Voice over IP, or VOIP, is quickly gaining popularity. I have my ridiculous Captain Scarlet-style headset waiting at home, in order to talk to people half the world away about our respective brands of reality TV and chocolate bars, and it seems that millions of other people are sailing with me in this good ship that we know as ‘HMS Free Internet Phone Calls’.

As the technology develops, it’s fairly certain a lot of telecommunication bods will be running a bit scared, or at least trying to hop onto the Skype bandwagon. I’m not worried about that - they’ll be fine, modern life is all about telecommunication, these VOIP systems still use the same sets of wires and all that, and hey the people working at massive telecomms companies can probably look after themselves.

What does bother me about this, and sometimes about internet technology in general, is the inexorable increase of complexity that advances tend to entail. Where art is frequently driven by the pursuit of new levels of simplicity and elemental forces, technological advance piles on complexity after complexity. Put simply, we now have phones that can crash and leave us shouting into a useless black box, and I can’t see the rise of VOIP making phonecalls any simpler.

It’s the old trade-off, stability and simplicity versus extra features and the wow factor. Ultimately I always believe in progress, but I think I’ll always feel unsettled that my phone conversation isn’t just passing through a couple of phone company exchanges, but through tens, maybe hundreds of computers. Pass the paper cups and string!

Because outside the software-displaying boundaries of the computer screen is the computer itself. What does it consist of? Typically a screen, a keyboard, a mouse and a box of tricks with a medusa-head of wires popping out the back. Tech types will tend to view the box of tricks under the desk as the computer itself, and its attendant attachments merely tools plugged into the computer. Non-technical types will often refer to the screen as being the computer - after all, that’s where everything happens.

Well I think the whole caboodle needs to be present before you call it a personal computer, and it strikes me that this bitty existence is a bit strange, a bit… underdeveloped. OK, so you have immense power through the ability to get a fancy mouse or a massive screen, but as personal computers continue to move into being consumer items, for heaven’s sake the last thing consumers need is complexity. A bit of choice is good, yeah, but if people are going to buy a PC and not change anything, why have a separate monitor and keyboard and mouse and all that?

I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of those Apple style combo-computers, where the monitor and main box become as one - and not just because Apple set fashion and are thus copied left right and center. Once those linking wires are got rid of, perhaps we could have some kind of holographic keyboards, and control the pointer by just wiggling our fingers on the desk? Look, we’re already partway there.

Funny she should mention Wikipediasts (is that term going to catch on? I thought it was Wikipedians - although Wikipedophiles has a certain ring), because yesterday I noticed that The Register has recently indulged in a bit of one of its favourite sports - pouncing on anything that makes Wikipedia look a bit silly: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been telling students not to refer to it. “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia” cries the head ‘pediast.

Well, Prof Brown and you teachers faced with another cut-and-paste job from Wale’s baby, you shouldn’t waste any time worrying that the kids are nicking huge sections of online content and slapping them into their essays. Instead please recognise that, via new technology, information is becoming as plentiful and easy to obtain as air - and then realise the pointlessness of getting a whole class of students to write the same essays again, or forcing people who swim in a sea of information to sit on artificial dry land in an exam environment.

We shouldn’t be patching up out-dated assessment methods and telling kids off for rigging them to their advantage, instead we need to develop new ones to teach them more about how to process and filter information - like, should they really trust an encyclopaedia that begins its own page about itself with the line ‘no soup for you’?

But all that stuff is secondary in my mind to Google’s towering achievement (and let’s sweep under the carpet the fact that they actually acquired most of the software by buying up the original company behind it), probably the single best piece of computer software since Super Mario World… I speak, of course, of The Almighty Google Earth.

I hardly need to explain it here, it’s the world on your desktop and you can zoom in almost far enough to check if you’re actually developing a bald spot, or spin around the world in corky 3d-o-vision like you’re presenting a child-depressing Newsround report on the plight of Malaysian duckbilled penguins. You can even get it to map out a route to drive somewhere if you like that sort of thing… or go and look at the Big Brother house. If you like that sort of thing.

