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Back from the summer break, Europeans get blogging

There's been a noticeable surge in traffic across Europe to the popular blog platforms Blogger, WordPress and Typepad, coinciding with the September back-to-school period, web measurement firm comScore reported on Tuesday. WordPress, the open-source blogging initiative, saw the biggest monthly gains across Europe. Pan-European traffic to the site was up 27 per cent month-on-month to 21.6 million Europeans.

Does this mean we should expect to see millions of new Euroblogs coming online, covering every facet of daily life?

BlackBerry-totin' MPs

The humble BlackBerry faced a barrage of opposition from MPs last week. Among the more outlandish accusations was that its introduction into the House of Commons would plunge the chamber into a state of chaos worthy of a Wild West-style shoot out.

In the end, however, the small, handheld device dodged the assault, and now MPs will be permitted to punch away on their QWERTY keyboards and send and receive messages - especially when they tire of long debates in the chamber.

By a majority of 74 to 36, the House voted in favour of a Commons Modernisation Committee recommendation that would allow electronic devices to be used in the chamber, ending an era when the only way to receive a message was to be passed a note.

The move met with considerable resistance, however, including from Brian Binley, the Conservative MP, who expressed a wish that the house could be run more like a saloon in a Western film - except that instead of guns, MPs would leave their BlackBerrys at the door.

Free mobile calls and text messages?

That's the idea behind a new partnership announced today between Skype and the mobile network 3. Announced in Milan and London this morning, the two firms have teamed up on a Skype Phone, a specially designed handset that allows users to bring free (when calling or texting Skype to Skype) Skype calls with them while they are on the go. The handset will be available at 3 shops in the coming days in nine countries including Britain, Ireland and Italy.

With 246 million users around the world, Skype has already become a major irritant to fixed-line telecoms operators, who have seen business and home users defect to cheap net-based telecoms services. In July, telecoms consultancy Mformation reported that 70 per cent of the businesses they surveyed in Britain, America and across Europe are making plans to institute some kind of internet-based service on their mobiles within the next two years. at the time, 27 per cent said they currently make cheap internet calls and SMS messages on their handsets.

A glimmer of hope for Italian bloggers?

Click here to read Bernhard Warner's column: A geriatric assault on Italian bloggers

For those of you who are still grousing about Italy's draft "anti-blogger" legislation (and judging from my inbox and the comments on my most recent column, there are a lot of you) don't despair. To be sure, any law requiring Italian bloggers to register with the Government before airing their grievances would generate more problems that it solves, but there are ways around it.

As a number of you have already told me, we can all sneak our blogs to an offshore server and still take aim at unresponsive elected officials and their poorly conceived laws, the reckless drivers, the misguided football managers and the inefficiency of Poste Italiane from our homes and offices in Parma, Rome, Milan and Sicily. In other words, we can have our pasta out in the open and engage in some honest criticism of the system too without fear of being roughed up by Guardia di Finanza officers.

Twittering the California wild fires

"Ok, no really... I'm heading to bed.... will start updates again in the morning.. fire seems to be slowing right now anyway."

And with these words, "nateritter", as his friends on Twitter know him, signed off after a rapid-fire, round-the-clock day of covering the raging Southern California wild fires.

And, a few hours later he was back again.

As with sex, computer games can be casual

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

The 'next big thing' in computer games has been officially identified and it's called 'casual gaming'. Partly because of innovations like the Nintendo Wii, which have made gaming accessible to a whole new audience who wouldn't traditionally have been considered gamers, and partly because of increasingly sophsticated mobile phones, more and more people are playing basic games. (The gaming industry likes to refer to these as having low production values. The 'mini-golf' common on mobile phones is a good example: it doesn't look great, but it's a happy distraction on the Tube.) During a session on the future of gaming, panelists said there was an enormous opportunity for publishers to capitalise on this audience, who didn't care so much about the traditional values of games - like sophisticated graphics - and played games because they were simple and convenient.

