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Is the web twisting your sense of time?

Concerned that you - or indeed your company - are falling behind in the race to be noticed in the digital age? It may be because you are operating according to an industrial concept of time.

In the railway age - an age when trains apaprently did run on schedule - timings were far more rigid, and the importance of abiding by them was paramount. Now our sense of time is more 'fluid', meaning we feel less willing to making temporal commitments because of the ease of breaking them - by making a call on the mobile or sending a text.

So, anyway, says FutureRealWorld - a research company which tracks consumer behaviour and trends. "The most obvious expression of this is in media consumption, where we've witnessed the end of prime time because of the advent of PVRs [personal video recorders]," said Tamar Kasriel, FutureReal's director, warming to her 'time' theme in a speech at Internet World in London. "But it's influencing social patterns too. Rather than arranging a meeting now, people schedule a 'proxy-meeting'. You'll say Friday. Then in the middle of the week - you might specify Friday afternoon, and then as time gets closer, you gradually nail down when and where you'll meet. There's a sense that you can bend time, and for some people that provides a great sense of empowerment."

Those starved of the vocabulary of digital marketing and consumer trends were also feeling empowered after Ms Kasriel's speech. Featured in her 30-minute talk were a raft of creative - and sometimes slightly bamboozling - phrases which sounded nothing if not very 2.0. Among them: "the half-life of data is much shorter than it used to be", the "world wild web" - a reference to the perceived unlawfulness of many activities on the internet, and "the tyranny of immediacy", which has something to do with the fact that we and many of the services we use are "always on". Still with us?

Mario Kart and the joy of fake racing

I don't like 'real' racing games. No matter how exactly the physics match the real world, it's just never going to be like a real-world racing experience. The problem as I see it is the lack of peripheral vision in games. When driving, obviously I look straight ahead but it’s what I see out the corners of my eyes that lets me know how fast I’m going. This tells me if I am going too fast or too slow to take a corner or, as a teenager, to donut my mum's Nissan Micra.

In 'real' racing games, I can't tell the difference between 60mph and at 160mph. I tend to crash a lot and spend vast amounts of time skidding around in gravel at the side of the track.

Fake racing games are another matter. The one I’m most looking forward to at the moment is the Nintendo Wii edition of Mario Kart. I had the original Mario Kart on the SNES and have had every version since. It’s about as far departed from real driving and real-world physics as is possible. I like watching a giant dinosaur with a spiky shell on his back burning round a track in a tiny go-cart without tipping over, no matter how top-heavy he is. I enjoy throwing banana skins all over the track and firing red shell homing missiles to take out other racers.

The question is, will the game be as good as it should be or will it suffer from too much programming?

If I had to choose between Mario Kart on the SNES and Mario Kart on the Gamecube, the SNES version would win hands down. The graphics weren't as good, it wasn't in real 3D and there weren't as many features, but it had a good feeling of speed and the gameplay was set at the perfect level between fun and frustration. I did like the Gamecube version and it was very pretty, but it just didn't have the sense of speed or the same feeling of fun. For me, if you are making a racing game, make it fast and make it fake.

If all of this is new to you and you have never experienced a Mario Kart game, get hold of the version for the DS. It has tracks from the original SNES version and loads more besides. I've missed my stop on the Tube several times because of an all important time trial speed that had to be beaten.

I haven't had a go of the new Wii version yet, but I hear that there are motorbikes in it. I am a little worried: just because you can add something, it doesn't mean you should. But there is going to be online racing with up to 12 people which should be great. I'm sure in a month or so you will be able to read a post on here with me complaining about 12 years olds beating me at racing as well as Call Of Duty 4.

Balance Wii Fitness with feeling the fool

Wii Fitness: InGear preview

Later this year Nintendo plan to release a new game called Wii Fitness (or Wii Fit if you are outside Europe). Consisting of 40 or so fitness games, it also includes a 'Balance Board' that gives feedback on how the prancing folk in front of the TV are doing. Basically it's the workout version of the popular DS game, Brain Training. In Japan, Nintendo shipped over one million units for launch and have managed to sell them. Obviously there is a demand but, would you use one? I think it's safe to say that if you're a male sharing a flat with a couple of other male friends, then breaking a sweat on your Balance Board is going to invite all sorts of abuse. In a fatigued state, you may well be too exhausted to fight your flatmates off, verbally or otherwise.

However, an easy way to workout in your living room that can avoid boredom is bound to be popular with people. I could do with dropping a few pounds but I just don't know if this is something I want. I think it's due to all the ratings and feedback that are offered. I'm in my 30s and I really don't want a game telling me I have the fitness of a man in his late 40s. Perhaps if the fitness rating were based on animals I would be happier. I can live with being told I am at a badger's level in fitness so I could perhaps aim towards being rated as something such as a squirrel or a lemur. It's pretty much the same reason I have never played Brain Training on the DS. As well as yogic balance and press-ups (yawn) there are some fun mini games involved in the Wii Fitness, such as ski jumping and hula hooping, so I might find I love it when I actually have a go.