In short, Google Earth is amazing and literally makes me feel like I’m living in the future, and I’ve finally had an reason to talk about it because there’s a new version out. Look, you can even see UKFast towers on there!*

^{* OK so my links here aren’t to Google Earth but its flatter cousin, Google Maps… sadly we’re not allowed to use the beast in the office, given its habit of trying to download the whole planet and the attendant bandwidth-eating that ensues…}

Reasonably easily, as it turned out. In fact for a while I got used to being netless, just like the protagonist of Sandi Thom’s chart smash ‘I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker’, who wants to live in a time when ‘the super info highway was still drifting out in space’. Admittedly I was still getting my fix of netiness at work, but this was tempered by the fact that I was, well, at work, and it seemed wise to get on with my job instead of spending all day emailing people - plus, holiday and financial planning went out of the window for a month. Having a good excuse to put these things off was quite relaxing.

But then friends started complaining that I wasn’t around online anymore. My Flickr and 43things accounts were languishing. With my PC gathering dust, a backlog of songs I wanted to buy started amassing in my head. As frustration started to build, I finally got around to sorting out my connection. On the day it was switched back on, my router resolutely refused to work. By the time Daz managed to get me fully online-ified via some router-voodoo, I was starting to get desperate. Getting back into the web world felt like coming home.

Sandi Thom, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind your song, (it’s likeable and a little unusual, although hardly Imogen Heap) but you, and anyone else with this myopic, nostalgic view of ’simpler days’, well you can all keep your rosy made-up version of the past. The net is amazing and the past is rubbish, we all know it - especially those of us who bring our songs about how great the 70s were to worldwide attention via the suspiciously modern medium of webcasts and huge PR budgets…

Good thing one: Loading speed. Back in the old days, I had to wait for about ten years to load up Paradroid on my Commodore 64. Now everything loads up super quick, and there’s no time to make a cup of tea whilst your PC boots up and loads everything you need. Which is good, because I hate tea. On the other hand, I’m not really allowed to play Paradroid at work. So it goes: for every reaction, an equal and opposite reaction.

Good thing two: Optical mouses. Yes, the plural of computer mouse is computer mouses. At least I think it is… to be honest I don’t want to check that, because then I’ll know what an idiot I sounded like every time I referred to mouses. Optical mouses are great because you never have to pop out the ball and clean off all the dirt from the rollers, and because they make a cool-looking red glow and at a push can be used to temporarily blind unexpected assailants.

Good thing three: Flat screens. When oh when will Daz learn that cathode ray tubes belong back in the fifties with all the black and white people? Flat screens are great because they provide extra space on your desk, which you can utilise to store your Fruit Corners, plastic meerkats and Etch-a-Sketch pens.

Good thing four: Internetification. This has got to be the best thing. Now that broadband means that we no longer need to endure ‘loading Paradroid on your Commodore 64′ style delays in accessing the web, we can look up anything just like that. In fact, asking non-work-related questions of your colleagues is almost obsolete. Soon we won’t have to talk to each other at all, we’ll just glare and shine the light from our mouses in each other’s eyes. Progress!

And that, my friends, apart from showing off my extensive knowledge of the art world, is all a bit like Web 2.0. Nobody seems to know what it means, and all the real innovators and cutting edge folk on the web seem to be shunning the label. No wonder - the phrase itself sounds incredibly smug, mainly because of the ‘point oh’ bit. It is scientifically impossible to say ‘Web 2.0′ aloud without sounding like a punchable buffoon - try it.

What’s more, it’s kind of innaccurate: the ‘version number’ format of the name implies a completely new version of the WWW, where instead, on the sites sited as being part of this exclusive club, all we find is more of a ‘Web 1.25′ - a web with a few bells and whistles on top. Ben Ramsey has been talking about the need for a new term, now that O’Reilly Media have claimed Web 2.0 as their own - but I’m thinking perhaps the whole buzzword needs to be binned, or at least saved until the web really is revolutionised.

