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From TWL:

Finally the mid-tier IT company that you’ve been battling with all year gives you some good news - the CEO is coming to the UK in three weeks. “He’s got some news, not sure what it is yet. Word is, it’s a European acquisition. You’ve got a half day for media stuff, the rest of his time here is dedicated to customer meetings.”

What a dreadful business this is, sometimes, eh? (Sorry, nothing profound here. Move along to the next blog)

I knew the Metro was owned by Associated Newspapers, but it now seems to have turned into a facsimile of the Daily Mail.

The hard porn lurking on teenage blog sites says their story today in the paper edition.

The vast majority of blogs on top social websites contain potentially offensive material, a study shows.

The pages on sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Google’s blogger.com are a hit among children but can hold porn or adult language.

The popularity of blogging has exploded in the past 12 months with the number doubling to 70million.

But some of the most popular sites are shamelessly devoted to sex such as ‘Belle de Jour, diary of a London call girl’ and ‘Girl with a one-track mind, diary of a sex fiend’.

Needless to say, it’s based on “research” (PDF file) by an outfit called Scansafe, who make errm web filtering software for business and for paranoid parents. If you look at the PDF, which the Metro clearly didn’t bother doing, you’ll find there’s absolutely no substantiation of these claims whatsoever. Who’da thunk it?

Apparently, it’s worth a trillion million dollars. What could go wrong?

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My colleagues and friends Mike Butcher and Sam Sethi, the co-editors of Vecosys, have parted ways as business partners for the time being. Happily, there are no bad feelings.

Mike will work on his tbites Technology 2.0 blog, as well as his multifarious freelance and consultancy gigs, including NMK Forum 07 (book now).

Sam is relaunching Vecosys across Europe under a new, and much better, name Blognation.

Vecosys, as the founders freely admit, was not a great name for a blog about the UK and Europe’s digital startups. Blognation perhaps suggests a blog about blogs (cf. The Blog Herald), but is at least pronounceable by two different people in the same way. [I am not one to talk - it normally takes around 20 minutes to explain this blog's title: "No, two as in the word two", "point - no, no not a full stop - p-o-i-n-t", etc.]

Good luck to them both!

I was at a strategy meeting on Wednesday of about 10 people for a forthcoming event - not NMK, for once (readers sigh with relief), but with a sister organisation (readers scrabble for something else to click), Dynamo London, that’s about our digital creative industry.

Anyway, mum, it was a really interesting meeting and could have spelled the first time that the Head of Interactive at the BBC sat down in the same meeting as his opposite number at The Guardian. We also had people from the PR, mobile, exhibitions, music and design agency sectors.

That, in a way, was the theme of the meeting and the event we were discussing. These people, working in very different media, that very often don’t talk to each other, were all doing similar things and facing the same problems viz. working with and championing digital, interactive media.

The Digital Divide

The people who are in charge at many clients and board directors in other organisations view digital as an add-on. They are typically men aged 55+. And, at best, rather than admit that they don’t get it and please tell me more, they shove aside a tiny amount of cash for an online offshoot or partnership. What the people in the room knew, and I’m sure you know, is that the audiences are coming from the opposite direction. If the first time they hear about your launch is when they see a friend has them on their MySpace, then you’ve lost yourself a lot of time and money. This isn’t an extra; this is where the people are.

Experience Rules

How did you learn about how to use the Internet? Or any other IT, for that matter? If you’re remotely like me, then the answer is nowhere; you just did it. You made some mistakes, and your friend gave you some advice, but you were interested enough to find your way. People learn by doing: learning retention rates from experience are around 80%, compared to 30% for reading things and 40% for hearing things. I used to be a teacher, and I reckon the 40% figure is about 40 times too high.

And how many IT-related conferences have ever allowed you to experience anything? The closest I normally get is being able to ask a question, which I never do, unless it’s one of ours and I feel that horrifying obligation to kick things off. As an event attendee, you can simulate experience by taking notes - it makes you process the words a little and so it goes in a little deeper. But really experiencing anything? Never.

So that creates a bit of a conundrum - we’d like to reach people who don’t really get interactive; we know that experience is the best teacher; yet we’re stuck with a traditional conference environment for the event. (We’re getting a prestigious venue for free, so don’t knock it).

I’m thinking mobile phones or some of the interactive voting tools that are used in classrooms. Suggestions and real help welcome.

I’m opposed to this code of conduct for bloggers idea. I quite like the whole freedom of speech thing on blogs and believe in the ability of people, by and large, to do the right thing. There’s already legislation against threatening behaviour and I don’t think the proposed code, however it ends up, will do much to tackle anonymous bullies. It’s also allowed the newspapers to (predictably) characterise the whole activity as a chaotic wild west, perhaps an implication of the silly sheriff’s badge chosen by code-lovers (see yesterday’s Guardian for evidence).

However, that’s not quite the same thing as being pro-unpleasantness or against guidelines and controls anywhere. The whole thing was brought home to me at an event we ran earlier this week called ‘Goodness 2.0‘. It was about how charities and campaigning organisations might adopt Web 2.0 technologies to change and improve relationships with supporters and potentially change internally. One of the big problems that charities appear to have with the whole social media she-bang is the issue of moderation. I made a possibly flippant comment about moderation of forums being a voluntary activity - if you don’t moderate at all, you can’t be held legally accountable for a forum’s content, I understand. It’s the way a lot of magazine forums work - I think that some newspapers are the same - since publishers, by and large, aren’t going to pay for full-time moderators.

However, the flippancy of that comment was laid bare when another audience member, a representative of Youthnet, talked about the messages from very vulnerable and troubled young people that appear on their forum message boards. If there weren’t moderation, then (a) that youngster probably wouldn’t get the help they needed, rendering the whole thing pointless; and (b) it would lay them open to the potential for savage and uncaring comments from other teens on the board.

