I'm pleased to announce that IT Week's hotshot reporter, Phil Muncaster, has started his own blog. Phil has worked for IT Week for a little over a year and has already amassed more nicknames that the rest of the 14-strong editorial team put together. (All good names, obviously :-)

In the interim, I'm looking forward to learning exactly what Phil gets up to when he's not grilling IT industry execs over the phone and furiously typing up the results. Hopefully he'll find time to jot a few clues down in his blog.

Every business dreams of having workers it doesn't have to pay. Has Google cracked it?

One of the secrets of Google’s success is, by all accounts, its grasp of long-tail theory. Applying the theory to Google’s business implies that there are a relatively small number of advertisers with very large budgets, and a very large number of advertisers with small budgets - but that the sum total of all the small budgets greatly outweighs the few large ones.

It’s a theory, anyway, and there seems to be plenty of truth in it if Google’s bulging bottom line is anything to go by.

Whatever model you subscribe to, Google is certainly a dab hand at mopping up money from advertisers large and small with its AdWords programme. And it has proven equally adept at signing up content providers large and small, hoping to get a slice of Google’s action by carrying its AdSense adverts.

One interesting wrinkle of the long-tail business model is that Google ends up having financial arrangements with a very large number of advertisers and affiliates.

To simplify matters on both fronts, it automates billing and payment. Unless advertisers choose to pre-pay, they are therefore charged only when their ads have been clicked on by sufficient numbers of people. AdSense affiliates, meanwhile, are paid when their account is $100 or more in credit at the end of the month. Until the account gets to $100, they are not paid at all.

This is where the long-tail theory really pays off for Google.

Google’s process for matching adverts to content is pretty good, so it’s typical for content providers to see a promising click-through rate on the ads they host. But even so, most small sites – the web’s army of bloggers, for example – will be lucky to amass more than a dollar in AdSense revenue per thousand page impressions.

A modest site with, say, a couple of thousand page views per month will therefore need to carry Google advertising for about four years before it sees a cent in revenue.

Google, meanwhile, doesn’t care how many of these small sites it signs up. It can aggregate millions of tiny content providers to amass a worthwhile advertising environment for any advertiser.

If you follow long tail theory, there are a lot more small content providers than there are big sites. Which means that there will be a great many sites still waiting to amass enough clicks to get their first $100 payment from Google. The odd $5 balance here and $20 there may well add up to a very large sum of money sitting, waiting, in Google's coffers. (Google’s financial data doesn’t mention debt, but I’m assuming the firm makes a provision on its balance sheet for the money that it owes to affiliates and hasn’t yet paid).

Interestingly, if you follow long tail theory to its logical extreme, there will be a significant number of sites carrying Google ads at such a low rate that they will shut up shop and disappear without ever getting paid.

All of which is nice work if you can get it. And Google certainly gets it.

Microsoft will be defending itself against antitrust claims in court again this week. Not a new case, but an appeal in the long-running EU case against the software giant.

So much has been written about the rights and wrongs of Microsoft’s aggressive bundling tactics that it’s hard to lift finger to keyboard to add more. But Microsoft does have at least a small point when it notes that rivals to some of its bundled add-ons still flourish: “The rapid rise of Apple’s iTunes service and Macromedia’s Flash media player demonstrate the vigorous competition in the media player market,” it states – media players being the crux of the EU judgement against it.

Microsoft also notes that European PC providers on average install 3.2 media players before shipping their boxes (it neglects to add that this number would no doubt be a lot lower – approximately equal to one – if antitrust courts hadn’t taken such a dim view of its former hardball contract-negotiation tactics).

Anyway, it strikes me that Microsoft is onto something: the public does want choice. Particularly when the default – Windows Media Player – is rubbish (in my humble opinion, obviously).

Perhaps the above figures that Microsoft is so keen to present tell a greater truth. Even predatory bundling won’t kill off rivals if the bundled products aren’t up to scratch.

Microsoft is of course a changed beast – it is, apparently, talking to the European Commission's competition people before releasing its upcoming Vista operating system onto the market, rather than launching it with a full complement of bells and whistles and toughing out the ensuing trouble.

Perhaps the prospect of fines of €2m per day are a sharp enough prod for even a calloused giant like Microsoft to take note.

There’s a learning curve for every skill, and at IT Week we’ve just fallen off at a sharp bend.

For the past ten weeks or so we’ve been experimenting with podcasting – much like just about everyone else in the world with something to say.