Which is all well and good for those of us who have Derren Brown style mental powers - but as June pointed out, what happens when you’ve got a less-than-perfect memory? I think I can dredge up quite a few important numbers purely from memory, but I also remember fraught times at cashpoints when all the digits got mixed up and I ended up freezing my card, or setting off house alarms. Numbers - they’re just so abstract and hard to remember.

Of course there is an alternative, which we see all the time using computers - passwords. Every so often you hear statistics about the majority of passwords being ’secret’ or ‘password’. As is often the case with this blog, I’m starting to wonder what people’s passwords say about them. Sadly I can’t really conduct a poll of the office, all I can analyse are my own passwords. My policy is to go for phrases, words and collections of numbers completely unrelated in anything but the most tenuous way to myself and my interests…

… which kind of makes them abstract and hard to remember. Perhaps I should swallow my Orwellian terror of ID cards and biometric scanning and just relax in the knowledge that soon my fingerprints will get me into my house OK. Unless, of course, a Terminator turns up and steals my fingers.

The real-time nature of BB, and the fact that it generates those ‘water-cooler’ conversations (you know, the sort all the media journalists were going on about a few years ago), well it makes me think. There’s all this buzz online about iTunes selling episodes of Lost (another of our favourites, especially now the plot seems to revolve around people sitting in a room doing inexplicable things with computers) and the new plan to sell 24 (yeah, we love Bauer too) on myspace.

But this narrowcasting approach, treating TV shows like music, seems a little foolish - TV is completely different, and nowhere near the solitary experience the naysayers wibble on about. In fact, I think it’s the most social of modern media. Discussion of last night’s crop of big shows is a vital office bonding experience… Daz got quite annoyed with me because I missed Lost the other week, and fair enough, I was a bit miffed myself. Not because I missed it, but because we all need a bit of fuel for talking outside of the world of SQL queries and web form design. OK, and because I missed it.

Hey, if you can’t gossip openly about your colleagues, at least you can gossip openly about the people on TV - and to do that you need to be tuning in as it happens, in synch. Now where’s my copy of Heat?

This made me think about names. We routinely talk a load of old rubbish in IT, forced to do so by the strange names of the programs we use. Let’s have a look at some of the big names:

Internet Explorer - good, solid, boring name. Does what it says on the tin. My only issue would be that it really only explores the web, not the whole net. And using its initials makes you sound like you’ve just been stabbed with a protractor. Iiieeeee!

Firefox - much more romantic, mythical sounding. Foxs are… kind of quick. Fire is… sort of fast. OK, so it sounds like a rebranding of the word hotdog, and has nothing to do with the web. Still it does sound cool.

Flash - a great name, as with Firefox it tries to intimate speed, plus the technology is all about adding flashy stuff to websites. Makes me think of the Queen song and the film, which can’t be a bad thing. Perhaps a slight hint of self-exposure is in there, but it’s well hidden.

Dreamweaver - hilariously unconnected to what it does. A great program (and this is coming from an avowed hand-coder), but sitting there with your tables and CSS palettes does not feel particularly dreamlike. Also makes me think of spoof horror writer Garth Marenghi, who describes himself as ‘Author, Dreamweaver, Visionary’.

Photoshop - it is, basically, the modern version of a photoshop. Sounds definitive, and is.

The Gimp - everything I feel about this program is summed up in that name. Except I’m more inclined to leave it sleeping than ever decide to ‘bring out the gimp’

A good deal of this terrible stress is brought upon us IT types by the dreaded Users. As someone said in the poll - ‘I spend most of my day fielding calls from people who don’t even have a basic knowledge of computers and printers. It is amazing the amount of time I spend teaching people where the on-off button is.’ Well whenever I hear this kind of thing, I’m on the user’s side, because computers are the most ridiculously designed things in the world (aside from that new rendering of Barbie’s eyebrows, of course).

I used to work in a public library and had to help people who’d never used PCs get on the internet. Why do you have to double click those icons to start ‘the internet’, then only single click everything else? What recycled products does the recycle bin churn out? Why can’t I turn it on and off as I please, instead of waiting for all sorts of odd stuff to happen? Who is that paperclip and what does he want from me?

