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The ever-reliable telecoms analyst James Enck has blogged a spoof list of five new "Web 3.0" apps suited to the economic crisis and its effects.

I won't replicate it, as the post deserves to be read in its entirety, but I will throw extra kudos his way for this: "Optimized for Emerging Market 2.0, Hypa-N-Flashun is a Java flake for iPhone which removes the friction from everyday transactions. Let's say you're at a Web 2.0 conference in Zimbabwe..."

AT&T, bless them, have put up a page of hints that might suggest your modem is not working.

My personal favourites are:

- Modem is smoking.
- Modem is smashed into bits and pieces.
- Modem is melted and misshapen.

Here's some viral marketing - ironically enough for an anti-virus company. Norton Fighter is a Japanese superhero, saving the world from viruses in black body-stockings.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XLPZSHkFjA

Strangely, this has taken at least a year to reach me, despite its obvious excellence, so I apologise if I'm the last to appreciate it. It ends on a cliff-hanger, but Part 2 is easy to find on YouTube.

It looks very Power Rangers to me, but online afficionados say it's more Masked Rider, and bat around terms like Sentai. Norton Fighter is also available on YouTube, as an Akihabara street play:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phyxnhSth24

Ofcom's report on the potential broadband capability of Britain's copper phone network is a good one. It could help reduce the UK's digital divide and get faster broadband to more people.

The report discusses how to get the most out of the UK's copper. But what was the regulator thinking of when it put it online?

It probes the fundaments of our infrastructure, sure. And it pushes for the benefits of fibre in increasing throughput. But was that really a good enough reason to give it the filename asses.pdf?

Linux blogs elsewhere have uncovered a very nice little bedtime story, contained in the readme file for Gnome's printer manager.

"Once upon a time there was a printer who lived in the woods. He was a lonely printer, because nobody knew how to configure him. He hoped and hoped for someone to play with," begins the story, contained in the gnome-cups-manager , and reported by fsckin w/ linux.

The poor little printer remains unhappy, "jamming paper (for that is what little printers do when they are confused)", until a girl - called gnome-cups-manager - comes to play with him, after which the happy little printer can print to its heart's content.

If I'd known README files were this good, I'd have read more of them.

Today, I wake at 5am in something of a funk. I'd been having a bad and very vivid dream in which aliens disguised as IT marketing executives were trying to take over the world. Their technology was a combination of an MRI scanner and high speed wireless network that set up resonances in the brain and took control.

Trouble was, it didn't work very well. At the big industry launch where the aliens were going to reveal the tech and sell it to us as a great consumer boon, it became clear during the demo that it wasn't actually ready. The press conference quickly degenerated into a battle between the alien marketing directors and journalists – some of whom were taken over by the brain rays and turned on their colleagues, with varying degrees of success. During this rampage, the aliens dropped their disguise: they still looked like Americans in suits, though.

The details of the dream were rather engaging. The launch took place in a modern museum of antiquities, some of which turned out to have been planted thousands of years ago by the aliens in preparation for the take-over, and I can remember in dispiriting detail how the tech was supposed to work. I woke up just as I was being physically equipped with a dongle: I'll spare you the details, but I was very glad to find myself awake and un-modded.

It doesn't take a Freudian to untangle those themes – from the tin-foil hat brigade running scared of Wi-Fi to the tendency of the wireless industry to oversell itself on matters it doesn't really understand, it's all standard stuff. And as for aliens with Powerpoint; that makes rather more sense than Roswell ever did. I'll leave it to you to decide which journalists are really Pod People.

I don't think 7am is too early to call my therapist...

The best clerihew celebrates, not Bill Gates, but a paragon whose contribution to IT has empowered all of us to create great and worthwhile things.

Over at Miss Conduct, the winner is announced:

Tim Berners-Lee
Invented HTTP
Thus the World Wide Web was born
For Nigerian Diplomats and porn.

I'm impressed by the way IT dominated an open clerihew contest. Obviously, I was too slack to produce any entries of my own, but here are one or two more suggestions for IT-related clerihews....

Linus Torvalds
Doesn't suffer from colds
I guess that comes from calling
Your child after Linus Pauling

Steve Jobs
Inspires hysterical mobs
They shout "Can I swap my phone
For an iPhone?"

I think Richard Stallman
Is not a small man
He writes code for free
And once sent an email to me

Alan Turing
Broke codes during
World War II
And never played the kazoo

I know you can do better...

Technologists figure prominently as the subjects of amusing poems, in a competition to celebrate Clerihew Day, july 10.

Miss Conduct is running a Clerihew competition , and the five finalists include both Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee.

Here's the Gates one

Bill Gates
Has left the giant software company everyone hates.
"Hey, Mistah?
Are *you* gonna use Vista?"

Voting ends today, the birthday of Edmund Clerihew Bentley, the inventor of the form (well explained on Wikipedia, of course).

I've voted for Bill, even though his clerihew is close to breaking one rule reported in Wikipedia: "Clerihews are not satirical or abusive, but they target famous individuals and reposition them in an absurd or commonplace setting."

I should point out that, despite the headline of this post, I'm not advocating any form of ballot rigging, of course.

And if anyone else has IT-related clerihews, let's hear them. Even if you miss the delivery date of 10 July!

Our mobile reportage guru David "I'm in a band, you know" Meyer is, as you know, in a band. Like any good rock star, he's also got solo projects on the boil - one, miniblackhole, being of quite long standing.

Unfortunately for his psyche, his songwriting chops have been infected by all those marketing meetings, Powerpoint presentations and cliche-ridden press releases that he has to endure in the course of his duties. So bad has this contamination become that he found himself writing "Love Solutions" -- a rock song all about love, entirely in managementspracht. It's so twisted, it works.

We've tried to help him work this thing out. In particular, Alper "I've written and shot a movie, you know" Cagatay from our video production department took up his camera and his editing suite, and shot David while he acted out his rock god fantasy.

And now we've put it up on Youtube. In the time-honoured words of experience: David's suffered for his art, and now it's your turn.

Believe it or not (and we have trouble believing it ourselves) Dialogue Box has been recommissioned for a fourth series — and we didn't have to resort to Alan Partridge-style babbling about 'Monkey tennis' to get the nod!



We filmed the first episode yesterday, and without giving too much away, I can reveal that we shed (rather bright and exciting) new light on a subject we covered in the first series last year. Check the site on Monday for the results, once our video chaps have worked their post-production magic.

What else is in store? Again, keeping the cards suitably close to the chest, we'll be looking at wireless networking, the latest mobile technology and remote system management, among other things — all with the usual DB mixture of tech savvy, dodgy humour and references to going down the pub.