The Weekly Round-Up: 09.02.07

Web 2.0 is very much the phrase du jour in trendy new media circles right now and corduroy-jacket-wearing old media has decided it wants a bit of the action. And why not? It's an exciting time to be online.

Folksonomies, social networking, blogs and Ajax are concepts and technologies held beloved by the new wave of internet developers, designers and marketers. There's also the wiki, of course - and this is what has tickled the fancy of venerable book publisher Penguin.

Penguin has launched a web-based, collaborative 'novel' called A Million Penguins, which can be written, edited or read by anyone using wiki software. The publisher claims it's the first wiki novel to be started by a major publishing house.

Penguin claims it's using the novel as a test of whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a "believable fictional voice". Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing at Penguin UK, said: "This is an experiment." And definitely not a publicity stunt.

"It may end up like reading a bowl of alphabet spaghetti," he joked. There are no plans as yet to offer deals to any contributors or to publish (in print) the completed work, Ettinghausen added, unwittingly committing a web 2.0 faux pas by alluding to the existence of paper.

"We are not making any predictions," he added, before predicting: "It would be utterly fantastic if we could at the end create a print remix." Something which most famously happened to the novel by Geoff Ryman, 253, originally published on the web using hypertext to link the characters on a doomed Tube train.

So far, the early chapters include Carlo, a troubled man walking his dog, and "on the other side of the globe" a seductive murderer, Tom Morouse, "known as the Tango poisoner". It's a heady mix.

Penguin blogger Jon Elek (he gets paid in raw herring) wrote earlier this week: "In an ideal world we could throw in a sense of plausibility, balance and humour."

That's the spirit, Jon! The Round-Up starts each column with the same three virtues in mind but by the end of the first bit it's inevitably all gone a bit titsup.com and descended into childish name-calling and references to Steve Ballmer's simian roots.

However, in the spirit of collaborative creativity, the Round-Up is offering its readers the chance to write a bit for next week's column. Except rather than going to all the bother of setting up a wiki we're going a bit low-tech and asking you to email us your plot, snippets of dialogue, sub-plots etc and the Round-Up will mash it together and create a reader-contributed Round-Up bit for next week's column.

So here's the scenario: Bill Gates, Mitchell and Webb, Tony Blair and a mysterious stranger in a black-hooded cloak are trapped in a lift in a plush Las Vegas hotel. What happens next?

Web 2.0 it ain't (more like old-new media) but if it works then the Round-Up can truly call itself a column by the people, for the people. And if no one emails anything the Round-Up will just pretend this bit never happened. Everyone's happy. Get scribbling. Or not. Your call.

Anyway back to Penguin's Elek for the final words: "I'll be happy so long as it manages to avoid becoming some sort of robotic-zombie-assassins-against-African-ninjas-in-space-narrated-by-a-Papal-Tiara type of thing."

Indeed...

Talk of robotic-zombie-assassins-against-African-ninjas naturally leads one to the eternal and colourful conflict between Apple and Microsoft. A kind of free-for-all between tech's celebrity glitterati that has lasted three decades and shows little sign of abating.

Recently, departing Microsoft supremo Bill Gates got a bit hot under his plaid Gap shirt collar at his black turtle-necked nemesis in Cupertino, Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Speaking to veteran Newsweek tech journalist Stephen Levy, Gates couldn't resist rising to the bait of a couple of questions about his company's relationship with Apple, namely that early reviewers of Vista had suggested that many features of Microsoft's long-awaited OS had long been available in Apple's OS X.

Flying in the face of public opinion, the great man rejected utterly Apple's claim that Redmond would ready its photocopiers once OS X's new features went on display. Gates insisted that actually Apple had imitated Windows and not the other way around. (It's worth noting that at no point did Xerox Parc crop up in the interviews but that's another bunfight, folks.)

Gates said: "I mean, it's fascinating - maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done."

Speaking of which, Gates also claimed Windows was inherently more secure than the Mac, which was vulnerable to nasty hackers and all types of unpleasant exploits.

"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user-interface-wise."

What cojones! An open challenge to the less reputable elements of the hacker community - and a claim that flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

And don't get Gates started on the 'Get a Mac' ads. Oops, Levy already has. The campaign, which features a fresh-faced, self-assured twentysomething playing a Mac, and an inept, chubby but likeable middle-manager playing a PC has attracted praise and criticism in equal measure. Brief summary: Macs are cool and hip, PCs aren't.

Gates insisted he'd never seen the ads. "I haven't seen the ads," reiterated Gates helpfully, and then demonstrated remarkable clairvoyance by describing what the ads he hadn't seen were about and decrying the anthropomorphic insinuations in the idiom of a 12-year-old, emotionally distressed schoolgirl.