Us lot have been using these interfaces that are completely unrelated to real life for years, but most normal people haven’t, and are not interested in tinkering and learning about them like we are. We shouldn’t moan about them, we should moan about the design of these systems in the first place. I should be able to talk to this thing as if I was Captain Picard by now, instead of tapping away like someone in a typing pool in the thirties.

Computer, end blog!

Last night iTunes suddenly decided to delete half my carefully downloaded album artwork. At first I was quite irate, because I’d spent ages finding it all so it would show up on my ipod. But after some thought, it started to feel like iTunes was trying to enlighten me. I still buy CDs, even though I just rip them straight onto iTunes and stack them up in the corner. It feels somehow more like I’ve got a handle on the music if I physically own it, and getting the artwork onto iTunes felt like a link to this physical medium.

Well shame on me for trying to cling to the old ways! Shame on bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers for moaning about people downloading their music, instead of embracing the new ways! When we get fixated on album art, sleevenotes and so on we’re just not getting it - CDs and record sleeves aren’t music, music is music and it’s something that only ever really exists in the air and in the mind. That’s why the abstraction of going digital is so appropriate - it frees the music.

So maybe next time I get the urge to download more album art and lyrics for my collection, I’ll just stop and listen to the music itself.

Now (and forgive me for dipping into a bit of UKFast promotion here) I’ve been working on our new Client Area for a couple of weeks now, and it’s struck me that the best bit of working on the web is the changeability of it all. Whilst there’s always got to be a deadline, things are never set in stone. Nothing’s ever perfect, but working in this fluid medium means that, if an improvement occurs to me, I can make it - now, or in the future.

Say you’re a novelist, and you’ve just noticed you’ve used the word… I don’t know… ‘wow’ far too many times, so many times that it looks ridiculous, hey, you used it five times on page 57 alone… well, you’ve just had that book published and now you look silly, you wow-obsessed fool. You can only beg the readers ‘be kind to my mistakes’. If I on the other hand suddenly notice I’ve got far too many… I don’t know… mysql_query commands going on in a script, hey, I used it five times on line 57 alone… well, I can fix it just like that - either now, or in the future when somebody goes ‘Oi Chris, you mysql_query obsessed fool’.

Of course there are times when you could have done with some burning bridges, and you really really don’t want to see X Y or Z script again. But on the whole, it’s a satisfying plus-side to this beast we call development.

This phenomenon of online-ifying your personal life is really gathering speed, and I find myself worrying a little about the persistence of this information. Whilst I’m getting sick to death of myspace related stories, this one highlights the issue nicely. For a while back there it looked like El Murdocho owned your info for ever if you posted anything up - seems this has been resolved to something more satisfactory, but the fact of the matter is that information on the web stays there.

Myspace may crumble and take all those ridiculous abuses of CSS with it, lastfm may forget how many times I’ve listened to Dumb Dumb Dumb by Teenage Fanclub - and yet for years, perhaps for ever, archives will remain. Stuff on the web is publicly available information, and people like the Internet Archive (and Google’s infamous cache) are filing it all away. Yes, future employers may be able to see those pictures on Flickr of you getting drunk and that rant about authority you posted on your blog. Even I (yes, even I) am a little worried that, if, say, I post a link to chucknorrisfacts.com - sometime in the future someone will be searching for me and, not being aware that Chris in tech told me to post it, might think I’m the sort of joker who spends all day on chucknorrisfacts.com. And I’m not.

My advice? Get up while you can and delete yourself! OK, so I’ve had no success in implementing this noble aim myself - because those sites are just too cool. Maybe that’s the problem - cool vs privacy, fun in the present vs paying for it in the future. God, thinking like that, seems like I’m getting old.

When I’m reading something on the web I compulsively select and deselect text with the mouse. I’ll click and drag to highlight from the bottom of a paragraph, all the way up to the top. Then I’ll click elsewhere to clear the selection, click and drag from the top of the paragraph to the bottom, lather, rinse, and repeat about fifty times.

