One way of looking at the evolution of the Internet is to see it in three stages: first, a fixed Net essentially connecting desktop PCs; second, a mobile Net connecting hand-held mobiles; third, what we call the Internet of things. I've explained this next stage in my latest monthly column on Internet issues...

Time To Cut The RangeKevin Kerry rep and I took another look at sandwich sales this morning to identify the best sellers. Part of the reward package that Kerry roundsman have is to drive stock efficiency, they get a pay hit for waste.So with this in mind we have chopped the bottom half of the Heinz sandwich range out. As these are the products that we are returning and are selling less than one per day this month (and last) there is no loss to us and a gain for Kevin.Each morning this week we have been talking about sending a message to his employers about the need to ditch the current sandwich range, soon. Cutting out the poor sellers is one element and Kevin is encouraging me to join the Kerry Facebook group and posting comments there as he knows that their Managing Director reads the...

It’s fast approaching that time of year where I’m spending triple-digit sums on crap that people will look at once and then hide in the cupboard until they can find someone else to give it to. I actually quite enjoy spending money on people though, so it’s no big deal. One thing that does annoy me every year though, is badly designed e-commerce sites. I mean, things have come on in recent years… search features tend to actually work, and products are given various tags and categories. One of my favourite features, seen on the likes of Amazon, Play.com and Boots.com is the ability to narrow down search results or general browsing by clicking on listed categories, price bands, etc. Unfortunately, what they don’t ever seem to offer is a way to exclude these...

Doing a little keeping up with the opposition I see that Labour in West Lothian are still encouraging people to vote for them on 3rd May....2007. Sadly this is not the first time Labour websites in the area have been way behind. Mind you seeing as Tam Smith the Linlithgow and Falkirk East SNP Westminster PPC's own site is currently not available which at least is better that not updated...

Georgina Bruce’s writing mixes realism with fantasy. These bizarre fictional places, half-real half-imagined, are inhabited by living people and fantastic creatures. They explore the fragility of emotion and the mystery of poetic phenomenon. Her remarkable stories are posted up at her blog, The Bearded Lady, which she describes as: ‘a home for short and odd stories, poems, junk and ephemera, a sort of virtual cupboard under the stairs’. I wanted to know more about these strange worlds and where they come from. I was also keen to get a picture into some of the other aspects of her writing, areas beyond the scope of her blog. 1 ) I’m familiar with your work through your blog, which I believe only provides a partial representation of your work, can you...

There is a saying in politics that goes along the lines of ‘don’t ask a question unless you are sure of what the answer is’. Today I discovered the hard way that it applies in other areas too. I have a habit that if I come across something I do not know about I look it up.  Sometimes on Google, but more often on Wikipedia.  It might be a person, or a place, an acronym or piece of jargon, but I’ll hate not knowing.  Sometimes it might be a good idea to do such research at home and noton the office PC at lunchtime… Today I came across the term “rule 34″ on xkcd.com.  I did not know what “rule 34″ meant so I went to Wikipedia and searched for it.  Try it and see why I had a sudden panic...

After months of mounting pressure Yahoo confirmed today that chief executive Jerry Yang will be stepping down – as soon as the company can find a successor.The decision, announced by chairman Roy Bostock late on Monday, brings an end to a long period of speculation over Yang's future at the top of the company he helped found in 1994.In a statement, Bostock said was "deeply grateful" to Yang but would be starting a search for a new leader who could "take the company to the next level"."Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO," he said. "We are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo as a key executive and member of the board."Yang's departure comes just a few...

Sales double in the past seven weeks as prom dresses and black shiny leggings prove particularly...

Internet users are being warned to stay vigilant by researchers who believe that next Monday could be the worst day the year for computer attacks.After analysing information on viruses and internet worms taken from more than 500,000 machines around the world, security experts at PC Tools have pinpointed November 24 as the potential peak of malicious software activity for 2008.Data from 2007 showed that the high point of action from viruses, worms and other internet-based attacks came three days before America's Thanksgiving holiday, leading them to suggest that the same day could prove the bleakest 24 hours of this year.The company says the increase in virus activity could be the result of internet shopping in the run-up to Christmas, as millions of users begin going online to purchase...