I do have a fitness regime idea of my own. My 'act like a child' regime is easy, free and pretty simple to follow as the rules are very flexible. You just act like a four year old. Seen a wall? Climb up it and walk along. Need to walk somewhere with a friend? Run to the nearest lamp post and back all the way. In a hospital, school or hall that has a smooth floor? Running knee slides are the answer. I think my scheme would genuinely work and would also make any commuting so much more entertaining for both participants and observers. I am happy to sell my idea if Microsoft or Sony are looking for an inroad.

Cheats always prosper

I've recently been playing a game called Zack and Wiki. It's a point-and-click game on the Wii where you play as a boy pirate with a flying monkey sidekick. You have to get the treasure chest in each level by finding solutions to various puzzles, ranging from mixing shrinking potions to dumping a vat of water onto a fire-breathing dragon. All well and good.

I consider myself an enthusiastic but not particularly gifted gamer, and this has led me to become unstuck and frustrated when I can't find a solution. I end up wandering around the level randomly pushing things, hoping that the answer will come to me. You can 'buy' tips in the game but even then it's not always obvious what you should do next.

Back in the heady days of my ZX Spectrum, this would be the end of the game for me, unless a friend had worked out the puzzle. You could normally guarantee that all your friends had the same games, because the mighty tape-to-tape ghetto blasters had come out and all the game-playing children in the country were copying each other’s game cassettes.

Fast forward to 2008 and all I have to do is a quick search on Google and there are a wealth of walk-through guides popping onto my screen. I generally try not to look at them unless I have been really stuck for at least half an hour, but this seems to be happening more and more frequently.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is that checking a solution is cheating and ruining the game by not playing it all the way through without any help, as its designers intended. This opinion is wrong. The second (and correct) way of looking at it is that it means I get to finish most of my puzzle and adventure games now with only a little online 'assistance'.

Unfortunately, the guides still don't help me out in Gears Of War when one of the enemy jumps out at me. My reactions still tend to favour the shooting wildly at the sky and ground in a panic before I'm killed. One step at a time though.

Super Mario and the back-seat gamers

I have two young sons aged 4 and 2 who are both obsessed with video games, but although they want to hold the controller, neither actually likes playing the games. Instead they love to watch me play and are happy to shout advice, and the instructions get louder and shoutier if I'm not doing quite as instructed. To all intents and purposes, they are back-seat gamers.

This might seem like a perfect situation, letting me play video games and spend time with the kids at the same time, but there is a massive downside. I got Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii in early December. There is a great two-player option where one person controls Mario while the second collects stars and stuns enemies and the like. My eldest son loves doing this as long as I control Mario.

The problem arose when we finished the game. He didn't think that finishing was a good enough reason to stop playing, so we have had to replay lots of the levels. It's now mid-February and several times a week I’m still having to play the levels where Mario wears a bee suit. I've played these levels so many times it must be approaching triple figures and I'm starting to hate the game.

I once heard a story in which a man who loved fishing dies and wakes up on a river bank with fishing rod in hand. He believes he must be in heaven and, casting his line into the water, he immediately catches a fish. He keeps repeating this and the same thing happens each time, until he realises that he is actually in hell and is doomed to catch fish repeatedly for ever more.

That's how I feel about Super Mario Galaxy. To combat this, I thought that getting a game the boys can play on their own would be the ticket, so I picked up Big Brain Academy, a game that tests children with various problem-solving activities. Fantastic. I thought that they could get on with playing a game on their own and I could feel slightly smug in the probably misdirected knowledge they were being educated by a game. In retrospect, it was a mistake to I mention that it was a "learning" game – my eldest son cried and proceeded to tell me he that didn't want to learn and wouldn’t play it.

In a desperate bid to avoid starting up Mario again I discovered that if I left my son with the controller and put the Wii on the starting screen of the original Sonic The Hedgehog, downloaded from Nintendo's online game shop, it loops through several game level demos. My son thinks it's him playing and will happily 'play' Sonic for long enough for me to get some breakfast and have a shower on a Saturday morning. I can't help but think that a learning game really might be in order for the little fellow.

Violent games: Unreal means just that

Feature: The Manhunt II ban

With excitement about the forthcoming Unreal Tournament III building and other chart-topping games like Call Of Duty 4 doing incredibly well, the question of whether you can pick up real battle skills from these games - and what effect that has on a gamer - is back on the agenda. I'm still on the fence about the effects of violence, but a painful experience shattered any illusion that I was learning real-world skills.

Several years ago I worked in an office full of twenty-something geeks. We managed to network all of our computers together so we could play the original Unreal Tournament against each other. Unreal is a first person shooter (an FPS as the kids say), where you pick up big guns and try to kill everybody else or just the other team, depending on what style of game you are playing. We ended up playing this every lunchtime and every evening after work for a couple of months as obsession took hold.

One of the people I worked with had been a Marine before he went on to the natural next thing of selling online ads. You would expect somebody that previously had a career in the art of killing would be fantastic at a computer game that was all about guns. He was terrible, really terrible. You would find him in a corner looking the wrong way while you crept up on him and 'fragged' his character. He once managed to kill himself with the sniper rifle, a feat that none of the rest of us could reproduce, even when we tried.