The select-itis does not stop there. Give me a windows desktop and a slightly distracted mind and I’ll easily spend ten minutes clicking and dragging to bring up that little lasso, making the little icons go all blue and then back to normal. My poor iconic fools, behold the selectifying power of my mighty mouse and weep!

I can’t stop. I’ve been doing it whilst writing this. Is it ny hands trying to keep themselves occupied when they’re not flying over the keys? Is it some deep psychological need to make everything… turn… blue? Is it something that always annoys Daz when he’s looking at my screen? (yes to that last one). I don’t know if anyone else has select-itis, or any similar afflictions, but whilst I’m waiting to find out I’m off back to my PHP code for a bit more click, drag, click… click, drag, click…

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.

Fair play to Mr Orwell, he was pretty much spot on with the old telescreen concept. Good job he wrote 1984 - whilst there’s precious little reason for me to quote his other books about pot plants and being a tramp, it’s de rigeur for every person writing about tech to mention the original Big Bro at some point.

So telescreens are one step closer - and it’s Apple, who have famously flirted with a bit of 1984 imagery, who are developing it. The screen that watches you as you watch it - it’ll make video chats a lot more natural, and it’s undoubtedly exciting tech - but whereas you can turn off a webcam or even cover it up to make sure nobody catches you picking your nose or plotting the downfall of the government, how will we ever be sure that our screen isn’t sneaking a peek at us?

But of course, it’s not new technology at all. Like a lot of the Internet (with the youthful WWW a notable exception), email’s been around since the 60s. I think it’s starting to show its age. Last night I was watching (I confess with some amusement) Rich trying to send a set of hefty images to a client - as often seems to be the case this was quite a painful, slow process. Have you ever had to receive a large file like that? Of course you have, we’re all technical wizards here, right? You know what a pain it is - and it’s no surprise given that this is a technology originally designed to send plain text messages between studious scientific types.

Nowadays email’s mainstream enough to have been comprehensively hijacked by spammers. The big boys of the email world tell us it’s alright, they’ll make stronger filters, they’ll add anti-phishing systems. Now I have to put up with Thunderbird telling me half my mail is a scam even when it comes direct from tech support (scandalous, those magic beans I’m getting from Paul are totally kosher). The truth is, we have all the resources we need to develop a new email system from scratch, but it’s become so important and crucial to the way the world works that we’re stuck building on top of an out-dated system.

I hope we can work it out, because I’m a little worried that half of the Queen’s 17,000 mails were of the viagra-selling flavour - and that’s no way to talk to royalty.

At UKFast towers some of that noise is Rich whistling, or Chris pretending to be a pirate. Over there sales and tech are on their phones, over here there’s the constant tapping of finger against key. Being in Manchester we’ve less a sound of the underground, more a gut-wobbling rumble of the overground as trams go past outside. None of this can really be brought to a stop (unless we tape up Rich’s mouth), and to tell the truth I think most of us like a little of background sound - myself especially - I hardly ever get the show on the road in the morning without plugging my brain into the iPod.

But there’s one source of noise I think that we in the office - and everyone outside of it too - could do without: that din that computers make. As the beasts get faster and faster their fans get louder and louder. We sit pretty near the office’s server rack and it’s like the constant roar of an angry ocean. My PC at home sounds like an asthmatic hoover - you can actually hear it through the ceiling if you go downstairs. Seems like some manufacturers are catching up - apparently a lot of the new Mac models, for instance, are somebody-somewhere-is-eating-a-Cadbury’s-Whisper-quiet - but far too many PCs still produce a wash of background sound that makes it a relief to turn them off. I love machines - in fact, I’m waiting for a terminator-style brutal machine uprising - but sometimes I wish they’d just shut up.

Up until a few days ago I was using the new Windows Live Mail beta, instead of my usual Hotmail account. Now I’m back to good old Hotmail. Why? Mainly because the new system doesn’t work in Firefox. In my tricked-out browser of choice the whole Live Mail system is actually worse than Hotmail. You can’t seem to sort your mail, or type in a contact’s name and have it replaced with their email address, images don’t open up how I like them… it’s been making me grind my teeth daily since I started to use it.

