John Lamb's Week: Sorting the holiday snaps from the smut

Horror novelist Stephen King had a crack at publishing a novel over the internet, now the house lights dim on what is described as the world's first email drama. Penned by the scriptwriter of the Fully Monty, love, life and email will be dropping into mail boxes courtesy of women's site Handbag.com.

Recipients will be able to influence the shape of the drama by sending in their own advice as to what the protagonists should do. That idea is hardly new - Ray Bradbury used it in his 1950s novel Fahrenheit 451 - but the big question is whether Handbag's audience will go for send-mail soap. Stephen King abandoned his experiment due to lack of interest.

Lack of interest is also bedevilling the internet hosting business. Around the world data centres with enough empty space for a five-a-side football game are desperately touting for business. So, when customers of Kana software were notified that their hosted application service was being discontinued from Sunday night, they were immediately contacted by RightNow Technologies. The company is offering Kana customers two-month's worth of free service as an inducement to switch.

Business continuity is also the name of the game at help desk supplier Sunrise Software. On Monday the company will be introducing a help desk back-up service. When the lights go out, Sunrise clients will be able to switch their operations to a stand-by centre run by Sunrise agents. To ensure that Sunrise can work with up-to-date information, customers send in a copy of their databases each day.

The new media design business could now be worth up to £2bn to the UK economy, so it's timely that Adobe, the design and printing software company, has canvassed the views of the people who work in this largely cottage industry. Tuesday will see publication of the results of a survey of 160 design agencies which promises to answer such questions as how much they earn, who they work for and what kind of relationships they have with their clients.

On Thursday MesssageLabs, the UK company whose claim to fame is that it was the first anti-virus software company to stop the Love Bug virus will once again turn its attention to amorous affairs. MessageLabs will be demonstrating new porn filtering technology for use in the workplace that it claims is 95 per cent effective compared to an industry average of just 70 per cent.

The new technology has the ability to distinguish between harmless holiday snaps and blatantly offensive material, says MessageLabs. Porn scanners, deployed to stop workers wasting time downloading sex material, block images on the basis of such features as the amount of flesh tone they can distinguish. MessageLabs' software, which contains some 20,000 algorithms will be more sophisticated. The system can be trained to recognise smutty films and pictures by identifying shapes and postures that might be pornographic.

Journalists at the launch of the software will be asked to say whether images from a variety of magazines are pornographic or not. The system will then work out what makes an image pornographic and then apply that knowledge to other images.

For workers not skiving off work to look at pornography, quick retrieval of information remains a problem. For all the advances in information retrieval putting your hand on the right document or data is difficult. According to management consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, 32 per cent of all letters, contracts and emails, are not readily available to the people who need them to answer customer queries.

A new company called Meridio launches on Thursday with a document management system that boasts the approval of the Public Records Office, which stores government documents. Meridio claims its software is more scalable than its competitors' products. The company also points out that it conforms to the Government's Electronic Records Management protocol. Customers already include Scottish and Southern Energy, Cheltenham and Gloucester building society and FirstActive bank.