The Weekly Round-Up: 06.10.06

There was an almighty clash of corporate images at a party political conference in Bournemouth this week.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt brought a bit of West Coast glamour to proceedings at the Conservative Party conference as he gave a keynote speech to the neatly assembled ranks of middle England gathered together in a blue-themed conference hall.

It's a curious mix. The Round-Up wonders whether this is actually a meeting of two brands going in the opposite direction as the Tories shuffle away from their stuffy, old-fashioned image and Google's metamorphosis from internet upstart to corporate behemoth continues with grim determination.

Schmidt told the audience the internet is "democratising knowledge", a sentiment that met with a smattering of polite applause from some delegates as the remainder wondered just what the blue blazes an 'internet' was.

He also told the gathered throng: "But it's also like a child, testing its powers for the first time." The Round-Up thinks it knows what he means but it's a metaphor that immediately conjured images of Jack Jack the super-powered baby of The Incredibles inadvertently burning holes in things with his laser beam eyes.

Wearing a snappy suit and with a face moisturised with snake oil, Schmidt told the increasingly bewildered delegates about the importance of speed in delivering web content in a frankly outrageous bit of overselling of his company's benefits.

Schmidt claimed Google's speed of response had literally proved a life-saver to one user. "He typed his symptoms into Google and got a message back that said: 'You are having a heart attack. Call the emergency services now'. That's why we tell our employees that it's important that Google is fast. Otherwise people die."

Fair enough but the Round-Up can't help but think he's being a bit disingenuous. After all you could also use Google to find information about how to construct bombs and how to poison your spouse just as quickly, which one supposes is the flip side of the democratisation of knowledge.

Meanwhile, at the 2007 conference he's expected to announce Google will rid the world of all known diseases and in 2008 that the internet giant will be able to raise the dead.

Schmidt also said: "The internet can, and I hope will, be a revolutionary force in repressive societies," which is a bit rich coming from the company that, among others, altered the capabilities of its not-so-democratic search algorithms to block certain sites to users in China in order the appease Beijing earlier this year.

He even elicited a chuckle from the crowd with a comment that "most blogs have precisely one reader - the blogger themselves". That got a laugh.

However it's not clear whether the audience really got the joke or whether they didn't quite make out what he said over the public address system, misheard 'blogger' for 'bugger' and assumed it was some veiled reference to the Prime Minster.

They didn't care. They just loved it and waved their copies of the Daily Mail in appreciation at the nice American man on the stage.

In fact, there's every chance the Google CEO - who polled third in silicon.com's annual Agenda Setters list - could be asked back for next year's conference. Perhaps even in a sponsorship role in which the Tories could adopt the search giant's axiom of "it's best to do one thing really, really well" - which would conceivably be 'coming second in General Elections'.

Or perhaps not - more on that in a moment.

If the assembled Tories did get the Google chief's rib-tickler then the Round-Up owes them a profound apology for tarring them unfairly as internet laggards but also for lumping them with the technical ignoramuses (or should that be ignorami?) that apparently make up our great nation.

According to some new Round-Up-friendly research, conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings, confusion is rife among UK consumers when it comes to technology and its terminology.

Furthermore, just because a term is familiar to the average person in the street doesn't mean he or she actually understands the tech it refers to.

To the Round-Up it sounds as if respondents were asked if they knew what a particular bit of jargon meant, replied that actually they knew exactly what it meant, were pressed about it, nodded and smiled, were pressed politely again and finally admitted that actually they didn't have a clue what they were talking about.

To compound the sense of awkwardness, 47 per cent of Brits didn't know what blogging is either. Although given it's a nascent media form, practiced by millions of individuals and corporations who haven't quite figured it out themselves, that doesn't sound so bad.

Even the iPod is likely to cause confusion to one in seven Brits - although it's impressive the nice people conducting the survey managed to find one person in seven who wasn't sporting ubiquitous white earbuds to stop and induce bafflement.

The biggest headaches are caused by acronyms - which holds true for technology journalists as well as decent citizens if truth be told. VOD, RSS and PVR are especially likely to cause blank stares when raised casually in conversation.