Now I don’t know if Microsoft are planning on de-crippling the system for use in FF - as far as I can tell, all the AJAX (blimey, the A, J, A and X keys on my keyboard seem to be wearing out at the moment) bells and whistles Live Mail uses should be easy to implement on other browsers. But Live’s inability to work on my favouite orange beast isn’t the only thing that puts me off. The whole look of the system is artless; there’s certainly nothing to compare with the friendly pastel shades and spot-on branding of Gmail. The name ‘Windows Live Mail’ is similarly awful, and seems to be another attempt to tie in this web-based service with a specific operating system. Isn’t it a principle feature of the web that it is non-platform specific?

It seems fairly silly of Microsoft to assume that, if they migrate my current Hotmail over to this new, more Windows-ish, more Internet Explorer-ish system, that I will feel more inclined to stick with all their other products. I won’t. If Live Mail doesn’t get a lot better, when they switch off Hotmail I’ll be considering a defection. Hey, I’ve even used Live Mail under IE and I’m still fairly unimpressed. Then again, perhaps one thing keeping me hanging back from a Gmail defection is this (prepare for a highly suspect metaphor): I don’t want to put all my information eggs in one shiny, smiley and ever-so-slightly-too-powerful Google-shaped basket.

Now aside from that introduction putting you off the idea of inviting me to a party, there’s a link in there between my two conversational subjects (I have more, but don’t get me started on the boring travel stories). Computers are great at media; digital techniques are all important in film (most blockbusters couldn’t survive without CGI), people like Mike Skinner and Daniel Bedingfield can record hit songs on their PCs without even leaving their bedrooms (some may wish they never had left), and now that most of us are up to speed with broadband we can access all this stuff in the proverbial comfort of our own homes.

But media? The media is rubbish at computers. Well, to be fair, it’s more accurate to say fiction is rubbish at computers. Almost without fail, the portrayal of computers - and those magical people who work with them - is incredibly unrealistic. OK, so I’m not expecting to turn on Hollyoaks and see realism. But it gets hard to suspend my disbelief when I see these computers that make wooshing, beeping, bubbly little electronic sounds every time someone clicks the mouse. Every time! It’s not just sounds, it’s the way every single window has to flip round, zoom in and out and do a little dance instead of just popping up like real windows do. Hollywood computers are the worst for this - Sandra Bullock’s computer in The Net? It’d have been out the window in five minutes if I’d had the lead role. Maybe I’d have then escaped all her identity-theft problems and the whole film would have been much more relaxed.

On the other hand, it would be very nice if PCs started up instantaneously like they do on TV. It’d also be quite cool if there were as many Macs knocking about (I’m sure that comment’s going to get me into trouble). Macs are everywhere in film and TV because: a) the people who make film and TV tend to use them in the first place and b) they just look cool. In real life, you can throw a stone and a dozen Windows boxes will be in range, but the only shiny, translucent Macs around are the ones in the special section of the department stores. And the ones on the BBC’s inexplicably popular Hustle.

As for the people who work with computers, in TV and film they range from simply disfunctional to absolutely repulsive. Most of us in the office enjoyed Channel 4’s hit-and-miss sitcom The IT Crowd, but come on, we’re all a bit cooler than that. Aren’t we? We certainly aren’t like Jurassic Park’s treachourous, egg-stealing, obese, magic-word-demanding Dennis Nedry. Then again, if someone could point me towards an IT department staffed by the improbably glamourous likes of Antitrust’s Lisa Calighan and Goldeneye’s Natalya Simyonova… well, let’s just say that my blog posts could well come to a sudden end.

Come on media types, we all use computers these days. We know how they work. We know they can be exciting, and the people who work with them are often saints, but we also know that they tend to be simply useful, relatively non-flashy tools. The computers, I mean, not the people.

• Firebombing!
• Police stings!
• Rupert Murdoch!