So moderation is a big issue in this sector. And they’re shot by both sides. On the one hand, if they don’t have forums, member-created media, blogs and so forth, they’re sometimes judged as boring, irrelevant, not keeping up with the times. On the other, moderation is so crucial that the costs attached to opening up to members’ input can be significant. If a member, perhaps, was going to talk about committing a crime, committing suicide or being abused, then the softly-softly, user-driven approaches taken by the likes of digg and YouTube are clearly irresponsible. Even a low-traffic messageboard could easily equate to a full-time position. Add into that equation the fact that often online marketing by charities is seen as a diversion from the core activity of the organisation and very quickly the fancy talk of an outsider like me about letting users upload their own videos and photos starts to sound a little hollow.

Anyway, given the level of interest and difficulties these organisations face, I’ve been looking into it today, with a view to producing a seminar on the subject to help organisations adopt best practices in order to do it as well and as cost-effectively as possible. I spoke to Tamara Littleton at eModeration, who hopefully will be helping with the proposed event and she pointed me towards a white paper they’d just produced with some great tips and advice. She also mentioned that brands that are dipping their feet into social media are facing exactly the same issues, although there it’s largely questions of reputation management and legal liability that drives the discussion. It’s an excellent read and gives advice on how to draft your T&Cs, implement algorithms to flag worrisome posts and recruit member-moderators, among other things. Very much recommended to anyone who faces these sorts of dilemmas, and a good read for anyone else interested in social media.

Despite a few years in technology journalism, and about, what?, 40 hardware reviews to my credit, my main interest nowadays in things non-internet is that it works. Things stopped working today and these are the three things I bought from PC World - my first visit in four years - and the story behind them.

Unexpectedly, perhaps - credit is due to the guys and girls at the branch (Fulham). They were really nice. I’ve experienced crap service from PC World in the past, but not this time…

• No one bothered me as I bumbled happily about the shelves.
• They gave my wife (no man asks directions) great directions, took her to the right place, and didn’t try to sell her anything.
• There was no insistence on extra warranties at the checkout!

Back to my purchases:

HP Black Ink Cartridge Model 10: I was really lucky to be gifted an HP Business Inkjet 1000 printer by its product manager at HP UK. The reason he gave it me was because I was sceptical about an inkjet printer as a solution for school classrooms. He was basically challenging me to find fault with the machine. This was about a year-and-a-half ago.

My tests, this much time later, would show that it’s fantastic value for money. This is the first cartridge I’ve had to replace on the machine. That’s a million times (not literally, but emotionally) longer than equivalent machines I’ve had from Epson and Canon. The print quality is easily equivalent to a cheap colour laser, so the running costs must work out loads less.

Is it right for a school or personal business printer? Not for a school, I think - it’s a bit slow compared to the cheap colour lasers you can get nowadays. But, hey, this is a two-year-old printer that I’m still perfectly happy with.

£30 is a bit much for a refill, still.

Elements 250GB External Drive: I needed this because my music is all on my home (Mesh) PC’s hard drive and my PC is three years old. I’ve stopped trusting it. It’s making strange noises. Randomly. I get a message every time I start the machine that one of the chip fans has failed PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE. Every time I press that F1 key, it’s like punching the ‘nudge’ button on a fruit machine. That’s a horrible place to be, and I want to make sure those tunes are still with me when the Mesh passes on to the great landslip in the suburbs.

No idea if the Elements product is any good, but apparently there’s a Western Digital disk inside. There are photos and words and stuff too to be protected.

I will, of course, be moving all of that online before too long, but 70GB+ of music is still one hell of an upload on my BT Internet contract.

These things are surprisingly cheap nowadays - £60 for 250GB of reassurance seems very reasonable.

Nvidia 7300 PNY: Confession time - I love computer games. When I bought this PC, it was ‘rigged out’ with twin 6800 Nvidia GPUs. For those not conversant, the video card manufacturers have come up with a great wheeze to get you to buy two of their products whereby it was alleged that they’d work together to provide superior video performance.

About six months after buying my new machine, it informed me that this wasn’t working. Thanks. I carried on playing my favourite games - Neverwinter Nights, Oblivion and Civ4 - and noticed no difference. SLI - the NVidia version of this dual card technology - was a swizz, I concluded. Didn’t bother phoning in the warranty - what was the point?

Anyway, this morning, I got no display whatsoever. Having tested various bits and pieces, I concluded that one or both of my graphics cards had failed.

So, getting back to PC World, I had the choice between an SLI-ready (two cards, remember) 7600 card at £90 or a cheap-as-chips 7300 card at £60. There were other, very expensive, options. I’ve lost confidence with the whole two-cards-work-as-one concept. My PC is cracking on a bit anyway. There’s an unused Mac Mini in the wings. That extra £30 seemed unnecessary.

PNY? They are a funny company. Big in Europe, as I understand. I remember their marketing manager from a few years ago. Very sharp. Showered editorial guys with free memory cards and spent nothing on advertising. I understand that’s still the case, and that it still works when it comes to publicity.

I have five more Joost invites in case anyone is left without one. The new version - 0.90 - features a couple more channels and smoother playback in case of network difficulties, according to the release notes.

I wonder if the jump in version numbers to 0.9 indicates anything about how close the program is to launch and - hopefully - the introduction of some better content? I’ve heard conflicting rumours about this in the last couple of weeks.

Update: All gone - whew - that was fast.

Update #2: See the comments. 1 May soft launch, apparently. But they’ll need a lot more compelling content by that point to make it work, in my opinion.