UK consumers are also struggling with the pace of online and digital technology: 50 per cent of Brits surveyed said they can't keep up with it.

But all is not lost: just over half of Brits believe that despite the confusion it evidently creates, technology makes their lives easier - proving once and for all that ignorance is bliss...

Next up, we return for the second time in the space of one technology column to the Tory conference in Bournemouth.

The main opposition party's valiant search for a firm policy direction took another bold lurch towards the populist mainstream this week with a pledge from 1997-era Tony Blair clone David Cameron to abolish those dastardly plans for a national ID cards scheme. Boo! Hiss!

Cameron, leaping from policy opportunity to policy opportunity like a nimble-hoofed mountain goat, criticised the Labour Party for pushing on with the controversial scheme instead of "protecting our security by controlling our borders".

He told conference delegates: "These Labour ministers are pressing ahead with their vast white elephant, their plastic Poll Tax, 20 Millennium Domes rolled into one giant catastrophe in the making. ID cards are wrong, they're a waste of money and we will abolish them."

Forgive the Round-Up for being a little hazy on British politics but weren't the Poll Tax and the Dome originally conceived by Conservative governments? Should we be adding historical revisionism to the David Cameron CV?

He also took a swipe at the blunders surrounding the £12.4bn NHS IT project and pledged to undertake a full-scale review of the programme.

He quickly added that the whole sorry tale was "a story of wasted billions - and disappointed millions", as a helpful prompt at the side of the stage held up a sign with 'soundbite!' printed on it.

It seems the latest valiant leap aboard the policy bandwagon (any will do) has the support of many silicon.com readers.

In fact, if a research company has to predict the outcome of the next general election based solely on a straw poll of silicon.com readers they'd be reporting a Tory landslide, except their research methods might come under some fire.

The Reader Comments on silicon.com story pages mostly voice their approval of Cameron's pledge to sort out the e-government debacles.

From Barrow in Furness Ken Hall said: "I think that Cameron's Conservatives just may have gained a new voter." Ken is being coy but the Round-Up thinks he's referring to himself.

Steve Watkins in Buckingham added his support for the Tories: "Excellent! Great news! At last the Conservative party is acting like an opposition. Cameron gets my vote. Keep it up and stick the boot into Bliar! (sic)"

Stranger things have happened...

Speaking of which, the Round-Up turns full circle and returns to Google.

Anyone who's ever used the fabulous Google Earth tool will attest to the usefulness of the service which allows you to zoom into your back garden from outer space. (Ed: Though aren't your neighbours' back gardens always more interesting?)

If you zoom down onto the Round-Up's house you can actually see a clothes horse covered with pants drying in the back garden. Ah, the miracle of modern technology.

So it's with a grateful nod in the direction of fellow tech news site The Register that the Round-Up was shocked to discover photographic evidence that a giant earwig is stampeding through the German countryside in the general direction of the small German hamlet of Arlesberg.

The 'earwig', which must measure a good hundred metres in length and is armed with a set of pincers that could decapitate a blue whale, is clearly visible in the following screen grab from Google Earth:

Tragically, the rampaging behemoth will have reached and consumed the quiet, unassuming residents of Arlesberg by now, so what can you do? Except to wonder how it got there.

A practical joke by the pranksters at Google? The tragic tale of an honest earwig in the wrong place at the wrong time? Demonic space monster? Or just a bug in the system? Let us know your theories.

And finally this week, the Round-Up would like to take this opportunity to thank all our friends in the PR community who took part in last night's charity pub quiz.

We raised a lot of money for Computer Aid International and everybody who attended contributed to a fantastic, fun evening.

Congratulations to the winners on the night from Brands2Life but a huge thank you to everybody who took part - Berkeley PR, Fishburn Hedges, GCI UK, Hill & Knowlton, ITPR, Octane and Octopus.

Until next week...

• Indian call centre security breaches exposed

• Biometric passports take off

• Web ads to beat telly by 2010

• Mobile banking rolled out by HSBC

• 'Stop buying IT' bosses told