For those who are still struggling to work it out, yesterday’s post about the exciting new aPhone was an April Fools’ Joke.

AQA, however, is no joke. You can text literally any question to 63336, and get an answer usually within minutes. Click here to ask a free question, and get a free answer to your mobile.

Today, AQA 63336 (my part-time employers) are launching a brand new concept in mobile phones, with the aPhone (click here for the Press release).

This incredible device, costing only £1 and compatible with all mobile networks, can answer any question posed. In tests, it correctly answered over 5 million questions, and is being compared to the ‘Guide’ in the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy. Customers can test the mobile’s answering capabilities through this page on the AQA website.

This represents a huge leap forward in mobile technology, and at an RRP of just £1, it’s likely to take the mobile world by storm. So make sure you get down to your local mobile phone retailer today, because this amazing new phone is sure to sell out fast.

Dave Gilbert’s written a great piece for the Beeb talking about his role in developing online news services. Well worth a read.

A true landmark vote in the Commons tonight gave a result that surprised many – including Iain Dale, Dizzy, and (errr) me. A vote in favour of a 100% elected House of Lords. Of course, quite how (if?) that’ll work remains to be seen, and it’s not quite what I would’ve gone for, but it’s probably a positive move. Are we on the brink of true bicameralism?

An interesting, but much more parochial landmark also passed tonight – over 100,000 spam comments caught by Akismet on this blog alone. Again, I’m not quite sure what that means for the future of humanity, but it’s interesting. On the one hand, it shows that spam is well and truly alive – but the fact that the filter caught it shows that their tactics aren’t quite so strong any more. It’s an interesting dichotomy – an increase in spam being used to mark its decline.

I’ve uploaded more stuff over on the Work pages for the first time in a while. I think it’s worth highlighting this piece, about the public health effect of speed cameras, which I think from previous posts that some of my readers might find interesting. It’s hardly crucial seminal research, but I think some people might find it an interesting read.

So there you go – three utterly different topics in one barely coherent post. It’s a while since I’ve done that.

Since midnight, I’ve received 313 spam emails, and 11 genuine emails. So, on this pretty representative sample, 97% of my email is spam. That’s probably atypical, as my email address is liberally sprinkled all over the internet, but still, 97% of my email is spam.

On this very blog, there have been no genuine comments since midnight, but hundreds of spam comments (I haven’t even bothered to count…). That’s not really such a representative sample, but I’d say about 97% of the comments received on here are spam, too.

Yet, thanks to my spam filters, I’ve only seen one spam email get through to my inbox, and one spam comment was caught in my moderation queue (where spam comments are held if my advanced spam filter okays the message but my crude one doesn’t). Out of several hundred spam messages, only two have passed before my eyes. That’s much, much less than 1% of the spam I’m sent.

So, effectively, instead of the huge proportion of spam destroying email as a communication tool, it is probably less of an issue for me now than it was when only a few spam messages were hitting my inbox. With such a volume, the filters have become more finely trained, so that there are few false-negatives, and very, very, very few false-positives. Spammers are killing their own trade by inundating me.

Clearly, as long as people respond to spam, spam will continue. But it actually seems that, despite spammers getting more advanced, the success of their message in getting through is actually decreasing (except for on the odd occasion when things go wrong). So, perhaps, if the spam stops getting through to most people, it will stop being a problem for most people – and maybe the spammers will have to find other ways of conning people.

A brilliant video explaining in simple terms the Web 2.0 concept and its impact.

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/web2.flv” /]

A year ago, I made a prediction. It was my ‘Tip for 2006’:

Patricia Hewitt will be forced to resign as Health Secretary before year’s end… or, if there’s a reshuffle, her sucessor will be forced to resign. One way or another, we will see the resignation of a Health Secretary this year.

Ah. Well. Yes. Not the best prediction in the world. In fact, pants.

My prediction for 2005 is kind of coming of age, though. I predicted that MSN, and particularly MSN Search, would be the ‘one to watch’. Well, in a blaze of advertorial glory, it’s gaining ground. So I wasn’t far wrong, just two years ahead of my time. Okay, I’m trying to talk myself out of a hole, alright?

So what’s my prediction for 2007? Well, there’s the easy ones, like Blair’s resignation and the serious back-scaling of troop numbers in Iraq. But they’re easy, and I don’t do easy. So here we go: I reckon that the outcome of Yates of the Yard’s investigation of the Party Loans scandal will be a bigger political story in the long-run of the year than Brown’s leadership succession. I reckon the charges are going to be more stinging than anyone imagines, the Labour Party will be pretty damaged, and the transition will hence be a lot more orderly than is currently expected – but there will be a bumpier ride in the long run.

So there you go. Not quite as specific or objective as other years, but maybe this time next year I’ll be able to report at least a modicum of success… Or not.

