The Weekly Round-Up: 20.04.07

All around the world, in plush offices, behind mahogany desks the size of barn doors, lots of incredibly wealthy men are getting very worried. There's revolution in the air, the winds of change are blowing and a hard rain's gonna fall.

You see, according an Accenture survey of 110 senior media and entertainment executives, the rise of web 2.0 is going to have a profound effect on the generation and distribution of content and, of course, their bottom lines.

User-generated content - such as amateur digital videos, podcasts, wikis and blogs - will have a massive impact on the film, advertising, music, publishing, radio and TV industries, the terrified executives have predicted.

Only three per cent of the gibbering nervous wrecks surveyed think the use of social media is a fad that will pass in time, while more than two-thirds believe current usage is likely to grow. And while two-thirds are positive their organisations will find ways of making loads of dosh out of user-generated content within a few years, just under a quarter said they have absolutely no idea how this will be accomplished. The Round-Up's not sure what percentage of the 110 executives that leaves but it can't be good. You can see why they're worried, the poor little lambs.

Probably best to cancel that latest shipment of Cuban cigars until there's a business plan in place.

Anyway, viva la Revolución! Oh Lordy, it's going to be glorious! Content created by the people, for the people. It's an intoxicating vision, a collaborative, creative utopia.

Yup, just like the smug little man pretending to be a Mac in those Apple ads, we simply can't wait to traipse home from work, boot up our computers and get the creative juices flowing - editing photos, cutting short movies and making glorious music before uploading it, tagging it and allowing others to bask in the result of the artistic process.

Admittedly, there are a couple of problems with this vision.

The first is that it's complete codswallop. Very few people are actually actively contributing to the web 2.0 revolution. The vast majority of us are just sitting around, watching and eating crisps.

According to a survey by web traffic analysts Hitwise only a paltry 0.16 per cent of YouTube users who visited the site last year actually got around to uploading content.

Meanwhile, only two-tenths of one per cent of visits to Flickr are to upload new photos. Figures for other sites are similarly underwhelming, with the exception of Wikipedia - an impressive 4.6 per cent of all visits to the collaborative encyclopedia project are to add or edit articles. Bravo!

Regardless of the nature of this non-participatory revolution we simply can't get enough of user-generated content pages - at least when we can be bothered to move our mouse around the screen and go to all the trouble of clicking the button - visits to web 2.0 sites have rocketed up 668 per cent since 2005.

So rather than loads of people creating and sharing content and linking semantically, it looks like most people can't be bothered and are happy to let a minority of creative types generate content for them. So a bit like the current system but with much lower production values. Which leads the Round-Up to the other issue: quality.

Given the much-celebrated democratisation of web content, there's going to be a hell of a lot of content online, meaning you'll have to take the rough with the not-quite-so-rough. Sure, there's some quality assurance through user-regulated rating systems but being able to separate the wheat from the chaff is a sizeable problem.

Maybe our worried executives can place that order for a massive case of Romeo y Julietas after all. The revolution might take a while to get started...

One of Google's mottos is that it's best to do 'one thing, really well'. But let's ask the question: 'what is it that Google does really well?'

Most people would, naturally, say 'search'. After all, the company's simple home page is one of the first ports of call for users all around the world, while its range of search-related products and portals offer specialised services for discrete markets and audiences.

However, if the Round-Up had to say what Google's 'one thing' was, it would have to be 'annoying the living hell out of Microsoft'. And let's be honest, it does do that very well indeed.

Not content with dominating the search market and reducing Microsoft's role to a bit player, the company last year launched free word-processing and spreadsheet applications to compete with Word and Excel.

In addition to threatening two pillars of the Microsoft Office hegemony, it's now going after PowerPoint. The company is adding a feature to its Docs & Spreadsheets web-hosted software that will enable people to create presentations and slide shows.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a short presentation made using the new feature.

When asked if Google's enhanced Docs & Spreadsheets would compete with Microsoft Office, Schmidt played it cool: "We don't think so. It doesn't have all the functionality, nor is it intended to have the functionality of products like Microsoft Office… "

Yeah right.

This is the same Schmidt who, in a recent Wired magazine interview, said of the company's emerging revenue models: "The one that is probably most interesting is Google Apps. We’re now beginning to get some significant enterprise deals. Basically, companies are tired of dealing with the complexity of the old model and our products are now strong enough that they really can reliably serve a corporation."

Ooh, the nerve. Taking on Microsoft in the enterprise. Some upstarts have no respect for their elders.

Back to the conference, the Google boss, who last year joined the board of Apple just to irritate Steve Ballmer a little bit more, offered no specific timeframe for the introduction of the software.

He did, however, drop this pearl of wisdom: "Collaboration is a killer app for how communities work."

Indeed, for surely without collaboration it's not technically a community at all right? Duh!

Moving on, it must have come to your attention, dear readers, that silicon.com has a reputation for pushing its reporters to the limit in its quest to deliver the best and most timely content possible. It takes an individual possessing a certain mental strength to make the grade.

