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The Weekly Round-Up: 13.04.07
What was I looking for...?

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 13 April 2007

For reasons that will become obvious in a moment, this week's Round-Up will be brief and to the point. The Round-Up realises it has only a small window of opportunity to engage your interest before you wander off in search of other web-based delights. So here we go.

'Wilfing’ is the latest psychological impediment to productivity in the UK, according to a recent survey by price comparison site moneysupermarket.com.

Wilf (which stands for ‘What Was I Looking For?’) is the act of getting distracted and lost on the web despite going online with a specific purpose in mind. Still with us? Good.

It's akin to what listeners to Terry Wogan’s Radio 2 breakfast show may already know as a "senior moment", often associated with the gradual onset of age. A bit like walking purposefully into the kitchen, stopping in confusion and asking yourself: "What did I come in here for?"

Seventy per cent of the 2,400 people surveyed are partial to the odd wilf now and again.

Presumably, 70 per cent of those respondents who visited the price-comparison website to compare product prices, spent five minutes answering the survey and then completely lost track of what they were doing there in the first place.

Anyway, the gist of it is, and the Round-Up clearly has to be quick here to maintain both its readers' interest and its own, is that aimless surfers are spending an average of two working days a month searching the web with no real purpose.

Furthermore, almost one in four spend over 30 per cent their quality net time wilfing - the equivalent to spending an entire working day every two weeks browsing the net aimlessly.

How much you can trust these statistics, which are drawn from a group of people who freely admit they have lost swathes of their lives on the web, is up for debate.

However, silver surfers aged 55 or over were three times less likely to wilf than those aged under 25, which means there's hope for Sir Terry's legions of listeners after all.

Alternatively, the survey could represent a triumph for the unstructured beauty of the world wide web, allowing the mind to float free through hyperlinked virtual worlds. A whimsical, magical place where... the Round-Up swears there was a point to this bit but it’s forgotten what it was...

Moving on...

Second Life has quickly become the Round-Up's first port of call during slow news weeks and this week is no exception.

The weird and wonderful virtual world continues to issue a clarion call to real-world brands. These days, anyone who’s anyone possesses a headquarters in the 'game'.

However, having a virtual HQ in Second Life is now distinctly old hat, with many companies waking up to the potential of whether the user-driven environment could be the next frontier in customer service.

Over five million Second Life user accounts have been registered and although only a small percentage of those are likely to be actively 'gaming', it still represents a growing marketing and customer services channel for businesses.

Some believe Second Life is on its way to becoming a key point of contact for customers, with some consultants imagining call centres could ask customers to follow up a phone call by moving the support call into virtual worlds.

The idea is that rather than sit on the phone listening to tinny muzak and be told every 30 seconds or so that your call is very important, you get to go into virtual reality and talk to some green guy with wings about your vacuum cleaner. Meanwhile, as the winged chap is sorting out your suction issues you can chat with some other residents, watch a promotional video or slay a dragon.

The Round-Up agrees it’s certainly more appealing than listening to Jennifer Rush booming out of your mobile handset about the Power of Love.

On a more serious note, the use of avatars could also allow companies to open up a whole range of possibilities for customer services workforces. For example, those who need to work from home or mothers with young children could be brought back into the virtual workforce.

Meanwhile having a face to face discussion, virtually speaking, can also remove some of the issues with customers being prejudiced against call centre workers who have certain accents.

There's trouble brewing in MySpace, one of the brave, new bastions of the brave, new web 2.0 world.

The social networking site, which boasts over 100 million registered users, is a place where budding musicians can create their own pages and upload MP3s in the hope of getting a record deal. Of course, it's evolved into much more than that with pages dedicated to a whole range of interests from guns and ammo enthusiasts to My Little Pony tribute pages, with the most common element being hideous colour schemes.

But back to the aforementioned kerfuffle. A US headmaster has filed a lawsuit against four former students, claiming they falsely portrayed him as a pot smoker, beer guzzler and pornography lover and sullied his reputation through mock MySpace profiles.

He claims the students committed defamation by posting three separate profiles bearing his name, official school portrait and a host of "unsubstantiated allegations, derogatory comments and false statements" about him.

This included listing his favourite movie as a skin flick as well as alleging he enjoyed intimate relations with students, was on steroids and marijuana and kept a keg of beer behind his desk.

Actually, the Round-Up thinks that last one might not be the worst idea...

A similar thing happened in the UK with Friends Reunited a few years back. The social networking website suspended its message boards after a retired teacher complained about being libelled by a former pupil.

The US headmaster in question has sued. And quite understandably too, particularly as one of the allegations was about 'brutalizing women'. For professionals such as teachers and healthcare workers, rumours like this can be extremely damaging both personally and professionally, even if they are proven to be complete fabrications.

Still, what is it about teachers? You can never get the better of them. If it's not a blackboard cleaner thrown at great speed and accuracy at your ear then it's a lawsuit.

"You boy! At the back! You'll be hearing from my solicitors. Now turn to page 145 and start reading..."

And finally this week, fear and loathing on corporate networking.

Misuse of corporate networks and IT systems has long been the bane of system administrators across the globe. Inappropriate use of emails, accessing dodgy websites and the use of high capacity storage devices such as MP3 players and USB keys by workers keep IT managers awake at nights. Not to worry though, the prestige and big bucks on offer are enough to balance out the stress of the daily (and nightly) grind, right?

However, a story on silicon.com this week which chronicled horror stories of network misuse is likely to make uncomfortable reading for stressed managers.

For example, there’s the financial services organisation whose employees had a daily competition for the colleague who could best beat the URL filtering system and access the most inappropriate content on their desktop PC. Eek!

Or the employee who transferred huge chunks of business critical data from the network to a home PC and then promptly upon completion of this data heist handed in his notice. Aaargh!

Further problems are caused by employees leaving web radio stations streaming over weekends and web cams operating all day for the purposes of personal instant messaging. Shame!

But now for a couple of instances that will have terror-stricken IT chiefs reaching for the valium.

On two occasions, one involving a financial services firm and another in a healthcare organisation, administrators failed to revoke remote network access for sacked employees - resulting in worms and Trojans being unleashed on systems with devastating effect. Hell hath no fury like a techie scorned.

Luckily help is at hand and the article offers some essential advice for everyone from the CIO to the network administrator.

Related news this week makes it clear that it’s a fine line between vigilance and over-exuberant snooping, however.

Monitoring employees' internet and telephone use at work may contravene human rights laws, after a landmark case in the European Court of Human Rights last week.

The case involved a public sector employee in Wales, who won €3,000 in damages and €6,000 in court costs and expenses, after her communications were intercepted by her employer.

The civil servant, who remains in post, won her case. She took the UK government to court after her personal internet usage and telephone calls were monitored by one of her bosses in 1999.

The ruling means the private use of company telecoms equipment and internet access may be protected under European human rights legislation - if the company has an acceptable personal use policy and fails to inform the employee that their communications may be monitored.

As silicon.com’s network horror stories article explains, this acceptable usage policy should be enforceable on all network-connected computers and be clear to all employees and not simply be a PDF tucked away somewhere on the intranet.

Weekly emails from the Round-Up are exempt from all this of course, a little frivolity here and there is balanced out by erudite analysis and expert comment on business and technology.

Speaking of which, don’t forget that the Weekly Round-Up podcast is available here and from iTunes for download now. It’s all work-related of course, honest.

Congrats to Giles Turner, the winner to our most recent caption competition - see the winning caption.

And don't forget to come up with a witty caption for this week's competition.

If those options don’t wet your whistle, then the Round-Up doesn’t know what will...