The Weekly Round-Up: 17.08.07

As if we didn't already know, email is a double-edged sword of productivity.

On the one hand it allows us to keep in touch with friends and colleagues all over the world with a single mouse-click and on the other hand it allows us to keep in touch with friends and colleagues all over the world with a single mouse-click.

The veritable deluge of emails that assails you and me, the modern worker, is stressing us out and making us tired, frustrated and unproductive - or at least more so than normal.

Now the Round-Up, being as it is a fanciful piece of email-borne whimsy, is fully aware it should tread a very fine line here.

One in three workers feels stressed by the number of emails they get and the obligation to respond instantly. (If you feel the need to respond instantly to the Round-Up, say it's an antidote to some of your other stress. Please.)

Seeing as we are simply incapable of just turning off our email clients for even short periods of time, a nifty bit of research is on hand to tell us how we can stop this menace from driving us to hurl ourselves determinedly out of plate glass windows to escape the horror.

The study found that employees working on a computer typically switch applications to view their emails as many as 30 or 40 times per hour, for anything from a few seconds to a minute.

While half of the participants said they check their email more than once per hour, and 35 per cent said they check every 15 minutes, monitoring software installed on their machines for the experiment showed they check email more often. So not just depressed, frustrated and unproductive but dirty, rotten liars as well.

By comparison, a relatively chilled-out 38 per cent said they do not reply to email until a day or even a week after receiving it. The selfish sods are clearly not realising or caring that in doing so they're inflicting a proportionate amount of stress on the person who sent the email in the first place and is no doubt expecting a reply in 'internet time'.

Dr Renaud, for that was the name of the worthy psychologist who ran the survey, said in a statement: "Email is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives."

She added: "The more distracted you are by distractions, including email, then you are going to be more tired and less productive. Furthermore... Oh that's sooo cute! Look at this adorable picture of a baby otter that Jane sent me. My sister would simply love this. Hang on... "

The research said email senders at work should never press other employees, especially those they supervise, to respond to their emails as they would to a phone call. Furthermore, recipients should set aside dedicated email reading time to catch up on what's landed in their inbox.

She added: "The more distracted you are by distractions, including... the more distracted you are by distractions. Hang on, check out this YouTube clip of George W Bush falling off a Segway. Ha! Anyway, it's an amazing tool but it's got out of hand. Email harries you. You are going to be more tired and less productive. Wait, did I mention that already? Who are you anyway?"

The Round-Up may have misquoted the good doctor once or twice there but you get the general idea.

In related news, British Energy has decided to trial email-free Fridays, according to CIO Ian Campbell, who warned that email could be a blocker for collaboration.

Friday just happens to be the day on which the Round-Up is sent out. Bah! It'll never work. Off with his head!

From rolling heads to talking heads - check out this week's Caption Competition and tell us what Steve Jobs is saying for your chance to win a bottle of the fizzy stuff (and no, the Round-Up doesn't mean Cherry Fanta - or Diet Coke and Mentos).

Microsoft could soon be back in court defending its corner. No news there.

However, this time the case has nothing to do with antitrust allegations but everything to do with "slender models with piercing eyes and medium to large, youthful breasts in pensive or artistic poses... wearing boxing gloves".

That last quote came from the Wikipedia's entry on Perfect 10 which is the gentleman's magazine taking the biggest technology company in the world to court over the reproduction of its copyrighted images.

It'll make a pleasant change for the Microsoft defence team and certainly prove a more interesting legal research process than analysing European Commission competition reports.

"What about asset protection?"
"She's not protecting her assets, boss."

The publisher's legal team has had the bare-faced cheek to file the case in the US District Court in California and is essentially peeved that MSN's search engine is generating thumbnails of its online nudie content and linking to the full-size images without charging the user.

Although a judge had previously ruled that search engines could be liable for displaying thumbnails, this was later overruled in an appeals court, which determined that the thumbnails are 'fair use' and that the full-size images weren't stored by the search engines.