"I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it's superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to it."

Luckily Jobs was on hand to douse the flames of the conflict. In totally unrelated news, Apple this week issued a warning that Vista could corrupt iPods if users don't wait for an (unplanned) iTunes software update.

So the message from Apple is: "Don't upgrade to Vista." No surprises there but 10 out of 10 for originality. That'll appease Bill....

Apple's Jobs also hit the headlines in other news this week, by putting his name to a missive on the company's website extolling the virtues of DRM-free music downloads.

In a lengthy open letter called 'Thoughts on Music', Jobs called for an end to DRM technology.

There are three possibilities, according to Jobs: Apple and the rest of the online music distributors could continue down a DRM path; Apple could license its FairPlay DRM technology to others; or record companies could be persuaded to license music without DRM technology.

Apple apparently favours the third option.

Jobs wrote: "Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."

It's a pretty surprising move from the man who more than likely spent years in painful negotiations with record companies over the development of the iTunes Store. A number of European governments have made a lot of fuss about FairPlay. The French, Danish and Norwegian governments have all been waving their red tape in the direction of the Cupertino company in recent months, claiming the FairPlay DRM on iTunes locks users into the iPod, thereby limiting consumer choice.

In one way, by making the conciliatory gestures in support of bureaucrats, Jobs is playing the PR game and shifting the responsibility for maintaining DRM-protected iTunes tracks onto the copyright owners and away from his company.

Certainly, if Jobs is advocating the elimination of DRM on iTunes tracks, it's a barometer of how confident the company is about maintaining its lead in the MP3-player market. Apple famously makes little if any profit from sales of music tracks. The money (and there's been a lot of it in recent years) comes from the sales of iPods, the only devices capable of playing the FairPlay-encoded tracks. The iTunes Store is a loss-leader for the company and, while the FairPlay DRM may have been a necessary evil for the company to offer the music labels, it's fair to say Apple hasn't done too badly out of the arrangement itself.

It's also a bit of a cheeky broadside at European governments and lobbyists, too. The Apple CEO pointed out that two-and-a-half of the four major music labels are based in Europe. 'Take your gripes a little closer to home, fellas' seems to be the message.

Meanwhile, one silicon.com reader has his/her own solution. For reasons that may soon become obvious, we didn't publish the name.

The email read: "DRM-free music is already available from All Of MP3, the Russian-based business currently being investigated by various music and other authorities. Users can buy music from the site in just about any format and at any quality they like - and at a reasonable price! My family has spent more on this site in a month than it did on iTunes in a year, and my kids are getting into the habit of paying for music rather than getting it off their mates. Surely this is the way we need to go!"

Erm. Maybe the key phrase in that statement is "currently being investigated by various music and other authorities". All Of MP3, while supported by Russian licensing laws, is currently the target of a $1.7tr copyright violation lawsuit by the RIAA for allegedly distributing content without permission.

All things considered, maybe not the best model overall but the Round-Up commends you for your commitment to getting music possibly obtained 'off the back of a lorry' and onto your kids' MP3 players...

And finally this week, erstwhile magician and full-time media botherer David Blaine has signed a deal to become the face of LG's new Shine mobile phone, according to a chirpy press release from the mobile company's PR firm.

Interesting. So the 'face' of the Shine - a phone that boasts a very swanky sliding mirrored LCD frontplate - is either starved, sunken-cheeked and covered in sporadic beard growth, or wrinkled and pruned from being underwater for a week. Either way, we can think of faces we'd prefer. They should probably have gone for Scarlett Johansson or Sean Bean or anyone whose skin doesn't drop off after spending a week submerged in a fish tank.

But that's just the Round-Up's view. (And it's a pretty informed view considering it had to pass Blaine suspended in his Perspex box on a regular basis en route to Silicon Towers. Take it from the Round-Up, a few weeks in and he's not a pretty sight.)

But there you go, LG has made its decision. David Blaine it is.

"The LG Shine phone oozes sophistication," promises the press release. Let's just hope its celebrity spokesman's skin doesn't ooze something else while promoting it.

(The Round-Up hopes you are enjoying your lunch.)

Until next week, a reminder that silicon.com has launched its Fair Wi-fi campaign to iron out some of the iniquities in the industry which still sees business travellers hit with outlandish and entirely unjustifiable charges for internet access. You can find out more here.

And absolutely finally this week, don't forget silicon.com now brings you the Weekly Round-Up podcast. Looking for lively, witty and informed comment via MP3 with no DRM in sight? This might just be your lucky day, you lucky people. Check it out here. You can also download and subscribe to the podcast via iTunes - just follow this link.

Happy listening folks!