We mocked him about being being so very bad at Unreal depite having been in the Marines. One day this changed: the day a load of us went to play paintball. This fellow managed to show a large number of us that computer games are definitely not real and nor do they give you real-world abilities. Many of us believed that the hours spent playing Unreal would give us the advantage in what is essentially a live version of the game. They didn't, and the paintball welts served as a reminder of two important lessons. One: game skills do not equal real skills. Two: never mock an ex-Marine. The very name of Unreal Tournament should have given us a clue.

Predictive text gets smart

People who use predictive text might be with “of “ when I say that the it is not very intuitive.

Broadly speaking, predictive text relies on the general frequency of words in the language in order to rank suggestions when presented with a given combination of letters. (Because "of" is more common than "me", it is suggested first. "On" comes before "no" etc.)

Adaptxt is trying to make the technology smarter by incorporating a semantic element, meaning that a phone should, in theory, know what comes next based on context.

Adaptxt´s algorithm also recommends whole phrases rather than words – "Do" might immediately prompt “you want”, for instance – in order to cut down on the number of keystrokes, and tailors suggestions according to a user´s personal vocabulary. It can also convert a fully typed text message into "txt" – ie shorten words to save space – and "learn" vocabulary from files which have been sent to the phone, so that the owner doesn´t have to painstakingly enter more specialised vocabularies into their dictionary.

"A lot of people are turned off predictive text because it so often gets words wrong,"Andrew Glen, the marketing manager of KeyPoint Technologies, which developed the software, said. "There's a whole new language among teenagers now where they say "This is book" (instead of cool) and "I'll be good soon" (home)

A hive of inactivity

I keep seeing reports of the Nintendo Wii's amazing ability to keep you fit, illustrated with action shots of OAPs wildly waving their arms around to emphasise the benefits of new non-drug wonder drug. I, however, have been using the Wii to bring myself to ever-higher states of laziness.

Many of the games require you to throw yourself around gesturing vigourously to get the ball rolling/plumber jumping/fists flying, but there are plenty of games placed firmly in the realm of rapid digit movement and little else. And while the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 controllers have to be operated with both hands together, the Wii's remote controller and nunchuck can be held separately, one in each hand. So instead of having to lie on the sofa with both of my hands on the controller in front of me. I can lie back with my arms at my side, moving only my thumbs and index fingers. I have to be honest, I'm actually quite proud of the fact I have found a way of having a leisure activity that is purely the former and none of the latter.

It seems to me that as a society we are being made to feel guilty about spending our spare time in ways that don't increase our cardio fitness or reduce our blood pressure. I feel that embracing the joy of being motionless is, while not the way forward, certainly not a step in the wrong direction either. After all, if my video game character is running around, why should I have to as well?

I am searching for a game that only requires me to blink.

Will eBay's new fees please?

Picture a person of large girth who, while enjoying a gigantic feast, nodded off at the table only to wake up hours later still sated but rather envious - not to mention anxious - that the other guests had moved onto dessert. And now it is hard for him to move.

That is the image that eBay's recently announced changes to its listings fees conjures up.

For those who missed it - and that will likely be the majority - eBay today announced that it was cutting the price of putting something up for sale on the site by a third. The site said it would make up for the lost revenue by increasing the commission it charges when a sale is completed from 5.25 to 7.5 per cent.

The change was hinted at last week by the company's new chief executive, John Donahue, who said that eBay - long a synonym for 'online auctions' - needed to shift its emphasis towards 'fixed-price sellers': people who were just looking to shift goods, without the fuss of an auction, and whose goods make up an increasingly large proportion of the site's core revenue.

At first glance, it seems a sensible move. Attract more people - hopefully new ones - to list items on the site by making it cheaper to do so, but don't hurt your books by making up the loss elsewhere. (Financially at least, that will been the objective. According to Mark Lewis, eBay's managing director in the UK, the shift in fees will be 'value neutral' from a revenue perspective.)

But on reflection, it may in fact fall flat by working against the very people it is arguably most important for the site to attract: namely, first-time sellers who are keen to sell the odd item, probably not for a lot of money. Just the sort, in other words, who - because they buy books there - have worked out they can now do the same thing on Amazon, which looms large as a competitor.

Can Peter Gabriel take on iTunes?

Last.fm to offer free, on-demand music streaming from all the big labels

Relative to the technology around it, the music industry moves at a glacial pace - which is why it's worth recording little announcements such as the one today that Peter Gabriel's digital download service We7 has received a further $6 million in venture funding.

We7 is one of relatively few sites to be exploring the ad-supported model for music downloads by virtue of a clever technology it developed which lets an advert be attached to the beginning of any song that is downloaded.

The idea is that when people download a track, an ad plays before they listen to it for a limited number of times - eight times for new songs, five for older ones - before disappearing, at which point the song can be enjoyed like any that has been bought on iTunes.

(In fact We7 - which went live in April last year - goes further. Its tracks are all DRM-free, meaning that they can be transferred from one place to another and played on any device.)

