The state we're in

"We should not see anthrax as yet another blow to the economy in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Anthrax will assist the economy by giving us a second chance to move the mechanism of business from offline to online, thereby increasing productivity... Everyone seems obsessed by the negative, and no one seems to be focusing on the positive side... There is good news in all of this, and I challenge anyone who thinks otherwise."

So says Louis Halpern, CEO and founder of edesigns.co.uk. Well, challenge accepted, Louis: we'd hoped to avoid this particular topic, but the number of companies trying to turn a global crisis into a PR opportunity is, quite frankly, sickening.

Take Turtlesnap Ventures. It's organising an investment symposium in December called 'Lessons Learned, Changes Made'. According to its press release, "Natural and man-made disasters have created vast opportunities for technology solutions."

A slightly more coy reference to 11 September, but we know what they mean.

How about business continuity outfit Guardian IT? It says that: "Recent events have pushed disaster recovery and business continuity provision high up the business agenda. The financial sector was profoundly affected and is still feeling the effects. In the US, the Bank of New York, which specialises in securities processing, is still struggling to reconcile client trades made after September 11."

Meanwhile, thousands of families are struggling to 'reconcile' the needless death of a loved one - and the ongoing anthrax threat - with their long-held view that all they needed to do to live in safety was buy a car with side impact protection bars.

But hats off to the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), which at least admits it might be a bit dodgy to use a tragedy to make a headline - but then blows it all.

The IMRG has been running a campaign to prove that online shopping is safe for some time. Now it wants us to know that it's quite possibly safer than shopping on your high street.

"No reasonable person would wish to be seen as exploiting in any way the terrorist situation", the IMRG says. Bully for them.

Shame its latest release then goes on to state: "God forbid that our shopping centres are actually attacked in the run-up to Christmas, but if they are we can expect to see large numbers of shoppers reconsidering what, to them, constitutes 'safe shopping'."

Oh good. The IMRG quotes Stephen Cochrane, managing director of shoe-shop.com, one of those "reasonable" people who don't want to exploit the terrorist situation.

He says: "Since the horrific events of last month, we have noticed a marked increase in weekend sales: the first weekend was 45 per cent above any previous weekend. We think this is because people are not travelling into cities when they don't have to, preferring instead to shop in the safety of their own homes."

Yes, and videoconferencing sales have gone up, and teleworking's becoming more popular, and lots more e-tailers are seeing healthy sales, and most online news sites (including silicon.com) experienced unusually high traffic on 11 September and thereafter, so on behalf of everyone involved in these sectors of the high-tech world, the Round-Up would like to thank Osama Bin Laden (if it was him) for bestowing upon us all the myriad benefits we are now enjoying.

The internet has become a fairly accurate barometer of Western thinking. What people type into search engines is particularly revealing.

While far, far too many companies are trying to gain publicity on the back of "recent events" (as everyone seems to euphemistically call what was an act of mass murder), life does go on.

Top searches on Ask Jeeves last week showed that song lyrics by the likes of N'Sync, Nelly and Usher were of more interest than anthrax. And we don't mean the heavy metal band. Britney Spears' charms are also proving hard for web users to resist.

Osama Bin Laden does feature as one of the top searches - but apparently around 10 per cent of all searches on Ask Jeeves were for Bin Laden-related jokes and games.

As long as we've still got a sense of humour (and Britney Spears), the terrorists will not win.

You've seen the website, bought the T-shirt& actually, you probably haven't, which is part of the problem really. But you will be able to buy the book next month.

Yes, we're talking about boo.com, one of the highest profile casualties of the dot-com phenomenon. silicon.com's been having a chat with Ernst Malmsten, founder and CEO of boo, who's written a book called: "boo hoo: a dot-com story from concept to catastrophe."

He wanted to put the record straight on one or two issues. "It wasn't caviar or champagne," he told us. "We flew Concorde perhaps more than once, but I think that was more a symbol of what the internet was at the time. Of course we spent lots of money, but we worked hard as well."

To be precise, you spent £100m in 18 months Ernst... you have to work pretty hard to justify that.

Nevertheless, it does make for a good story, hence the book - and quite possibly a film. There are rumours that Universal is working on the project, and is considering casting Brad Pitt and Gwynneth Paltrow in the lead roles. But Malmsten says that's an exaggeration. "I haven't signed on the dotted line yet, but I think it would make a great film," he said.

See http://www.silicon.com/a48491 for the whole interview. The book will be available from all good bookshops (and possibly some bad ones) on 1 November.

And finally this week, it's the inevitable mention of Windows XP, a veritable 'ray of light' in these dark times. Probably.

We'll have news of the launch shenanigans next Friday (mainly because they're happening as this column is being written and Microsoft wouldn't let us know what stunts it had planned in advance).

We do know that Sting is involved though, possibly wearing one of his lovely vests. Which songs should he sing? We asked that very question in our launch story, and inadvertently discovered that our readers have a bit of a penchant for the failed teacher.

We've had more comments about that than any other story we've ever published, which says an awful lot about our readers.

If you think you have any better ideas than Error Message in a Bottle, Song of the Blue Screen of Death or Don't Stand So Close to M.E., then click here http://www.silicon.com/a48550 and join in what's become a rather surreal debate.

For all you could possibly want to know about XP, see http://www.silicon.com/xp