I’m not sure on this one… Is this exactly the opposite of what David Cameron wanted his Webcameron site to be used for – or is it exactly what he wanted?

It’s certainly ‘down with the kids’ – it’s not a Tory message, but is the hope that videos like this will attract young people to the site, so that when they start browsing they might come across some Conservative content – or even just reinforce the ‘Cool Cameron’ brand in their minds? Or was this exactly the sort of thing the critics feared?

I’m confusuled!

Ahh, Dixons. That famed electrical store which, three months ago, stopped existing as an actual entity, and turned entirely virtual with a woman poking at non-existing buttons on a non-existing screen and asking a non-existent customer “When do you want it? … That’s not a problem” (at least according to the ads). This was, of course, as parent company Currys ate up the Dixons brand and spat it out.

Dixons. What a marvellous shop it is. And ethically aware, too. It does lots of recycling – not least of press releases.

You may have seen in today’s newspapers and news programmes that Dixons is to stop selling analogue radios, them being so old-hat. This news has had a mixed reaction on the web: Some are cynical, some think it’s a step towards the future, some a sign of the times. But it’s undeniably getting wide coverage. It must be nice for an electrical chain to get so much free advertising of it’s modernity, but I can’t be the only one for whom this story rouses a profound sense of deja vu.

It smells remarkably like a reheated story from last year, when Dixons decided to stop selling 35mm cameras, them being so old-fashioned and uncool. That, again, was seen as a big sea-change in consumer electronics, and generated much free advertising for the chain. But again, there was something not quite fresh about the story.

That might be because the year before, Dixons decided to stop selling video recorders, them being so old-school and obsolete. This generated much free advertising for the chain, and every talking-head worth their appearance-fee told us that this marked a huge shift the consumer electricals market. But some complained that this story might not have been quite as modern as they’d hoped.

Crazy suggestion, but that might just be due to the fact that a whole four months before, Dixons had decided to take a stand and stop selling Manhunt, a computer game which the parents of a murdered schoolboy blamed for his death. “Ooh, look at our corporate responsibility for the modern age” cooed Dixons, to the sound of many press photographs outside their stores. Rumours that they later regretted this when stocks of the game completely sold out in the rest of the country due to massively increased demand thanks to the oxygen of publicity the case provided remain unconfirmed.

By now it must be struggling to think of things to stop selling. It apparently has personal CD players and “boom boxes” on its “endangered list”, but if it’s going to continue at this rate, there’ll be no non-existent buttons left for the virtual Dixons woman to poke at.

The last case I cited is, admittedly, a little different, but it’s hard to deny that Dixons have put out almost exactly the same story for three years running now, simply replacing one piece of technology for another. And yet it still generates acres of media coverage and free advertising. This either means that newspapers don’t realise what Dixons are up to, or simply don’t care about serving three-year-old reheated reports to their readers – after all, it fills another page in the lazy summer months.

Perhaps it’s irony – after all, this latest story is published right alongside the twenty-four-year-old reheated trash about A-Level results, for which the quote in this post (still on my wall) is probably still the best response published in a national newspaper. To anyone getting results today: I hope they’re what you wanted; if not then it might seem tough today, but you have your whole life ahead of you and you can still go on to do many wonderful things. A-Levels are no pre-requisite for greatness.

As has been widely reported, NASA have lost the original tapes of the first steps of man on the moon.  Oops.  I’ve lost one or two things before, but I’ve never really managed to lose one of the sole records of a defining moment in human history.  So I feel I’ve done quite well over the last twenty-one years, and it makes me feel better about the occasional bit of kit I might have lost at school.

Luckily, copies of the footage still exists.  The stuff that was shown on TV is clearly still around, but that’s grainy.  NASA, who were technologically advanced enough to send man to the moon, were not technologically advanced enough to work out how to directly broadcast their lunar footage on TV, and so had to show the footage on a TV monitor, which was then filmed by a TV camera, leaving the image somewhat grainy.  And, so it would appear, no-one’s bothered working on a solution to the problem over the last 37 years, so we’ve still not seen the original footage.  And now they’ve gone and lost it.  Probably taped over it with the Dick Van Dyke show, or something.

Now, wonderfully, internet conspiracy theorists are claiming with all the conviction they can muster that this doubtlessly proves that the moon landings were faked.  Of course it does.  The loss of a tape in an archive of tens of thousands clearly outweighs the evidence of the (albeit grainy) film footage, photographs, and samples of the moon that the astronauts brought back.

Anyway, in my experience, if they stop looking for them they’ll turn up.  And then they can make a fortune by airing the ‘lost footage of the moon landings’ in some TV special. 

In fact, you know where they probably are?  Right alongside Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and 150 Home Office PCs.  Wherever they might be.