So far none of the majors have signed up, and the two biggest independents to dip their toes in the water have been cautious. (V2, home of Bloc Party, the Stereophonics, and Mercury Rev, has only made a limited portion of their catalogue available. Sanctuary - to be fair - has put forward Morrissey and the Charlatans among its offering.)

But the new round of funding - led by Spark Capital, the Boston-based venture group who also backed the Veoh, the online distribution system, and Gabriel himself - should give the site and its 90,000 users a filip. (In eight and a half months, the number of tracks available has grown from 80,000 to half a million, and the site recently celebrated its millionth download.)

Zuckerberg: 'I don't have a proper bed'

Seeing as titbits of information about Facebook tend to be gobbled up rather like food at a frat party, it's worth trawling through the interview the company's 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, gave to 60 Minutes last night.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the 'curious but largely inconsequential' things we learnt about Mr Zuckerberg:

1. His bed has no legs. (He sleeps on a mattress on the floor.)

2. He plays Scrabulous - a tool which enables Facebook users to play Scrabble - with his grandparents.

3. He doesn't have his own office - his desk sits on an open plan floor alongside those of the company's 400 other employees.

4. He won't say what he makes of suggestions he is the new Larry or Sergey - a reference to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. ("Is that a question?", he said, when the show's Leslie Stahl suggested he was replacing them as the most important guy in Silicon Valley.)

Game over? Scrabble takes on Scrabulous

The legions of Facebook users who try to outsmart their friends with better, longer, and higher scoring words using the site's online version of Scrabble may soon be in need of another time-waster.

Hasbro, which makes Scrabble, has written to Facebook asking that it take the application down.

According to a report in Fortune, Hasbro has said that the game - called Scrabulous - is in breach of its own trademark, and is therefore unreasonably tapping into revenues that are rightfully its own.

Scrabulous, which was created by two Indian brothers, lets Facebook users play games against one another online, often over long periods of time.

The game began life as a standalone website in 2006, but has developed a huge following since launching as an application on Facebook in June last year. More than 41,000 people now play it in the UK each month, according Nielsen/Netratings, and other estimates put the number of global users at 2.3 million.

Philips' white TV: in any colour, as long as it's black

 

Black and glossy has been the finish of choice for TVs for the last couple of years, so a promotional video from Philips showing a white-framed set in the company's Design Collection seemed to be something of a departure. Oddly, though, when the people at the Philips booth were asked about it, they knew nothing about it. A call to the press office confirmed that the Design Collection is available only in black, and that any white-framed imagery was just for show.

It looked good in white, if a little like the last-generation iMac.

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

CES 2008: a video report

Click here to see the video

CES in pictures: Monday

^ Logitech's driving game controller is designed to give driving games a realistic feel

The mouse: 1968 – 2008?

Bill Gates has suggested that the era of the computer mouse may be coming to a close. Certainly the tactile interface of Apple’s iPhone points the way to a more direct interaction with our data in the future.

 

We thought it might be time to provide, if not a eulogy then at least a little look at how the computer’s best friend got started.

The idea of a hand-held computer controller was first mooted by Douglas Englebart in  1963, he applied to patent the concept in 1967. US patent 3541541 was granted in 1970.

A possibly apocryphal story about the origin of the name suggests that when  Bill English built the first Englebart-designed mouse prototype it was originally called a "turtle". When a mouse ran across their workbench while Bill and Doug were working they changed their minds

In December 1968 Englebart demonstrated the mouse, and many other key IT concepts at the Joint Computer conference in a presentation that has since become known as The Mother of all Demos

 

Englebart never received any royalties for the mouse, to an extent because his patent expired in 1987, before the personal computer revolution put a mouse in every home, and partly because many subsequent mouse designs used slightly different technologies that did not infringe upon the original patent. During an interview, he said "Stanford Research Institute patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple for something like $40,000."

 

Facebook provokes MP's existential crisis

It must be hard being Facebook. When you’re not being accused of endangering the privacy of people who’ve posted their life stories on the web, or of providing a forum for paedophiles, you’re deleting the profiles of Lib Dem MPs, claiming that they don’t exist. It must be hard being a Liberal Democrat too.

Steve Webb, 42, who has been an MP for ten years, used his Facebook profile keep in touch with constituents, but some people, it seems, began to doubt his credentials. When Facebook received complaints, they took prompt action and removed the profile.

"I was essentially accused of impersonating a Member of Parliament," Mr Webb told Reuters.

He accepted that Facebook’s doubts may have arisen because he had more than 2,500 friends – a suspiciously large number for an MP.

Do you mind if search engines archive your search queries?

Ask.com, one of the second-tier search engines, believes enough of you do. That's why it just launched AskEraser, a new feature that promises to delete all search queries from its servers within hours, compared to the industry practice of 18 months. It may not be ideal for advertisers looking to pitch you offers based on where you've clicked, but for privacy-minded netizens it's a step forward. As the company explains: "We believe that you as a user should have the power to control the usage of your search history".

Foggy day for Google News

In Turkey, 56 people were feared to have beenkilled in plane crash. A teenager in New Zealand had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in a £9.7 million computer hacking ring. And in Sudan a British teacher had been sentenced to jail after her class had named a teddy bear Mohamed.