For those of you unaware (i.e. those of you who aren’t as young and cool as you think you are), Myspace is a ’social networking’ site that basically reproduces the grown-up web in a microcosm of epileptic-fit inducing flashing backgrounds, pictures of teenagers looking moody (don’t they always?) and enormous lists of favourite bands. The site’s main thrust lies in its blogging features and the ability to build lists of your virtual friends. Aside from this it’s become a very musical place, offering the chance for musicians to upload their stuff and then build a fanbase with the friend list functions.

I’m not too interested in the controversy, its seems to me they’re just a new spin on those old ‘paedophiles lurking in every chatroom’ Daily Mail-isms we’ve all run through a thousand times before. What I do like is keeping tabs on this new breed of community sites - and I’d like to pay homage to three of my favourites.

First up, Flickr. The massive popularity of digital cameras has fuelled all sorts of online photo-album websites, and this is a top-notch example. Flickr gives you plenty of space for uploading pictures, and all the usual titling, captioning and rotating features you’d expect. What makes it a little more interesting and a lot more fun is the tagging aspect. Just as we tag our posts on this blog, so you tag photos on Flickr. Users searching for ‘disturbing animal’ are then able to get such highly useful results as… this. OK, so it all depends on how well people tag their photos, but coupled with the tags is a large community and the ability to post comments on other peoples photos, and it’s extremely interesting to see which of your photos are the most frequently viewed.

Yet another tag-heavy system is 43 things. It’s a kind of networked to-do list, a space to track either your mundane plans for the near future or your desire to become a pirate (154 people want to do that?! We all know ninjas are better). You can post blog-style entries on your progress on any of your things, and you can roam around other people’s lists - at a click of the mouse you can add appropriate someone else’s desire to learn Swahili as one your own aims. One of the nicest things about the site is the idea of ‘cheers’ - if you approve of someone’s thing, you can give them a cheer, they’ll note your approval and then you can thank them via private messages. You then become friends, et voila, Bob’s your uncle, social networking at its finest.

One of my most-visited sites over the last year has been Last.FM, formerly the wonderfully named Audioscrobbler. It’s my favourite because it combines music and statistics - perhaps my favourite things outside of robots and Subway stickers. You install a plug-in for your PC music player of choice (iTunes for me), and then that sneaks about in the background as you listen to music, compiling a list of your favourite artists and tracks on your Last.FM user page. Very interesting to find out just how often I listen to my strangely mis-matched collection of Elvis Costello and Girls Aloud records, but even more interesting to be told who else on the system is listening to a similar mix of music - and based on that, the system then makes recommendations as to stuff I might like. You can even listen to web-streaming radio stations based on your neighbour’s musical tastes. Of course, as with all these new social networking sites, there’s plenty of room for improvement - apparently, I should be listening to a lot more Billy Joel. Hmmm.

At the helm of R&D, Daz runs a two-screen behemoth of a desktop. Aside from making me jealous this lets him juggle about ten things at once, and gives him the luxury of running both a ‘testing’ screen and a ‘coding’ screen. For a man with such an elephantine memory this system is perfect - as for me, when I try it I’m always forgetting where I’ve left the mouse pointer.

Like Darren, designer Rich favours a CRT monitor over TFT. Being a design bod and thus obsessed with Pantone references and the like, he needs the superior colour reproduction. Rich has only the one monitor, but to make up for this he has it set to a resolution that means the biggest 72pt text comes out eye-bleedingly small. When he’s not battling with his weapons of choice, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Photoshop, it’s always amusing to send Rich an email and watch him peering at the screen trying to decipher the small print.

My next door neighbour Giles likes things much like I do - highly customised. He has that whole ‘Windows taskbar on the top of the screen’ look going on (a case of Mac OS envy?), and a set of wallpapers drawn from his current work on Airwaves-Ducati, all carefully tailored in his beloved Gimp.

Desktop wallpaper is one of the most revealing components of your setup - if you’re going to customise one thing, normally the wallpaper is it. Next to Giles, Laura has an inexplicable picture of some men with some fish. Jonathan has a picture of his little god-daughter, last time I looked Rob in sales had his dog, and his manager George has some kind of fantasy island. Work, fish, family, pets and holidays - all subjects that pop unbidden into our minds during the course of a working day.

