Chatting with an IT industry pal the other day, we got to wondering what might constitute web 3.0. It’s fair to say that web 2.0 is a pretty loosely defined thing, but we agreed to define it as emphasising collaboration, valuing user-generated content, and employing flexible, scripted front ends.

My pal thought web 3.0 would be a kind of merging of web and TV, whereby sites can be delivered entirely through the medium of moving images and sound. I volunteered that this, while by no means out of the question, would by a nightmare. I already despise web-sites that are overly reliant on Macromedia Flash, so I for one would not welcome further migration in this direction.

But then I am middle-aged. Perhaps the young things think Flash-based sites are just great.

My own feeling is that web 2.0 will be about filtering. It will be about saying, “I like this content, show me more like this,” and “I don’t like this content, don’t show me anything like it again.”

This filtered fussiness ought to be as granular as you like. Read a comment by an idiot? Click to filter out the bozo in future. Don’t like a particular journalist at The Guardian? Click to filter the hack out. And on the flipside, if you love the witty, incisive comments by BlabberMouth23 you should be able to click to bring them to the top, or be notified when the next pearl of wisdom is plonked on the site. Love columns by Avery Wiseman at the Grauniad? Click to have his latest thoughts flagged up large on the home page.

Of course a true web 3.0 experience would involve visiting very few actual home pages - you might see them when you first stumble across a new site. Thereafter, you’ll want to plug a feed into your reader, which will filter all of the stories, pictures, posts, videos, comments and claptrap from your feeds into categories with sorted duplicates and related items, just as Google News currently does in a much less personalised fashion.

“You’ll be able to do all of that with the semantic web,” my pal said, waving a dismissive hand.

I’m not convinced by that. My understanding is that the semantic web relies on site providers to honestly describe their content. Any innovation involving the internet in which honesty is a required element is a non starter - it will be spammed into a black hole, alongside the otherwise excellent concept of the trackback.

What do you think the next phase of the web will involve?

For reasons best known to itself, the Periodical Publishers Association (PPA) has decided, appearances to the contrary, that Lem must be a female name. I know this because every email or letter I get from the PPA is addressed to “Ms Lem Bingley”. 

Presumably the PPA rents its list of highly accurate editorial names, because I get quite a few letters from the less switched-on public relations firms addressed to Ms Lem as well. You can tell they are not the brightest bulbs in the PR box because they send letters, rather than dispatching emails or picking up the phone and finding out that I have a very deep voice for a Ms.

It’s not quite as silly as the period, in the mid-1990s, when I used to get mail addressed to “Mr Me Lem Bingley”. It took me a while to work out that a bunny must have called and asked, “Who should I send press releases to?” and I must have replied, “You can send them to me, Lem Bingley.”

Back in the present, I’m concerned that my honorary status as a female journalist may get me into some awkward spots. The other day I received a card inviting me to an event organised by a group called Women in the City. The event looked very interesting, and I was about to respond in the affirmative, when I suddenly stopped and thought. I’m not a woman, and I don’t work in the City. Maybe it’s not for me.

Part of what journalists try to do every day is to play futurologist - to extrapolate future trends from today’s events. IT managers have to do the same, of course, every time they propose a budget or a five-year plan.

It’s interesting to take a well-publicised event and to think through where it might lead. The recent examples of data misplacement, starting with HMRC’s infamous lost discs in the post from last November, provide a great example.

As a wake up call for business in general, these data losses will fuel interest in some obvious things, and subsequent action is likely to boost the fortunes of particular IT vendors. On the up will be things like:

• Security software in general
• Encryption software in particular (good news for suppliers like SecurStar, GuardianEdge, Check Point and PGP)
• Access control and single-sign-on software (from stalwarts Sun, CA, RSA, IBM-Tivoli, plus specialists like Imprivata)
• Account and identity management tools (Quest Software, NetIQ/Attachmate)
• Systems management software (LanDesk, Tivoli, MS-SMS, Unicenter, etc)
• Database and data management software (Oracle, IBM DB2, Progress, MySQL/Sun, Postgres, Actuate, Brocade, etc)
• Hardware-based access security (Aladdin, SecurID)
• Security consulting (big consultants plus BT, Verizon, 7Safe, Insight, ComSec, etc)
• Security-as-a-service (BT Counterpane, VeriSign, Symantec)
• ISO 17799  certification

Thinking more laterally suggests a whole host of other likely springs of interest. The current furore may be good for Microsoft, if it hastens adoption of Windows Vista - because the Enterprise edition includes BitLocker encryption software as standard.

It surely increases the likelihood of a new regulations. A new breach disclosure law is likely - after all, ministers are now highly incentivised to demonstrate that government departments are not the only organisations capable of losing personal data on a grand scale.