I’ve been delighted with the content of our programmes, but depressed about the audio quality. It has proven tougher than I expected to get consistent sound levels within the discussion format we’ve chosen. 

We decided to throw money at the problem and invested in new microphones, new cables, a mixer and a new professional-quality digital recording device. The only gap in this carefully assembled chain of professionalism lay in the shaven-faced monkeys operating it – ie, us lot. Along with our carefully considered words, this week we also managed to record a deafening amount of 50Hz hum – presumably by getting our mains wires crossed.

Rather than re-recording the whole thing we’ve elected to scrap this week’s programme and put our efforts into working out what went wrong.

With luck, our next podcast will be clear as a bell. Either that or I’ll be bidding on reel-to-reel decks on eBay and going analogue.

Here at IT Week we’re all for bits and bytes, but we also must deal with one resolutely analogue interface: printed words on paper.

So every week, a minor miracle happens - one that I’m never around to witness.

Here in our Central London offices the editorial team wraps up production of the printed edition at 1pm on a Friday, and then (via the pub, in a fair few cases) we immediately set to work on the next issue. I stop worrying about the print edition at this point, as it passes into the domain of Jo Hurst, our production director, who is in charge of the miraculous part: getting tens of thousands of issues onto readers’ desks by Monday morning.

Our freshly completed pages, in the form of PDFs, whiz via the magic of the interweb to St Austell in Cornwall, to a printing firm called St Ives Roche.

St Ives manages not to mix up our pages with those of Marie Claire or Woman & Home, which are produced at the same site, and transforms our PDFs into reams of freshly inked paper. The last section, containing our cover and contents pages, comes off the line in the middle of Friday afternoon.

The pages then move onto a saddle-stitching line for assembly, stapling and trimming. Every issue is finally in its recognisable form by midnight on Friday – stacked onto pallets. And at this point everyone heads home for a kip.

At six the next morning, while I’m still very firmly asleep, pallets of issues are to be found trundling across the frosty industrial-estate car park that separates St Ives Roche from the premises of SouthWest Mailing, which is another division of St Ives.

SouthWest’s state-of-the-art mailing lines do a number of clever things. They bag each issue in polythene sheeting, drawing it from huge reels and heat-sealing the edges. An inkjet then squirts on the address for each subscriber, bag by bag.

But before the poly-wrap is sealed, all those pesky loose pages of advertising that fall into your lap have to be inserted. These can be added on an individual (or "split-run") basis – if a reader has ticked the box saying they’re interested in Unix servers, say, an insert plugging IBM’s pSeries range might well be plucked from its hopper and fed into the issue, whereas the next copy along may receive a different loose sheet, or nothing at all, depending on the preferences of the reader it’s destined for.

The issues pass through this line in postcode order, starting with Scotland and working south. At the end of the line the wrapped copies go into mailbags, ready for collection by the Royal Mail.

By midday on Saturday, Royal Mail trucks are leaving St Austell and hurtling up the A30 to Exeter, then onto the M5 to Bristol and the Post Office sorting depot. Issues travel by First Class post from there, being processed on a Sunday and arriving bright and early on a Monday morning with the rest of the weekend mail.

Jo was responsible for establishing IT Week's pioneering, over-the-weekend schedule at our launch back in May 1998, and readers will hopefully appreciate that rival publications still can’t quite manage the feat.

Of course all of the above is what happens on a normal week. This week is a bit different. Awkwardly, the staff at St Ives and SouthWest like to go home and take a well-deserved break over Easter. Which means that next week’s issue has to be printed, assembled, stapled, trimmed, inserted, bagged, addressed, loaded and shipped quite a bit earlier than normal. In fact we sent the final pages for next week's issue to Cornwall at 1pm today.

So if you’re reading the 17 April issue next week and it seems oddly out of date, bear with us. Some miracles take precedence over ours.

And have a happy Easter, from all of us at IT Week.

Update:
Thanks to Robert Collyer at St Ives for the above pic (click for a bigger version), which is almost literally hot off the press.

Call me a cynic if you like, but I’m fully expecting the government to announce, at some point in the not-too-distant future, that its newly established Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has been a resounding success. One of the proof points I expect to hear is that computer-based crime will have fallen dramatically since its inception.

The reason I suspect this is that e-crime in the UK has just got a lot harder to report. And encouraging victims not to report crime is a great way to make crime statistics tumble.