Myself, I have a jarringly minimalist Windows environment that’s been tweaked and fiddled with as much as is humanly possibly. There are no icons on the desktop itself. None! This tends to upset anyone who tries to use my PC, and in turn that pleases me greatly. It’s mine, get off (NB. this attitude can backfire when you need to ask tech support to fix something). It’s a very different approach from that of someone like Daz or Laura, plastering files across the desktop, using it as another inbox. I have my quick shortcuts to Ultraedit, Firefox and Filezilla in my taskbar, and all documents are hidden away in rigid directories. It’s anal, and perhaps a little contrary - but it’s me, and I love working in my way.

As for desktop images, if Jonathan has a picture of his goddaughter, well, he’s a people person. So Giles must be an aspirational type, with his pictures of superbikes, and George is thinking ahead to his honeymoon. If this is all so, I’m not quite sure what my collection of wickedly grinning Terminator pictures says about me…

Anyone else care to psychoanalyse through the medium of the desktop?

It hardly seems surprising that there’s a game coming out called ‘Office Massacre’ (well, at least there was) -the cultural consensus seems to be that the office is a hellhole full of David Brents and broken dreams. Furthermore, over the years we’ve heard again and again that technology will let us all work from home. So why am I sitting here in a high-tech company that mainly runs from an open-plan office? Shouldn’t we all be wired up to the matrix, holding meetings in a virtual space straight out of Tron and disconnecting occasionally to watch Neighbours at our leisure?

Well, from the technology side of things, yes, I could be working at home. But I’d be at a further level of remove from the team we have here. Communication is everything, and spontaneous communication is essential in this work. As I mentioned in my first post, I want to produce usable stuff, putting the emphasis on people. There’s no better way to balance the highly abstracted coding my department has to do than to stick us right in the middle of a busy office. We can see what sales are up to, we can hear what tech support are telling the people who use our systems, we don’t always need to formalise the process with meetings and phone calls, we’re in it.

And the social side of things is much better than they’d have you believe, the writers of The Office or those smug rock stars who ‘just couldn’t bear the anonymity of office work’. Maybe we’re lucky here with this mix of characters, but come on, who doesn’t enjoy a bit of gossip? We’re all social animals, even those of us who know what AJAX stands for and can happily spend an hour solid quoting Tarantino movies, and here we all are in a big room where we can easily decide to go to the pub after work - and if I was working from home I’d never get a chance to steal Giles’ crisps.

When I’m not dealing with that triumvirate of three letter abbreviations (let’s not get started on the acc vs abb stuff), I like to try and get my head round new web tech. Currently the biggest noise in development circles goes by the rather unwieldy name AJAX.

And it’s actually the word AJAX, rather than the technology it describes, that I want to talk about. The technology - or rather technique - itself is handy, and as soon as I had the chance I stuck a bit of it on our Reseller Area site (first person to tell me where wins my undying admiration). Being able to interface with the server ‘behind the user’s back’ feels tremendously freeing, and there’s going to be a huge range of stunning sites using this very soon.

But that word, ugh. AJAX. It makes me think of a cleaning product. It’ll make less geeky types than me think of a football team. It sounds like the name of a design-by-committee videogame character. It does not sound friendly, it does not sound user-centric and, in its unabbreviated form ‘Asynchronous Javascript And XHTML’, it even scares as big a nerd as me. AJAX as a term barely makes sense, and it’s being blown up to the same giddy buzzword heights as Java was a decade or so ago.

The web, as something designed to be used, should always be led by the user. When projects with names like AJAXWrite come out, it seems to me that us web types are letting the technology take centre stage. I don’t ever want to have to explain to a non-computing friend what this mystical, horrible word means - I felt silly enough explaining it to my colleague Chris, and he’s the sort of chap who installs linux on his microwave for fun…

Let’s keep web tech behind the scenes, people - before it just get silly.