This article is entirely uninteresting. I only stumbled across it by chance. But one thing about it did excite me: at the bottom there is the following statement: An earlier version of this story mistakenly suggested that British programmes were responsible for 53% of global television output. The figure actually relates to the increase in sales of British format ideas. So what you might say. The BBC made a mistake, happens every day. So what? The BBC made a mistake and acknowledged it, instead of simply changing it and airbrushing the mistake out of history. Is this a one-off or a change in policy? I’ve not noticed any other acknowledgements like this. It may be sad to get excited by this, but the BBC’s practice of maintaining they are always right, at all times, even...

One that involves injuncting the German language Wikipedia site, apparently. Anyway, Lutz Heilman, for it is he, an MP for the extreme left Left Party has sicced his lawyers on http://www.wikipedia.de/ (if not de.wikipedia.org....). Note that he is all of 42, so his Stasi career shows some enthusiasm, as that particular Babylon fell when he was all of 23. Having been elected via a party list system on PR, I cannot excoriate the voters of any particular town, but the people of the Länder of Brandenburg, Sachsen and Sachsen-Anhalt have a lot to answer for. While our rather over-reaching defamation laws do not apply on the other side of the Rhine, it puts me in mind of Dering v Uris, wherein an Auschwitz doctor sued a novelist for his depiction of him. What emerged from the trial is...

It was a fireside chat for a wi-fi world. Barack Obama yesterday launched his first regular weekly update to the American voters by YouTube. It was an ultra-modern echo of how Franklin D. Roosevelt's regular folksy radio broadcasts, complete with the sound of a fire crackling in the background, helped guide America through the Great Depression.Now Obama is also facing a massive economic crisis and he is reaching out to the American public with a YouTube video. The move is part of a hi-tech revolution in politics that Obama has promised to bring to Washington when he takes office. Technology and the internet are set to be a core part of the new administration, bolstered by Obama's massive online army of supporters.Yesterday, Obama's first video appeared in the form of a response to the...

A video clip featuring an 'invisible' moonwalking bear that has stealthily grown to be an internet hit has been revealed as a subtle road safety campaign planted by London transport officials.The minute-long film called simply Awareness Test has caught out millions of viewers on the video-sharing website YouTube and other sites. It has been watched more than 10 million times. It begins by asking the viewer to count the number of passes in a short basketball game, relying on the fact that as the eye concentrates on the ball moving quickly between the players it can completely miss a man dressed in a bear suit who moonwalks across the screen. The viewer is told about the bear and shown the clip again, followed by the road safety message 'Look out for Cyclists'. 'The point is that we shock...

So I was reading a blog-post called Fuck Shit Arse Twat Paedophile Coprophile Custardcopulatory Cuntwad. As you do. It’s about a Guardian article (thanks to the Internet, what newspaper is in my house and what newspaper I read are almost totally independant variables) that says: Web providers to be named and shamed over offensive content Politicians are ready to introduce league tables naming and shaming the speed with which internet service providers take down offensive material. The culture minister, Barbara Follett, and her Tory shadow, Ed Vaizey, have backed the idea that web providers must be embarrassed into dealing with violent, sexually explicit web content. Fuck right off. Essentially, your suggestion is that in order to protect children from porn, there must be no porn....

Culture minister Barbara Follett is backing the pre-screening of user-generated content.I'm not sure someone who believes that paedophiles can watch children through the Internet is the best person to make judgements about online matters.Chris Morris' wonderful Brass Eye showed Barbara Follet reading from cue cards that "an online paedophile" had converted the eye of Pantu the Dog, "a child's game on the internet" to "work as a webcam to look at the child player."Senator Ted Stevens in Alaska is another apt example of the dangers of ill-informed people debating the...

posted by Thin White Duke Roy Wilson, 67, is threatening to glue himself to his Totnes bank after being penalised for an internet banking error. Roy and his wife Sally, who are both disabled and wheelchair bound, failed to cover £25.50 worth of standing orders when Sally transferred the cash to the wrong account by mistake. NatWest immediately yanked £114 from the couple’s (now overdrawn) account - plus another £28 for exceeding their overdraft facility. A furious Roy frothed: “I am prepared to glue myself to the bank as a protest. It would teach them a lesson.” Oh yeah, and while you’re at it, why not smash your brains out with a hammer in the manager’s office? That’d teach them a lesson, wouldn’t it? Well, wouldn’t it?! Anyway, a bank...