Politicians are also likely to give more resources and more teeth to the Information Commissioner's Office, so as to be seen to be doing something to correct the problem. 

At the less likely end of the spectrum, there may be a resurgence in interest in full public key infrastructure (PKI) schemes, of the kind that last seemed necessary when Baltimore was worth billions rather than being bankrupt.

More likely is that there will be increased interest in server-based computing (benefiting Citrix, Microsoft/Softricity and the like); boosted fortunes for the makers of thin client and, I suspect, thin laptops such as HP’s recently introduced example.

A similar jerk of the knee will also lead buyers to rack-mounted blade PCs from the likes of IBM and HP, and related management software from ClearCube and VMWare.

Fear of data breaches will also stoke the already fierce interest in software as a service, and Saas-based CRM systems from NetSuite and Salesforce.com. In turn, this will encourage more firms to look at cloud-based services like Google Apps.

And finally I predict an increasing spirit of false confidence. Lots of firms will put in place technically superb systems to which any passing hacker will be able to gain access with a few employee names and a list of the 50 most common passwords.

On Saturday I saw a performance of Dealer’s Choice, a play about male ego, stupidity, throwing good money after bad, and not knowing when to quit. Although I can wholeheartedly recommend the play, I evidently didn’t learn anything from it, because it didn’t stop me wasting a whole load of time over the weekend trying to get a good result out of Windows Movie Maker.

Movie Maker is an "easy and fun" video editing application that ships as an embedded part of Microsoft’s recent Windows operating systems. It has a relatively poor reputation, so I should have steered well clear, but I kind of accidentally got sucked in to using it. And initially I started to feel that it wasn’t actually all that bad.

Anyway, the details of why I ended up using it are unimportant. Suffice to say that I now feel its poor reputation is deserved and I won’t be using it again. But, male ego being what it is, I didn’t know when to quit. Along the way I learned some lessons that I’d like to pass on to other unfortunate mugs like me, who are having problems with Windows Movie Maker:

1. If you’re tempted to use Windows Movie Maker, don’t.
2. If you’ve ignored step 1 and find you have a completed Movie Maker (.MSWMM) project file, you may surprise yourself and be quite pleased with the result. By which I mean it may look quite good in preview mode. However, the best bet is to give up now. Don’t be tempted to click “Save Movie File” on the File menu, to export a finished edit. It will only lead to heartache and disappointment.
3. If you’ve ignored step 2, you may find that the .WMV file created by Movie Maker exhibits a picture-size different from your source material. Movie Maker only exports in the frame sizes and bit-rates it deems suitable, so if they don’t suit you, then the best bet is to give up. You may also find that the audio on your file sucks. I mean sucks. Like you’re listening to the audio with a kazoo jammed in each ear. Give up now.
4. I’m assuming you’re pressing on. Download Microsoft’s Windows Media Encoder. Unlike Movie Maker, this is a decent program, albeit a relatively unfriendly one. Don’t be tempted to ignore its onerous system requirements: if your PC isn’t up to snuff then give up now. The software will run on a sub-spec PC but it will produce movies that look like Ray Harryhausen shot them in 1955.
5. Media Encoder will let you resize your WMV file and it will do a reasonable job of preserving visual clarity and audio fidelity. You will probably need to go back to Movie Maker and create a new WMV source file using the “High quality video (large)” setting. Then you can use Media Encoder to create a file at the exact frame size and bit rate that you wanted originally. You may be lucky enough to get a good result from this. However, if you’ve used any fragments of non-native audio in your Movie Maker file - MP3 music, say - then Movie Maker is still going to bite you. No matter what quality setting you choose, it will create a WMV file that sounds like a bee has flown into your ear. Media Encoder can’t fix this. The best course at this point is to give up.
6. If you’re still with me, you poor deluded fool, then you may have acceptable visuals with terrible sound. You’ll need to use something else to edit any sounds that you’ve added like background music. Go back to Movie Maker and make notes on the timing of your introduced sounds. Then delete them, and create a new, high-quality WMV without them. Check any remaining audio. If the native audio is still hopeless, you will need to give up. If it’s acceptable, then you can run the file through Encoder again to get the frame size and bit rate you want.
7. Take the audio fragments you wanted and, referring to your notes, use an audio editor - Audacity, say - to create a new file of the right length, with the right sounds in the right places to match your Movie Maker visuals. Take the resulting MP3 file and use Media Encoder to convert it to the Windows Media Audio (.WMA) format. Then locate Windows Media Stream Editor (it will have arrived when you installed Media Editor). This lets you combine different media streams into a single output file (confusingly called an Audience). Use it to splice your WMA audio overlay with the WMV visuals and audio.
8. You may now have a WMV file of acceptable quality. Enjoy it, but learn your lesson. Don’t go near Movie Maker again.