But in Florida conditions were partly cloudy, with a chance of afternoon storms, and that - for a moment, anyway - was the most important story in the world according to Google News, one of the most widely watched news sites.

There were a couple of 'related stories' - 42, in fact - mostly from local newspapers in Florida, which also sparkled with headlines like 'Some fog, some clouds today' and 'Spring-like weather ahead.' Watergate it wasn't.

How could a spot of moisture in the air over the East coast of the US have enveloped the world news agenda?

A spokesman for Google explained that Google news partly ranked stories according to the "critical mass" of similar stories - for instance, if a number of similar stories were posted within a few minutes of one another, "that would make Google news deem them more relevant."

In other words, local Florida news services rose up and took Google by storm, so to speak?

A statement clarified the matter:"The headlines on the Google News homepage are selected entirely by a computer formula, based on many factors including how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the web."

So the computer did it.

Still, it was pretty weird, wasn't it? "There do seem to have been more important stories around this morning, yes," the spokesman said.

Google and the 'Israeli blog damage control operation'

The words 'Google', 'personal information' and 'privacy' are a bit like tindersticks to a technology news wildfire.

It was no surprise then, that when a relatively obscure Israeli business news website reported that Google had 'handed over' information about a blogger to a local council which was suing him for libel, news spread quickly, and creatively.

Today senior spokesmen for Google were forced to deny reports that the company had 'voluntarily' handed over the IP address of a blogger using the Google-owned Blogger service to council authorities in Sha'arei Tivka, a settlement in the West Bank.

The story, they said, was "factually inaccurate" - but not before tech news sites had picked it up anyway, and sent their readers into a lathery wave of 'Is our information really safe with Google?'-type commentaries.

Will the real IFPI please stand up?

The art of a proper online hoodwink is an elaborate enterprise. (Just look at all the time and energy phishing scammers put into their fake websites.) But some downloading enthusiasts have managed to score as much success with a rather low-tech approach -- a simple domain squatting ruse that has allegedly managed to fool the music industry's leading lobbying organisation into coughing up valuable legal documents to its crafty nemesis. Here's how it happened:

Silver lining on the copyright cloud?

Will it be the silver lining media companies have been hoping for?

There has been a lot floundering about how content owners should protect their material from being copied illegally and shared on the internet.

A broad consensus seems to agree that some type of filtering technology - where a digital 'fingerprint' of a piece of content is taken and cross-checked against content uploaded to sites like YouTube - is a good idea.

And while some significant legal bickering remains about where responsibility should lie for searching out unauthorised content, a common view that the technology should be industry standard and work across sites is at least emerging.

The unveiling today of Attributor.com, a content-tracking site, takes the debate on and focuses attention on the next question, which is how a media company manages the revenue when its content is consumed - on a range of sites - across the web.

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.

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:

The "Great Firewall of China" is not so great after all

China's all-seeing, all-knowing "Great Firewall" is once again failing to live up to its iron-tight billing. American researchers have been monitoring the elaborate filters that block the many words and phrases that the People's Republic of China deems objectionable, and has found that a fair number -- as high as 28 per cent -- are actually getting through. And, in moments of peak usage, the filtering was even more erratic. How do they know this?

Rumour-watch: the Google G-Phone

Another week, another rumour about Google's long-anticipated 'Google-phone', another swathe of technology sites sharpening their digital knives at the prospect of... well, not very much really.

Yesterday Business Standard, an Asian business journal, published a story which claimed that Google was a mere fortnight away from the "worldwide launch" of its much heralded, much discussed Google-phone.

Are virtual shopping baskets bigger than real ones?

How much did you spend on those groceries you bought online from Tesco a couple of months back?

£50? £70? Can't remember? We need an answer now, so give it your best shot.

It may seem trivial, but the holes of memory that are shown up in a Q&A like this – a daily problem for market researchers – go to the very heart of one of the stories the news sites and blogs alike got most excited by this week: how much we shop on the internet.

On Monday, IMRG, the body which represents internet retailers, announced that online shopping had risen to an all-time high in July of £4.2 billion – up from £2.34 billion in the same month a year ago.

This, the IMRG said, could be attributed to the poor weather, and the fact that more and more retailers had better websites enticing us to 'add to basket' and 'proceed to checkout'.

As a teaser in its press release, the IMRG casually dropped in that high street sales in the same period had only totalled £5 billion - the implication being that online might be en route to surpass the high street.

Many papers reported the story with relish. 'Rainy July pushes online sales past £4 billion' trumpeted the Guardian. 'Online sales set record in July' said the BBC.

Was the comparison fair, though? And to what extent could we be assured IMRG's figures were accurate? After all, eAbsinthe.com apparently does a bright trade in specially slotted Absinthe serving spoons in the UK. Had they been included?

Is this what the internet looks like?

The web consultancy Information Architects Japan has produced a map of the internet, based on the Tokyo Subway plan (click on the image for a larger version).

There are, it seems a few in-jokes for those who know Tokyo: "Yahoo! is in Ueno, a nice place but nothing is going on there," while "Skype has conquered a place that doesn't exist", according to the people who designed the map.