Prior to the creation of SOCA, appropriately enough on April Fool’s Day, e-crime victims could report crimes in confidence, directly to the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU). This followed the establishment of the NHTCU’s Confidentiality Charter in December 2002.

The Confidentiality Charter laid out the NHTCU’s investigation process, promised to minimise disruption to a company's day-to-day operations, and pledged to avoid damage to reputations.

“Our research shows that it is not the fear of reputation damage that is stopping companies reporting crime, but the fear that any investigation will disrupt day-to-day business activities,” said detective chief superintendent Len Hynds, then head of the NHTCU, at the launch of the Charter.

Within four months, the Charter had encouraged four major companies to come forward. “We're getting steady contacts from companies,” Hynds said in March 2003. “So far the results have been very encouraging.”

A year ago, Hynds’ replacement, detective chief superintendent Sharon Lemon, also lauded the Charter, saying it had improved the flow of information. “If a company says it has lost its customer database, that doesn't encourage people to [report the incident], but we give an assurance that we will keep this information confidential... We fully appreciate the sanctity of the brand, and would never do anything to damage it.”

Now the Charter is gone, and victims must trot down to their local police station to report attacks, where they will be highly unlikely to receive the kind of kid-gloves treatment the NHTCU promised.

Not only is the Charter gone, so is the NHTCU’s web site and the wealth of helpful information it contained. (If you've been directly affected by the Charter or its removal, please let me know).

I cannot see the loss of the Charter as anything but a retrograde step. It will set the fight against computer crime back immeasurably, encouraging the return of head-in-the-sand attitudes towards sharing information. That’s good news for only one constituency: criminals.

Apple’s launch of an official dual-boot system for its new Intel-based iMacs, in beta form, was a little unexpected. After all, the firm had insisted that it was impossible to run Windows on Apple hardware as recently as 9 March (shortly before the web’s legions of enthusiasts proved it was talking cobblers).

While the Mac faithful may be appalled, businesses are likely to be delighted. The news would be very welcome in the IT Week office but, alas, our new iMacs are Power-based and won’t run Apple’s Boot Camp software.

Talking of boots: how long will it be before the other shoe drops? As IT Week’s Roger Howorth has pointed out, there might be a substantial business market for Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware.

Apple insists OS X on grey boxes is out of the question. But now we know exactly how much store to set by that kind of statement.

It’s good to see that Gordon Brown may be considering a reprieve for the Home Computing Initiative, which officially dies tomorrow. Reportedly, the chancellor is now considering a similar scheme that would encourage employees to invest time in gaining broader IT skills.

What a surprise to learn that HCI was scrapped because the system was being gamed. Just like the fiasco of Individual Learning Accounts in 2001, which had fraudsters raking in cash, HCI was apparently withdrawn because beneficiaries were not spending the money on the intended pieces of kit.

Given the blurring of boundaries between flat-screen TVs and computer monitors, this outcome surely should have been predicted.

It’s a shame for those who might benefit from the scheme that there will now be a gap where help is not available.

Meanwhile, I’m currently proof-reading the back pages of next week’s IT Week print publication, and two IT Week columnists - Dave Bailey and Professor James Woudhuysen - have zoomed in further on Labour’s IT blind spot.

In Dave’s case, he wonders why the government’s plans for social housing don’t include the connectivity that might let people telework over genuinely fast links – giving more people the chance to work from home when their only alternative might be to not work at all.

Similarly, James wonders where the beef is in the government’s Olympics 2012 plans. Beijing has clocked that communications infrastructure must play a key part in its plans for the 2008 Olympics, but where are the equivalent plans to thread fibre through Tower Hamlets?

You’ll be able to read both opinion pieces in full very shortly. I’ll update this post as soon as they are available online.

Update:
Dave Bailey's article, Homes must come with fibre, is now online; as is James Woudhuysen's opinion piece on urban renewal, IT holds key to East London regeneration.

It must be odd being famous these days. Forget the professional paparazzi – these days celebrities must see nothing but ranks of people staring cross-eyed into mobile camera-phones.

At lunchtime today I zipped over to Shoreditch to see pop band A-ha perform a short set of three songs as part of Tiscali’s “Secret Sessions” events.

What struck me – apart from the band’s fantastic performance, obviously – was the sea of smartphones waving in the air. Most odd. Why go to a live event, only to watch most of it through a tiny screen?

But then I’m not innocent either. My own best camera-phone snap is above. Click the small pic for a bigger version of Morten and Paul in full flow.