Update, 29 Jan 08:
A simpler alternative to steps 6-8 is to pass any MP3 files or other non-native audio through the Media Encoder to create .WMA files. These can then be readily dropped into Movie Maker's Audio/Music track and edited in-place as required. This will provide acceptable, but certainly not hi-fi, audio for your movie.

Why would anyone complain about the government's announcement of £140m funding for science and maths teaching in schools? It seems like a good move all round, right?

Employers’ group the CBI is full of praise, with the body’s director of human resources policy, Susan Anderson, saying, “This is very welcome investment which should lead to more specialist science teachers who can be inspirational, confident and enthusiastic about their subject. That is crucial if we are to raise young people's interest and attainment in science, technology, engineering and maths subjects and if the UK is to stay a leading world economy, able to compete with the emerging economic powerhouses of China and India.”

I’d be enthusiastic too, had I not been collared at the weekend by an apoplectic particle physicist. Rather than probing the inner workings of the universe, my academic friend is currently staring into a financial black hole. Tearing at his remaining hair he railed against the kind of blinkered central-government budgeting that advances funds to build a research centre one year and then denies the funds to run it the next. More than 10,000 scientists have signed petitions complaining about this year's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) spending plans, and an £80m shortfall that will see lots of researchers looking for new posts. And with the funding crisis affecting the whole of the UK, a lot of good people will naturally be forced to look overseas.

So while I applaud moves to encourage our most intelligent young people to pursue a career in science and technology, it would be helpful if the money were made available to hang on to the brainboxes we already have.

The following is a list of mistakes recently made that really ought to have been obviously iffy from the outset:
1.    When providing IT to a distant retired relative for the first time, don’t forget to install remote access technology. After many painful sessions on the phone asking, “What does it say on your screen now?” I’ve since made a personal visit and installed LogMeIn. Which is bliss as long as the problem is not being unable to get online, with which remote access cannot help. 
2.    For reasons that are blindingly obvious, when organising two roundtable events for two different brands at the same time on the same day, don’t hold one at a Gaucho restaurant and the other at the Groucho Club.
3.    For reasons that are scarily obvious, when building a new airliner, don’t install a single data infrastructure for both critical flight data and passenger internet access. Unless you particularly want your approach to Heathrow to be controlled by the nine-year-old in row 27 via his PlayStation Portable.
4.    For reasons that are not at all obvious, don’t stay logged into your web email or online bank account in one tab while browsing other sites in another. As Tim Anderson relates, you could easily end up doing a Jeremy Clarkson.
5.    As Clarkson proved, don’t blather on about things that you know nothing about. Which is a good reason for this particular post to stop now.

Today, via Dennis Howlett, I reached the blog of Charles H. Green, which is focused on the issue of trust in business. It’s well worth bookmarking. I particularly liked Green’s simple observation that “the best way to be trusted is to actually be trustworthy”, a tenet that my bank used to appreciate but seems to have forgotten over the last 18 months.

Today, Green has posted about loyalty and credit cards, but there is a lesson or two for everyone in it.

Green first notes the following three reasonable business principles:

1.  Profit is a measure of business activity effectiveness
2.  Measurement is a valuable tool for management
3. Activities can be disaggregated into smaller, measurable activities.

And then lists the three bastard children into which the above have evolved:

1a.  Every business activity has value only insofar as it increases profit
2a.  If you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it
3a.  Anything worth measuring is even better measured in shorter durations and smaller units.

As Green goes on to say, “This extreme thinking has meant that the management of business these days is centred on short-term profit manipulation - not on long-term value creation.”

I’ve heard 2a, in particular, from quite a few enterprise application vendors. It makes me wonder how much responsibility the tech sector should bear for the metamorphosis of reasonable business methods into the short-termist, self-defeating competitive lunacy that we see all around us. 

If you’d asked me which company spends most on research and development worldwide, I’d have said IBM (famed for filing lots of patents), or possibly Microsoft (it employs lots of researchers, even if it doesn’t always show), or perhaps Honda (humanoid robots and jet aircraft don’t come cheap, after all, especially when your main business is building cars, motorbikes, marine engines and lawnmowers).

Of course I’d have been wrong, as the good people at IEEE Spectrum have shown. They’ve done the leg work (or mouse work) necessary to comb through all the annual reports and work out who spends what, compiling the R&D global top 100. Their numbers are for 2006 fiscal years, as it’s tough to get good data for the year we’re still in.

The surprising top 10, in pure pile-of-dollars terms, is as follows:

1.    Toyota (Japan) $7.49bn
2.    Pfizer (US) $7.42bn
3.    Ford (US) $7.2bn
4.    Johnson & Johnson (US) $7.13bn
5.    Microsoft (US) $7.12bn
6.    DaimlerChrysler (Germany) $7bn
7.    GlaxoSmithKline (UK) $6.61bn
8.    Siemens (Germany) $6.6bn
9.    General Motors (US) $6.6bn
10.    Volkswagen (Germany) $6.03bn

As you can see, Microsoft and Siemens are the only tech companies in the top 10, with five carmakers (none of them Honda) and three healthcare companies completing the roster. The US and Germany dominate, with the UK and Japan making up the numbers.