There's more information, and the option to buy posters or download screensavers featuring the map at the iA website.

Al-Qaeda's pixels popped?

There's nothing like a tiff between image processing experts to put a few extra pixels in your Monday.

Last week Wired.com ran a story in which a computer scientist claimed he could establish whether al-Qaeda had altered a video prior to posting it on the internet.

Neal Krawetz said he had written a program which would enable investigators to establish whether a background had been added to disguise the true location in which an al-Qaeda video was recorded, and, if the image had been altered, which editing software was used. (Of limited significance, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless.)

A video by a prominent al-Qaeda spokesman posted last year, had, for instance, had a desk, computer and some books added after the original recording, Mr Krawetz said.

A computer security expert at Cambridge University last week took issue with Mr Krawetz's claims, however, claiming that his analysis was flawed.

Harry Potter and the military spyplane

What is it that connects Harry Potter, Channel 4 advertisements, and military surveillance aircraft?

Well, a clever piece of software.

A series of Channel 4 'idents' have become well-known for featuring a constellation of objects in the air which, when the camera circled around, were revealed to form a '4'. (The most recognisable showed a bunch of floating haystacks.)

Similarly, fans of the Harry Potter films will be familiar with the image of Hogwarts looming large as the students approach it on the water. The scene filmed for the shot was in fact an empty hill near Glen Coe, in Scotland, with the school's imposing facade being dropped in later.

Both shots rely on a technology known as 'moving image processing', which helps film-makers cope with problems of perspective when objects not originally in a moving shot are inserted after the event.

Now, the same technology is being used by military aircraft to pinpoint the precise location of objects on the ground.

The Facebook Friendship Challenge

Some have suggested that friend requests on social networking sites can become intrusive or tiresome, but here at Times Online we embrace all the friends we can get. Competitively.

Dan Harris, deputy editor, special projects:

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. No it isn’t. It’s a barefaced popularity contest. And it's a contest that I'm currently winning against my esteemed colleague and Times Online Driving editor, Arion McNicoll.

Moonbounce

A guest appearance today from the Books crowd at The Times, who have made a tentative but exciting foray into the world of technology.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first time the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank moved -- it rotates in azimuth and tilts in elevation, swinging on gun turrets rescued from battleships -- we have helped stage the First Move literary and scientific festival this weekend. Here, in the shadow of the telescope, in the middle of the Cheshire plain, we have enjoyed literary and scientific speakers, and watched the telescope 'dance', showing off its various moves. We can report it is in excellent nick for a 50-year-old dancer. 

The highlight, though, came earlier this afternoon when a hare-brained scheme to bounce poems off the moon came to fruition. When we heard this could be done, it appealed to our romantic sensibilities no end, and we begged the astronomers here, notably Tim O'Brien and Ian Morison to help us make it happen.

Kate Moss to wear an RFID tag?

Swarovski’s image has always been a little less sparkly than its wares. The Austrian crystal maker has always been rather too closely associated with the ornaments that adorn the bronzed bodies of ballroom dancers to amass anything vaguely resembling ‘street cred’.

In its latest attempt to gain the respect of the in crowd, Swarovski has join forces with that well-known paragon of cool: Near Field Communication (NFC).

And, admittedly, the O2 Wireless Festival.

To gain access to the VIP area at the festival, which starts in London tomorrow, celebrities will be asked to wear a crystal-studded wristband containing a radio frequency chip, which can be swiped in front of a reader.

The band – of which "only 50 have been made", an O2 spokeswoman assures us – can be topped up with cash so that payment can be made "in a swipe of the wrist", much in the way that an Oyster card does on London's transport network.

Does this mean that Kate Moss, one of several celebrities expected to attend, will be paying for her own drinks, then?

"We don’t anticipate that the celebrities will be using it in that way, no," the spokeswoman said, explaining that the wristband was part of a trial to see whether mobile payment could be adopted more widely at the event.

A printer-friendly web?

How often do you print from the internet using Internet Explorer, only to find that half the website is cut off when transferred to the page?

Some applications where the accuracy of the print-out is paramount – such as maps – have resolved the issue, but for many websites it remains a gaping inadequacy.

Going glocal

Businesses can no longer be merely global. Now they must aspire to be 'glocal', combining the reach of the multinational corporation with the familiarity of the local family business. The web can help such businesses to establish their brands throughout the world, but to maintain the impression of a local presence in each country, a company has to get its message across in a variety of languages.

Manual translation can be time-consuming and expensive, so many large companies are turning to automated translation services. Most of us will be familiar with websites such as freetranslation.com, which offer rather rickety automated translations between a selection of languages. Businesses require a higher standard of prose, but the quality of automated systems is such that they can now produce a useful first draft.

"Automated, or machine, translation is increasingly becoming critical in enabling the delivery of foreign language content," Mark Lancaster, chief executive of SDL International, which provides translation services for Microsoft and Yahoo!, said during a Q&A with Times Online. "It will, however, never totally replace humans because machine translation will never deliver the high publishable quality required to deliver a company brand."

SkypePro offers free calls – at a price

Skype has launched a new service that lets people call landlines from PCs without paying a per-minute charge, but users will have to buy a monthly subscription and pay a connection fee for each call they make.

