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The Weekly Round-Up: 04.04.08
The latest dress code for attending court: antlers, wings and the ability to sting…

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 04 April 2008

You're not always taken entirely seriously when you have wings, antlers and don't exist.

However, as it happens, the rather strange but law-abiding denizens of Second Life (no, not these guys… ) were the focus of attention this week as they made their case to Capitol Hill legislators that their world is safer and easier to police than the real world.

That's largely because it isn't real. But there's a great deal more to come from this opening gambit in this week's Round-Up other than just cheap shots, oh yes.

Philip Rosedale, chief executive of Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, said: "It is likely that virtual world activities are somewhat more 'policeable' and the law somewhat more maintainable within virtual worlds."

Rosedale and a handful of other virtual-reality experts, testified this week at a House of Representatives hearing.

The hearing was also attended by some two dozen Second Life avatars portrayed on video screens in the hearing room, as well as by real people. And the aforementioned legislators, of course.

The avatars sat quietly, fingering the edges of their vorpal blades while their comments were displayed at the bottom of the screen.

Rosedale, appearing in both physical and avatar form, outlined some of the steps the company takes to discourage and prevent illegal activity.

Probably eager to avoid being smitten with the Sword of Ultimate Smiting, Congresswoman Jane Harman said: "I am not advocating censorship. But I am asking what we can [do] to make certain that these glorious tools are not...changed into tools that facilitate the use of terror attacks on innocent civilians around the world."

A fluttering of approving gills emanated from the surrounding monitors and a calm descended on the room once again.

According to reports, at least two of the avatars had wings. A third turned into a giant bumble bee as the hearing ended.

Hand on heart, the Round-Up did not make that last bit up.

Also on the screen was an avatar representing Edward Markey, the Massachusetts democrat who chairs the subcommittee.

Anybody else suspect his aides knocked up the avatar a few minutes before the meeting to make the politician look hip, groovy and down with the orcs?

Rosedale said virtual reality is the next step in the evolution of the internet, and argued the virtual world has more accountability and traceability than the real world.

"Real world" - that's the crux of it.

Virtual world inhabitants meeting government policy makers. There's a whole nebula of unreality swirling around right there. And, to cap it all, out of the nebula flies a giant bumble bee.

Wibble...

So another April Fool's Day has come and gone and once again Google has spent a fair amount of its annual marketing and engineering budget on a series of badly disguised japes. The first effort, and one which clearly had the most amount of work pumped into it, was the Virgle initiative.

Virgle, we were led to understand, is a joint effort between the practical jokers from Mountain View and madcap Virgin boss Richard Branson. Both companies put a fair bit of effort into the stunt - sign up to colonise Mars in a grand 100-year plan - which the Round-Up imagines involved a fair amount of chortling and self-congratulatory back slapping.

Had the Round-Up been a fly on the wall at that particular meeting it would have swatted itself.

The Adventure of Many Lifetimes starts off with a questionnaire for aspiring colonists hoping to get started on Plan B. To be fair, it has its moments. It's just that April Fool's jokes are meant to fool people and it doesn't.

A rather more subtle and rather better joke came courtesy of Google's Australian branch.

gDay! No, that isn't a tired old cliché for referring to our antipodean cousins but rather the name of the gag they launched.

The company proclaimed it had developed a new search algorithm capable of predicting what would occur in 24 hours' time based on analysing its own spidered web content.

Meaning you could search tomorrow's news, today. The Round-Up's aware of at least one enterprise search company that actually has something quite similar in its marketing collateral.

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, the gDay services uses a statistical extrapolation of a page's future PageRank, called SageRank. Nice.

Google also ran a number of user endorsements alongside the fake press notice.

One stated: "Wow, I just put a grand on number 7 in the 4th at Flemington tomorrow and bought my girlfriend a gift with the money I’m going to collect tomorrow. Thanks Google!"

Another said: "This is old news. I read about this announcement yesterday on Google." Which was, fair enough, funny. Another good technology April Fool's joke was an announcement from ThinkGeek of a new device to convert Betamax cassettes into HD-DVDs. Meanwhile, anyone who clicked on one of the featured videos on YouTube's homepage got rick-rolled - redirected to a video of Rick Astley's 1980s hit 'Never Gonna Give You Up'. There's funny and then there's tasteless.

Finally, the BBC spent an unfeasible amount of licence payers' money producing a video about flying penguins.

Again, this was rather cool and while the Round-Up desperately wanted to fall for it but didn't at least the money wasn't being spent on EastEnders...

Another week, another survey - Apple's brand has the biggest impact on the world's consumers, according to research by online magazine brandchannel.com.

Meanwhile, bringing up the rear and labelled the 'brands most in need in a remake' were Microsoft and, in second place, the entire US nation. Harsh.

Apple triumphed in six categories overall, including 'most inspiring brand' and the 'one readers cannot live without'.

What the other four were the Round-Up cannot say. Possibly, the 'brand people most likely to be caught holding while passing a full-length mirror'. Though just as likely, possibly not.

Microsoft also won a gong. Alas it was a bittersweet victory as it took the titles for 'the brand most readers wanted to argue with' and the brand they 'most wanted to revamp'.

Unfortunately for Apple, Microsoft and indeed every other company, organisation and nation on the planet, very few people believed that there was such a thing as a green brand.

As one great philosopher once said: "It's not easy being green."*

After Apple, the most inspiring brands were Nike, Coca-Cola, Google and Starbucks, the survey showed.

The same brands, except with Virgin in place of Starbucks, were the brands most readers would "like to sit next to at a dinner party".

Virgin? Richard Branson? Dinner party? Pass the salt. Just a pinch will do...

(* Kermit the Frog.)

That's almost it for another Round-Up, just a final dash through the other big news of the week.

The 10 strangest things you can do with an iPod. What more can the Round-Up add? Nothing.

Yahoo! joins the increasing number of companies jumping up and down on top of your mobile phone shouting "Me! Me! Me!" What's the 'revolutionary' pitch?

Don't blame the idiots responsible for your data breaches, blame the system. On the same subject, 1,000 or so government laptops have gone missing. Getting tedious, isn't it?

Two more surprise news items and then the Round-Up has to go:

Vista still not all the rage.

HMRC has done it again.

Until next week, catch up with the Round-Up in its alternative podcast version.

And have a go at the Caption Competition. Lovely jubbly.