IBM comes in at number 14 with $5.7bn spent in 2006, and Asimo fans will find Honda at 19 with $4.6bn.
Other notable entries include Intel at 12th place and $5.9bn; Finland’s Nokia at 17 with $5.1bn; and even acquisitive Oracle at the number 48 spot with $2.2bn spent in the labs.

Frankly I'm surprised that the tech sector is so poorly represented.

Of course Toyota happens to be the world’s largest automaker, and so presumably can afford to splash a bit of cash in the labs. Interestingly, IEEE Spectrum has also provided data for what it calls R&D intensity, or R&D spending as a proportion of turnover.

I put the numbers into a spreadsheet and reordered by intensity, and of course the top 10 looks rather different. These are the firms spending the most per dollar of revenue, and therefore the most committed to making business progress through research:

1.    Qinetiq (UK) 44.9% - defence
2.    Electronic Arts (US) 33.7% - tech
3.    Broadcom (US) 30.5% - tech
4.    Amgen (US) 23.6% - healthcare
5.    AMD (US) 21.3% - tech
6.    Schering-Plough (US) 20.6% - healthcare
7.    Qualcomm (US) 20.1% - tech
8.    Eli Lilly (US) 19.9% - healthcare
9.    NEC Electronics (Japan) 19% - tech
10.    Daiichi Sankyo (Japan) 18.4% - healthcare

This list (and the rest of the top 100 by intensity) seems to better match my own impressions and prejudices about tech sector spending.

Attempts to relate R&D spending to business growth are, of course, far from straightforward. As IEEE Spectrum observes:

“Apple, the one company perhaps most closely associated with innovation, doesn't even show up on the R&D leaderboard this year [and] hasn't appeared there [in the last five years]. Its absence can't be attributed to size, because Apple's sales of  $19.3bn surpassed those of 30 of the list's 100 firms. Comparing those sales to the relatively meager $712m Apple spent on R&D in 2006 yields an R&D Intensity of just 3.7 percent.”

So while it may feel like a forward-looking supplier ought to be diverting a healthy proportion of profit into creating tomorrow’s products - it ain’t necessarily so.

I’ve been using the beta version of the Bloglines RSS reader, since I learned about the pending upgrade through Drew’s PR blog a few weeks ago.

I like the changes a lot and find the beta a big improvement over the current mainstream Bloglines, which hasn’t really changed in a long while.

The Bloglines beta developers have clearly taken a long hard look at Google Reader before designing their upgrade, as the two function in a very similar manner. I prefer bits of both. Google’s ability to easily share content with others through a web page or RSS feed, with a simple tick, is very useful. If you’re a blogger you can add the resulting feed to a box in a sidebar, say. In an intranet context it’s very easy to provide recommended reading lists to colleagues, who can slurp up your recommendations through their own choice of content aggregator.

However, I prefer the way the Bloglines beta keeps track of what I have and haven’t read. Bloglines won’t fetch items I’ve previously read unless I tell it to. Reader, by contrast, automatically appends them to the bottom of the list of unread items if you scroll down, with a subtle colour change the only indication that you’ve seen the item before. I find this tends to waste my time.

Neither app seems inclined to let me personalise how I view new articles. I’d like to read in reverse order - ie, starting with the oldest item I’ve not yet read and working forward in time, whereas the assumption seems to be that I will always want to read the newest item first.

This is not necessarily the case, particularly in the Google aggregator. If you read and tick to share items as you go along, your shared feed ends up reading backwards - the newest items from your reading list each day become the oldest items in your shared list, and vice versa.

I’m sure both Bloglines and Google Reader will become more flexible in the future. Neither yet does what I’d really like them to do, though. What I want is an aggregator that genuinely aggregates - that can take multiple feeds and group stories together by content. For example, if six of my feeds all include a new article covering the same topic, I’d like to see them grouped together in the style of Google News.

Having written a bit about .uk domains over the last few days (or posted ill-informed rants, depending on your perspective), I was reminded of something I wrote in June about the .eu domain and its continuing lack of appeal within these islands.

Back in April, IT Week reader John McCormac argued that the Euro top-level domain would probably peak in popularity on the anniversary of its founding, on 7 April 2007, and thereafter find its real level of little interest. 

A graph of UK-based registrations since 1 January this year lends weight to McCormac’s view, although the slow recovery after April suggests that the .eu domain may regain it’s former popularity - albeit in about two years’ time.