Take poor news editor Steve Ranger, for example. Recently, he was forced to sit in an air-conditioned office and watch the FA Cup match between Arsenal and Blackburn on a massive flat-screen TV. The inhumanity of it all. He also had a couple of sensors attached to his palms to check his sweat levels.

Steve was meeting with researchers from BT who are developing an algorithm that tries to spot the most interesting bits of a football game - the goals, corners and rows with the ref. Or depending on your perspective, streakers and ad breaks.

The idea is that the algorithm could be used to generate football highlights packages automatically. In the longer term the technology could be used to help computers spot emotions, so a machine could recognise funny or sad parts of a video, for example.

To make sure the algorithm performs correctly, it has to be tested against the actual responses of a living, breathing human football fan.

Both the computer and the human test subject watch the same game of football. The responses of the human guinea pig are monitored by their skin conductance, then that data is compared to what the computer picked out as interesting.

You can check how Steve's responses to the game measure up to what the algorithm identified as the most interesting parts of the game here.

You can also watch the look of unbridled joy on Steve's face as Benni McCarthy's goal dumps the Gunners out of the cup. It's pretty good work if you can get it. Being a BT researcher that is, not silicon.com news editor.

After all, if you want to make sure the algorithm is working properly you need to benchmark the results continually. By, say, watching lots of football yourself - just to be sure the algorithm is picking up all the correct highlights, you understand.

The research is now five years in (good work fellas) with the requests for funding for next year covering staff, IT equipment, the basic Sky Sports package, a slightly bigger HD television, a beer fridge and 2,000 bottles of premium lager…

… or so the Round-Up imagines.

And finally this week: how much is too much? It's a deep and intriguing question that has been baffling philosophers for centuries.

At what point does one person's love of a person or an object tip the scales from devotion to lunacy. It's tricky to gauge without an example.

Let's take computers. You may really like computers, you may like them a lot. Or you may like them too much. Take Jeremy Mehrle for example. He likes computers. Macs to be precise. He likes them a lot.

Mehrle has more than 100 Macs in his cellar, including a bar made out of 30 Mac Classics and a wall featuring a working version of every colour of iMac ever made. Geeky? Just a bit.

The man, who is clearly MacMad (Q: Does that mean a little bit mad? A: No, that would be McMad, stupid) didn't start collecting Macs until he saw an 'angle poise' iMac in a shop, according to an Associated Press article.

"As soon as I saw it, I was like, 'I have to have this computer'," he said. "The design, the user interface, the way it worked made sense," he drooled. After that he was smitten. Some computers in his collection were donated, others he bought off eBay.

Mehrle admits he doesn't own every Mac model ever made. "If I did that would be awesome but my girlfriend would probably leave me," he joked.

Pull the other one. If you admit to having a collection of over 100 computers in your cellar the chances of you having a girlfriend are pretty remote. He's not fooling the Round-Up.

Still, the Round-Up supposes it's good to have a hobby to distract him from the daily grind of office life. And what does Mehrle do for a living, you might ask.

Glad you asked. He works full-time in an Apple store.

Oh yes, that's too much. That's way, way too much.

Nonetheless, this got the Round-Up thinking - how many computers do you have in your home and are they still in use? Got a little 386 machine chugging away in the corner of your basement? A still operational ZX81 in the loft? Thirty Mac Classics made into a mini bar in your rumpus room? Ludicrous numbers of desktops daisy-chained in the garage?

Let the Round-Up know by emailing details of your PC collections and whether you still use them or not to editorial@silicon.com. Hell, go crazy and send us your pictures too, if you want. The most impressive number of PCs as well as the daftest use of obsolete technology will get a mention in next week's column. There may also be a prize on offer but more likely there won't.

Just for the record, the Round-Up has a measly three. Five if you include two Palms, which we're not - and if you don't like the rules of the game, then hard cheese, the Round-Up will just pick up its ball and go home.

Until next week, be sure to check out the now well-established Weekly Round-Up podcast, available to listen to right now here. (You can also subscribe in iTunes here - or pick up the XML feed here.)

And don't forget to try your luck in our latest caption competition.

And now to last week's competition, in which we asked you to give us a caption for a photo of Charles Simonyi (of Microsoft fame) floating in a spacecraft with some cosmonaut types - as seen here. The silicon.com team liked: 'Dwarf throwing to be included in the London Olympics' (from an anonymous IT manager) though we noticed it made no reference to space, Simonyi or Microsoft so no dice.

Then there was the compact simplicity of 'MySpace is better than yours!', also from an Anon, as well as the lewd: 'In flight maintenance... the bloke at the bottom is saying: "You just twist this little knob here and they go twice as fast".' That was from someone saying they're in marketing but also failing to give their name, which must be a first.

So the winning entry, which sounds familiar somehow, comes from Valérie Ganne of Penarth who wrote: 'Richard Branson had also applied for the space trip but, due to an administrative error, was being trained in zero-gravy.'

Well done Valérie, a bottle of bubbly will be on its way. Keep the entries coming!