Perfect 10 has a bit of backstory on this legal debate. It's taken on Amazon - and lost. It's taken on Google - and lost. You'd think perhaps it should set its sights on a company with less ominous legal representation.

Think of it in boxing terms, if you're a newbie fighter you don't ask for a bout with Joe Calzaghe or Ricky Hatton, you seek out weaker and flabbier opposition first and let's face it, the Microsoft defence team is as fit as a butcher's dog.

No matter, Norm Zada, the litigation-happy president of Perfect 10, isn't being deterred. He claims Microsoft's thumbnail action is costing Perfect 10 around $4m per month.

"Our business is being destroyed," Zada told infoworld.com. "This is a life and death battle for us."

Zada also complained that Microsoft had shown no willingness to reach a settlement in court. Who'd have thought that top-shelf magazines and Linux would have so much in common?

Only this week, the father of the open source operating system accused Microsoft of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) in the market about open source technology.

Which is a bit like accusing Apple of being a bit obsessed with pretty industrial design and Oracle being quite interested in data storage and access.

Like Achilles challenging Hector before the gates of Troy, Linus Torvalds is calling on Steve Ballmer to put up or shut up on the patent dispute. Microsoft has claimed open source software violates 235 of its patents but says it will not sue open source users at the moment.

Torvalds has accused Microsoft of building an open source cult of fear: "I personally think it's mainly another shot in the FUD war.

"Microsoft has a really hard time competing on technical merit, and they traditionally have instead tried to compete on price. But that obviously doesn't work either, not against open source. So they'll continue to bundle packages and live off the inertia of the marketplace but they want to feed that inertia with FUD."

Can Microsoft not get along and play nicely with the other children? The evidence would suggest not...

Cover me in lizard dust and strike me with a witch stick, Harry Potter's official French publishing house Gallimard and writer JK Rowling are worried…

What could a huge international publishing house and a billionaire author be worried about? Well you can find out in the next paragraph.

They're worried about organised gangs of lawless translators stalking the land and callously, well, translating stuff. In this case it's the last of the boy wizard's verbose adventures, with neither publisher nor author getting a single euro from the result.

Before you swoon with terror, rest assured that this latest threat to modern life is being dealt with. Action against the menace has been swift and a 16-year-old French boy in idyllic Aix-en-Provence has been taken into custody. Mon Dieu!

The teenager, who was suspected of posting his own translation of the new Potter novel on the internet, was later released, presumably to allow him to receive psychiatric treatment - essential for anyone prepared to translate a 600-page book about leprechauns and Hufflepuffs into French.

Both Rowling and Gallimard have filed official complaints via special owl delivery but stressed that their concern was not pubescent French geeks but the wider threat of organised translation networks. It's hardly Cosa Nostra is it?

And finally this week, even the unborn are joining in the Facebook revolution.

First, an Australian foetus provisionally called Bubba Waring now has a Facebook profile courtesy of its proud if slightly daft parents to be. Bubba's profile picture is a grainy ultrasound scan.

The parents said they wanted to find a way of updating friends and family on the progress of Bubba and email, as we know, just doesn't do the trick anymore. Meanwhile, the tiny being bobbing around in its sac of amniotic fluid is proving popular and is receiving dozens of friend requests.

In fact, the news was particularly depressing for the Round-Up as it viewed Bubba's impressive list of friends and found that even an unborn child was more popular and socially adept than it is.

Meanwhile, in related Facebook foetus news, a story in London freesheet Metro this week reports that another father-to-be has claimed if he gets 100,000 online signatures on Facebook his wife has given him permission to call their child Spider Pig. (For the sake of the child, the Round-Up urges you not to sign up.)

And meanwhile, in related child-naming news, Reuters reports that a Chinese couple have attempted to call their child '@' - which apparently sounds like 'love him' in Mandarin.

The Round-Up suggests the proud parents-to-be speak to the artist formerly known as Prince before making a final decision on the little squiggle's name.

Until next week, why not clap your ears round this week's podcast?