Unlike other web-based services where people connect with one another, like Facebook, there was good opportunity to try different revenue models such as subscription, contributors suggested. Trip Hawkins, a co-founders of Electronic Arts, one of the world's largest gaming companies, pointed to the example of Avapeeps - a'virtual dating' game, where players send virtual versions of themselves (avatars) into 'virtual watering holes' to make friends. "It took four days before players got in touch asking if they could have the real contact details of the people whose avatars they'd met in the game," he said.

Robert Kotick, chief executive of Activision, the company behind the popular air guitar game Guitar Hero, said: "It's true the bulk of our audience have been 16-35 year-old guys who can't get a date on Saturday night, but the number of people who want to have a short-term gaming experience is growing."

Fed up with your PC? Why not get a VC (virtual computer)?

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

G.ho.st is trying to solve a problem that is being flagged up more and more as users flock to web-based services like Facebook. Namely: how do you ease the hassle of logging in everywhere? One solution is so-called 'open ID', where websites work out a way to share login information so that a user can have a single sign-in for multiple sites.

G.ho.st is approaching the problem in a slightly a different way - by transferring the entire operating system of a computer onto the web. That way, a single login on any computer with a browser effectively opens up the entirety of the web and PC-based applications that a person regularly uses. All document management and storage, for instance, becomes web-based. Creating and writing documents happens via free web-based products, like Google Docs.

G.ho.st is effectively trying to make us move towards a world where the entirety of a computer's 'functions' occur on the web - a type of computing that is referred to in the industry as 'the cloud'. Zvi Schreiber, the company's founder, said: "For 30 years we've all worked with the assumption that everything has to exist on the computer, but these days a browser is all we need."

Does it come with a virtual parking space?

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

Property enthusiasts who like the idea of buying a home (even when they're not buying a home) can now play a fantasy real estate game, where they compete to buy pretend houses.'Realius' allows players to visit a range of virtual properties - each complete with a virtual 'view from the balcony' - and guess what they're worth. If they're the closest bidder, the property is theirs, and they can sell on, or acquire others.

The game is "built around real world events" - Sunday is 'open home day', for instance - and there's also a 'social' element, so people can liaise 'neighbours' about valuations. If the popularity of fantasy football is anything to go by, Realius may well inspire the next 'own a pretend empire' fetish. "People have an obsession with their homes," Chuck Teller, Realius's chief executive, said. "We thought: let's let people channel their real estate passion into a fun and social game." 

Paperbacks - print your own in your living room

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

Soon you will no longer need visit the book store - or Amazon - to buy a book: you'll be able to print one in your own home. HP, the world's largest printing company, said it intended to introduce a range of printers that would allow users to turn their home printer into a paperback production line - albeit on a small scale.

The head of the company's imaging and printing group said that having attacked the market for machines that print in the traditional fashion, HP would like to "get into glue". (Or 'finishing'. Or whatever word you use to describe how the pages of a book are stuck together. It used to be called binding.) HP already offers 'binding services' that can be used by home users - for instance that will pull together holiday photos - but the next step is to produce a homemade book that resembles what we're used to.

Ballmer: why Microsoft is like a 3-year old

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

Steve Ballmer, the larger-than-life chief executive of Microsoft, is not known for subtelty or understatement. But his description today of how Microsoft is playing catch-up in the search advertising market - long dominated by Google, the company's arch rival - reached new heights of enthusiasm.

Asked by the conference moderator whether, in the search market, Microsoft had behaved "a bit like 'little Johnny' who got smacked over the head by his parents," Mr Ballmer's reply, which credscendoed to a thunderous climax, went: "Oh yeah, we're like the 3-year-old who's just started playing basketball with the 12-year-olds, but we're catchin' up real quick, and soon little Johnny's gonna be dunkin' like the best of them!"

Apple to scrap premium pricing for DRM-free tracks

That didn't take long. Less than five months after Apple announced it would sell DRM-free tracks on iTunes at a premium, it's now saying it will abandon the more expensive pricing structure. In the coming days, iTunes will offer songs stripped of DRM at the same price as those with the restrictive copyright protections, Steve Jobs told today's Wall Street Journal, after Ars Technica broke the across-the-board pricing scoop.