Subscriptions to SkypePro will cost €10 (£6.70) for a five-month introductory period, and then will continue at €2 (£1.35) per month. The connection fee varies according to the currency in which it is paid, but in UK pounds is 3.3p per call and in euros is 4.5 cents per call.

Skype users have always been able to call other users without paying anything, but until now had to pay 1.7 euro cents per minute when using SkypeOut to call a landline. SkypePro subscribers in 15 European countries will be let off the per-minute charges, but all users will have to pay the connection fee for SkypeOut calls.

The complexity of this price structure may be no accident. Skype, owned by eBay, is keen to introduce more paid-for add-ons to its free web calls base, but the fledgling market in internet-based phone calls is extremely price sensitive. Any opportunity to muddy the waters as far as price comparisons go will be seized with both hands.

French politics enters the virtual world

Nicolas Sarkozy has joined the growing number of real people and companies setting up shop in the virtual world.

The French presidential candidate has opened a campaign office in the online game Second Life, with some help from the French blogger Loic Le Meur.

Webcam diplomacy

Israel has started to broadcast live footage of an archaeological dig at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem in an attempt to demonstrate that the foundations of the site are not under threat.

Fighting between Palestinians and Israeli police broke out last Friday after Muslim groups claimed that the mosque would be damaged. Work to replace a broken wooden ramp was suspended, but excavations continued.

New York proposes ban on killer iPods

According to at least one New York state lawmaker, iPods kill. That's why this state senator – remember the name Carl Kruger, particularly if he gets laughed out of office some day soon – wants to slap a $100 fine on anyone who ventures across a busy city street fidgeting with the 5-ounce killers. The same goes for Blackberrys, mobile phones, handheld video games like the PSP, and on and on.

Huge web attack: what’s your alibi?

Someone tried to bring down the internet last night, and it might have been you.

Hackers targeted 13 of the servers that control the internet with a denial of service attack, using infected PCs to bombard it with traffic in an attempt to close it down. They take over unprotected computers using trojans, malicious programs that allow individual PCs to be controlled remotely without the owner’s knowledge.

Apple - the story so far...

Just to ease you in to the swing of things, post new year, how about a run-down of potential spanners aimed at Apple's works? AP has run a convenient summary of what faces the company (below). Meanwhile, what price an Apple iPhone finally being released at this month's MacWorld (even though it turns out that Cisco owns the trademark...) or a touch-screen iPod?

Sony BMG settles rootkit cases on the cheap

What is the penalty for selling spyware masquerading as Celine Dion, Susie Suh and Neil Diamond CDs to more than two million unsuspecting consumers? If you're Sony BMG, the world's second largest music label, the answer is a slap on the wrist. Oh, and a promise not to do it again.

'Geo-targeting' is key to Skype TV

One of the most intriguing elements of the announcement by Skype’s founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, that they are to launch an internet television service is the issue of digital rights management (DRM).

The internet has already proven itself as a platform for delivering video content. Sites such as YouTube – and similar offerings from MySpace and MSN – have enabled millions of users to upload and share their own videos, and now mainstream content producers, including the television networks, are hopping on board.

The browser wars are back on

Some unsettling stats for Microsoft: Mozilla's Firefox is fast catching up on Microsoft in Europe. Or so says web measurement firm Xiti Monitor. In this, its second year, Firefox now represents 23 per cent of the European browser market, Xiti Monitor says. In seven European countries, it has a share of greater than 30 per cent. For a good country-by-country breakdown, click here.

Cash-strapped Christmas

Tech-savvy teens could save themselves some cash this Christmas by creating a gift pack of free-but-valuable software. A bit of time spent downloading and installing no-cost security programs will protect a technophobic uncle’s PC from the viruses, hackers and spyware that could cost him thousands if cyber-criminals have their way.

Digital music: the legal alternatives

Allofmp3 is a bit of an oddity in the crowded field of music websites. The Russian site is neither a peer-to-peer network, allowing users to share music and video files without payment, nor an unambiguously legitimate site such as iTunes or Napster, working with record labels and paying royalties to their artists.

Stop that cab! I left juicy trade secrets in the back seat

Forgot your mobile phone, Blackberry or laptop in a cab recently? Take heart. You're not alone. According to an annual survey conducted by Pointsec, over 60,000 such items were left behind in London cabs over the past six months, proving yet again that the biggest security threat to our high-tech gadgets is simple carelessness. 

But the study, which surveyed cab drivers in ten major cities around the globe, makes you wonder: Why are Londoners so damn forgetful?

An online guide to spam and how to fight it

Following a recent surge, spam now makes up more than 90 per cent of all messages sent by e-mail. The rise has been documented by The Times, The Sunday Times and Times Online:

The failure of anti-spam legislation
Spam, spam, spam, spam... you’ve got mail
The rise of the share-tip spammers
Medical spam – the pusher in my inbox
Subliminal spam – a new weapon
Bill Gates predicts the end of spam

The next format war is begun, choose wisely

The last thing we consumers want to think about is yet another format war. Too bad. The one brewing between HD DVD and Blu-ray will be a skirmish we simply cannot avoid. Inevitably, over the next year or two, you'll be faced with this question: which one of these formats is best for me?