Far be it for me to celebrate the unhappiness of others but this is a great story: As divorce cases go, it is as explosive and sordid as it gets: a woman catches her husband having sex with a prostitute, forgives him, but finally throws in the towel after discovering he has been unfaithful again. Yet absolutely none of it happened in real life. Amy Taylor is divorcing David Pollard, her husband of three years, on the grounds of “unreasonable behaviour” after she discovered his character in the online community game Second Life had been having an affair. But of course that ‘affair’ wasn’t ‘real’. The internet has this fascinating ability to make the otherwise not real all-too-real. The way the medium fixes meaningless thought in the real world...

Politicians are ready to introduce league tables naming and shaming the speed with which internet service providers take down offensive material.The culture minister, Barbara Follett, and her Tory shadow, Ed Vaizey, have backed the idea that web providers must be embarrassed into dealing with violent, sexually explicit web content.Follett said she wants to see the pre-screening of material on sites such as YouTube, as occurs at present on MySpace. She admitted there was growing chaos out there on the internet, and order needed to be brought. She has also admitted barriers aimed at preventing children from accessing over-age material on the internet are not just porous but leak like a sieve. "People can get straight through it, or straight by it." Follett warned: "We must teach children...

I was impressed with Locly when shown it by a friend, but Google has really blown that out the water with this. [via Buzzmachine] I always nodded when people said to me that mobile was the next step for the web. I understood what they meant in theory, but I have now shifted up a gear after seeing this. It is, in many ways, a completely different dimension for data to exist in. It has got me thinking about how news might fit into this new environment. My instant thought - although perhaps not useful as a product to make money - is that stories can now exist not just in a moment of time, but also in a defined space. One way (or indeed my madcap way) to get to grips with the concept is to visualise stories as hanging from threads that touch you as you walk by them. Why that might be...

I’ve just been linked to this: Where can I get me the penis...

We get lots of emails at Life Goggles and one the other week turned out to be a two in one deal. Not only did it link to a digital editions of magazines via a website called Cloverleaf, but the article it pointed to for a free preview was about how plastic is recycled into fabric. The article is from ReadyMade magazine and you can read it here. A little more info and picture of the digital edition are below. The article follows the process it takes to turn a bottle into fabric, from the chipped plastic bits that resemble snow cone filling to the fiber filaments that “feel eerily like human hair gone unwashed for so long that it’s soft with grease.” There’s also some great photos, and surprising facts like it takes just 10 plastic bottles to make a pound of fiber. All information...

IN AUSTRALIA the new mandatory net filter is being readied to block 10,000 websites that deal in “unwanted content”. How is it unwanted? We know not, only that it...

Google has applied its massive data-collecting power for the first time to prediction of the spread of disease, with the launch of a site that claims to be able to raise the alarm over flu outbreaks up to two weeks in advance of existing public services.Google Flu Trends takes the general search tracking technology pioneered by Google Trends and applies it specifically to influenza. The firm's engineers claim to have devised a way of analysing millions of individual searches related to the disease that in tests proved to correlate closely with the actual incidence of illness. That gives them the potential ability to predict rises in flu cases - information that could be used by health professionals to warn the public or plan their responses.Google found that if it assembled a cluster of...

Ged Carroll memed me to find out where I get my inspiration from for my blog and thoughts? Plenty of places but here are a few ideas… - Suggested links from blogging, Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed friends - Delicious, Digg and other social bookmarking tools - Traditional media reading such as The Times, The Guardian, The Economist, BBC, NY Times - An endless array of podcast subscriptions - ViralVideoChart.com - Top political blogs and PoliticsHome.com - Job experiences - Film, music and sport - When I’m on a run - And most importantly pub chatter i.e. people I meet Next up for the meme? Well, my esteemed Weber Shandwick digital colleagues…James Warren, Robert Anderson and Simon Collister.       ...

On Sunday we did lunch with the internet people… *cue scary theme music*....”DA DA DA!!!”.My fears of meeting a group of psychos were unfounded, they were two lovely, normal couples who chatted away fine and it all went well. It was only afterwards I realised the irony of it. It never occurred to me for one second that I was the psycho that they were coming to meet and I had a bloody cheek thinking that they might be the nutters. Isn’t that weird?My level of insight into my illness/personality is very hard to explain. Certainly at the moment I consider myself completely normal, albeit with one or two minor issues that need resolved. But were I reviewing someone else with all my history and behaviours I might think differently, well I know I would. I just can’t accept or come to...