The sudden announcement now has the hopeful wondering: is this finally the beginning of the end for DRM?

A royal flush at Google's loos

At Google, the most modern of firms, even the method of abluting is state of the art.

Employees at the company's office in Palo Alto, California, enjoy a convenience that is the envy of Silicon Valley: remote-controlled bidets.

Users of the 'robo-bidet', as the unit is known, can control a range of features - such as the direction, pulse, and temperature of the spray - from a small panel on the cubicle wall.

There is even the option to make the seat vibrate, for extra comfort. "You're not, like, rocking around in there, but it's kinda nice," said a veteran of one of the company's best kept secrets.

Sensors in the toilet bowl mean that the system is only activated when someone is sitting down - to prevent accidents, though pranksters have been known to fool the system by pressing down on the seat with their hands, leading to "ambush attempts" on unsuspecting passers by.

The system, understood to be made in Korea, is among a range of perks at the 'Googleplex - the company's sprawling campus on the fringe of San Francisco. Others include a continuous supply of free food from the all-day canteen, and access to the communal bicycles that litter the grounds.

"I think it aids productivity," one company employee said of the robo-bidet. "You come out of there ready to face work, clean as the day God made ya."

A spokeswoman for Google declined to comment.

Is the iPhone packed with hazardous materials?

Could Apple's iPhone be hazardous to your health?  Greenpeace thinks so.

Testing the Great Firewall: internet censorship in China

China’s Great Firewall – the bank of filters designed to keep uninvited information out of the country’s cyberspace – may not be the impenetrable barrier it was once considered. Recent reports have suggested that the software designed to filter out porn, democracy and other undesirable topics is technologically erratic but psychologically effective. Its most powerful effect is in convincing people that their Government is watching them.

On a recent trip to Beijing, I had a chance put the theory to the test. My survey was neither scientific nor comprehensive, but it did seem to confirm the findings of the American academics.

Sitting in my hotel room, I tried to access a selection of news websites, as well as those devoted to topics such as Falun Gong and Taiwanese Independence, which the Chinese Government regards as damaging to the security of the state. The results were as follows:

Missed the biology lecture? Fear not, there's YouTube

Having difficulty making that first period university lecture? Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future it won't matter. Lectures could be filmed and uploaded onto the web. This is the plan at University of California, Berkeley.

In what is being hailed as a first in academia, Cal Berkeley, a university with a reputation for revolutionary thinking, announced this week that it will begin putting hundreds of hours of class lectures on the video-sharing site YouTube. There are already 201 UC Berkeley videos on the site, ranging from an integrative biology lecture where the professor gets very friendly with a droopy skeleton to a guest lecture delivered by Google founder Sergey Brin in 2005. Physics, biology and chemistry will all be added during the course of the semester.

Could Skype kill Facebook's lofty valuation?

If Facebook fails to score a cool half-billion dollar investment from Microsoft, as the pundits in Silicon Valley are betting, it can blame Skype. Skype has revolutionised the phone industry by making calls cheaper. It looks likely to score a second, even greater trick: killing the valuation of over-hyped dot-coms like Facebook.

Gold MacBook Pro

If Apple’s impressively-specified, impressively-priced MacBook Pro just isn’t quite expensive enough for you fear not; a solution is at hand. Oregon-based case modification experts Computer Choppers have just announced that they will be offering a 24-carat gold plating service for the world-beating laptop for well-heeled customers later this year. The modification is expected to add something in the region of  £780 to the purchase price of a standard aluminium-skinned model.

For extra bling power buyers will be able to specify a diamond or sapphire-encrusted Apple logo although, keen as they are to avoid a stern letter from Apple's lawyers, Computer Choppers make it clear that they will be treating any request to modify or enhance the famous logo on a 'case-by-case basis'.