The web is it

The internet has brought about many changes since its birth little more than 15 years ago, but one of its less predictable effects has been a surge of innovation within the advertising industry. Shaken by the erosion of traditionally captive audiences on TV, radio and in newspapers, companies have begun to change the way they reach out to consumers.

Where once they would subject us to the hard sell, the new messages are smarter, slicker and, at first glance at least, may not seem to be selling anything at all. When media consumers have so much choice, the goal is to produce an advert that people choose to watch, and will recommend to friends. The old maxim that content is king is proving to be true in advertising too.

Virtual news

"In this era of newsroom downsizing and newspaper sell-offs, it’s refreshing, if not slightly perplexing, to hear this week’s news that Reuters is expanding, opening a news bureau in the virtual world of Second Life," writes Bernhard Warner, himself a former Reuters correspondent, in this week's column. "As beats go, Second Life has all the makings of a community on the rise, and thus a worthy territory for a news operation to keep tabs on. Its economy is on an annual run-rate set to exceed $130 million."

Click here to read the full article

Calling all bloggers

An experiment in online social history takes place today, with people throughout Britain being encouraged to contribute to a collective blog being compiled by the British Library. The Times Online newsdesk weblog has been doing its bit...

Here be giants

"The core conceit of the original dot-com bubble was that the internet was going to force the reinvention of just about every industry on earth," writes Jonathan Weber in a comment article about Google's acquisition of YouTube. "In Bubble 2.0, though, you don't hear much about all that... it's remarkable how much of the feeding frenzy involves the media business in particular."

Click here to read the full article

So you want to start an online business

"At this point even the most cynical will probably concede that this internet thing is going to be around for a while. For good or ill, the audience is moving online, which means the people who serve the audience have to move with them, whether they're selling TV, baked beans, or words," writes Michael Parsons. He goes on to give five golden rules for anyone thinking of entering e-commerce. The first, encouragingly, is "You have no idea what you're getting into."

Click here to read the full article

Energy innovation

"Wind, solar, nuclear and geo-thermal are all now attracting attention even from venture capitalists like Vinod Khosla and John Doerr, Silicon Valley superstars who until recently stuck to computers and the internet," writes Jonathan Weber in his weekly column. "Yet appealing as it is to think that we can apply the Silicon Valley model of innovation to the energy problem, the fundamentals of energy technology are completely different."

Click here to read the full article

Endgame approaches in the console wars

Two short, dry business stories out of Tokyo this morning provide a snapshot of the standings in the long, juicy saga of the console wars.

Nintendo, buoyed by strong sales of its hand-held DS console and optimistic about the prospects of its forthcoming Wii, told investors that it was raising profit forecasts for the second half of the year. Sony, the arch-rival whose PlayStation 2 and PSP kept Nintendo on the defensive for so long, simultaneously suffered a 2.75 per cent drop in its share price.

The e-mail trail

E-mail has got a lot of politicians into trouble in the few years since its invention. The latest to make the mistake of assuming that his messages would remain private is Mark Foley, a Republican congressman who resigned after sexually explicit messages apparently sent to a 16-year-old intern were published. As James Collard, author of Times Online's gay weblog, notes, "if the accusations do turn out to be true... my oh my, the breath-taking folly of a politician like Foley getting frisky in a text or an e-mail."

Bulldog in the doghouse

The Advertising Standards Authority has criticised Bulldog for claiming that its internet service offered speeds of "up to" 8 Mbps when many users would experience a much slower connection.

The "up to" get-out clause is a common feature of broadband advertising, much to the irritation of consumer groups. For their part, ISPs insist that connection speed depends on many factors beyond their control, including the distance between a home and the nearest telephone exchange, and the condition of the wires that link them.

Pirates run aground at the polls

"Was it naïve to think that a populist movement galvanised by a call of ‘downloads for all!’ could sweep into political power?" asks Bernhard Warner in this week's column, reflecting on the Piracy Party's poor showing in the Swedish general election. "A party founded on three basic principles – to reform commercial copyright, eradicate meddlesome patent laws and stop the surveillance of file-sharers – proved to be less popular with the voters than the tax cuts and new jobs promised by the victorious right-leaning Moderate Party."

Click here to read the full article

The good pirate

The news that Google News will have to stop linking to stories from several Belgian publications after a court ruled that the site breached newspapers' copyright rekindled the debate about copyright and the internet. "The proper role and use of copyright is one of the great, unresolved arguments of the internet era," writes Jonathan Weber in his latest column.

Click here to read the full article

Beware the technology of cool

"Where is Jarvis Cocker, to show his bared-arsed contempt for this ghastly smugness?" asks Michael Parsons in his latest column, railing against the pseudo-cool of Apple and its chief executive, Steve Jobs. "I couldn’t quite figure out why this made my flesh creep so much, until that old line came into my head, "never trust a hippy capitalist." Absolutely. Steve, you’re beautiful. And we’re beautiful. And that’ll be 200 quid please."

Click here to read the whole article