has it happened? Not yet....

Symantec and McAfee both sell anti-virus software for Macs. So does anyone have any anti-virus software installed on their Macs?

I don't on my machines. So am I smug and stupid or smug and wise?

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The next stage in the evolution of the mobile web has become clearer after the announcement that Nokia is going to use Microsoft's Silverlight on its handsets.

Silverlight has been dubbed a "flash killer" and while that's an ambitious claim it also underestimates Microsoft's own plans for the product, which it hopes will become the default platform for the next generation of rich web applications.

We're going to hear a lot more about Silverlight in the coming week at Mix 08 in Las Vegas, including some new applications for the platform.

But this first announcement is a powerful message to the internet industry. Because Nokia's phones, and specifically those running the S60 operating system, have a dominant place in the market, with more than 53% of the market share.

It means that Silverlight could well become the standard platform for web development on a phone and that in turn could have a knock on effect on the PC because smartphone sales will overtake laptop sales any day now.

And interestingly it also means that the distinction between the web and the mobile web could soon be at an end - because one of the aims of Silverlight is the creation of rich web applications that are totally independent of browser, operating system and physical hardware.

It could mean that the latest cool web 2.0 application that you've been playing with on your Mac or PC will run just as well on your mobile phone.

The meaty sub-plot to this is what this all means for Adobe's Air, its next generation web application platform.

Adobe has already signed up some big players to Air, such as eBay, but the mobile dimension is a big one.

So this feels like a good round for Silverlight, without actually being a knockout blow.

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While in San Francisco I called into see mobile firm Shozu, whose application had been powering my transfer of video direct from the phone to the BBC, and other online destinations.

I was interested in finding out why Nigel Clifford, the chief executive of Symbian, the world's most popular mobile OS, had cited the application as an example of the always-on, always-connected mobile experience when I had spoken to him during the Mobile World Congress.

I have been using Shozu mainly as a heavy lifter; my phone uploads to Shozu once and then it pushes the content out to other destinations.

But the application on your phone also works as a bridge to your online content, including your friends. For example, you can configure Shozu to notify you whenever one of your Flickr friends has posted new pictures.

The firm's Jen Grenz showed me the latest version of the Shozu client, and how the firm is re-packaging itself as more of a community bridge.

Instead of an application centred on distributing your content the new client is focused on your online communities - be it Facebook or Flickr, for example.

From Shozu you can change your Facebook status, see your Friends latest photos, or upload news ones of your own.

As the mobile web finally begins to coalesce around your communities Shozu is clearly gearing up to be one of the glues that bind those friendships and your shared content.

The new client will also feature adverts for the first time on Shozu. Adverts always tend to divide users but Shozu is promising they will be low bandwidth and won't interrupt the user experience.

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