I sat through every single keynote speech at this year’s IDF in San Francisco. They ranged in quality and content, from Paul Otellini’s well structured and fast paced discussion of the inevitable progress of high-end technology into the mainstream, to Gordon Moore’s interesting and humorous interview, to Renee James’ forced, dying comedy presented to an exhausted audience. Nothing deflates a fledgling software line better.

But by far the most insipid keynote was the final one. Justin Rattner, normally a perfectly pleasant individual who we have no problem listening to, began his keynote from within Second Life. If this wasn’t cheesy enough, he then emerged onto the San Francisco stage wearing – gasp – the same eye-bleedingly hideous shirt his Second Life avatar had donned, and proceeded to spout reams of unmitigated nonsense about the future of the ‘3D web’.

First up was a biased graph, showing that Second Life (in particular) is officially better than sites like MySpace and YouTube because, well, it’s in 3D! And it’s completely user created! Isn’t that great? NO! I’m not sure what sort of exposure Mr Rattner has actually had to the world of Second Life, but it seems the majority of those Terabytes of user created content are particularly phallic.

Moving on, we were shown undeniable proof of Second Life’s ability for free expression; Italian IBM employees, facing a pay cut of over $1000 per month, staked out IBM’s own SL-installation with anti-establishment placards. Well, I use the plural, but perhaps the singular is more appropriate: what we were actually show was a screen shot of one chap, standing on his own in the deserted IBM virtual office, with a virtual placard being seen by approximately nobody. Would this protest have been quite as effective if someone hadn’t posted a screenshot to the apparently archaic 2D web? No!

Rattner also had words for World of Warcraft and its ilk: “Massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Who came up with that? It sounds like it came from the Intel marketing department, doesn't it? It's just what Intel would call it, you know, and everybody would go, ‘What the heck? Can't you just call it an online game?’” Well no, Justin. There’s a perfectly good reason there are so many words there, and one is the avoidance of ambiguity that Intel does indeed seem fond of. Does ‘online game’ say ‘multiplayer’ to you? Does ‘multiplayer’ say 2 players or 100,000? It’s OK, you can just say ‘MMO’.

And then – as if it couldn’t get any more insipid – the presentation fell off a cliff. First up a representative of Qwak was brought to the stage. If you haven’t heard of it, Qwak is an SL-esque virtual world, apparently built to satisfy the enormous demand for jerky 3D avatars and awkward movement that exists in the business sector. A demo chugged away, showing how Qwak could switch to different 2D enterprise apps with ease, and incorporate recursive links so that a user could, for instance, burrow down to solve particular problems. What was really proven was that the 3D element was utterly and indisputably pointless, merely adding a layer of complexity and processor drain on top of what might otherwise be a fairly efficient business flow.

Then Rattner did a comparison of hardware requirements and cynically proved beyond a doubt why Intel is particularly interested in Second Life; server load. SL servers, thanks to the completely user-creatable nature of the game, can each house perhaps a couple of hundred users at a time, compared to a few thousand for WOW’s pre-defined world, and hundreds of thousands for a traditional web page. To us, that says that SL in inefficient, clumsy, and simply wasteful; if we wanted to work, we would do it in the unbroken world of 2D applications, not the broken land of Second Life. To Intel, the more users make it into Second Life, the more processors it sells – simple.

I don’t mean to be mean to Mr Rattner. He did his best, and I’m sure his enthusiasm for the evolution of the web isn’t quite as narrow as an interest in selling processors. But SL and Qwak clearly are not the way forward. Maybe when we have unlimited processor power and shiny lenticular monitors the 3D web will have a real place. For now, it’s the home of certain games, the home of a tiny little geek community, and something for people who are interested in efficiency to avoid at all costs.

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There was an error in the latest issue of PC Plus where the URL required to enter the MoGo Mouse subscriber only competition was incorrect, please accept our apologies for this.

If you would like to enter the competition the correct address is www.pcplus.co.uk/mogo. You will need your subscriber number, which is the 10 digit number that appears above your address on the sheet you receive with your magazine. You can also find this at the top of any correspondence you would have received from us.

A new iPod that's basically the iPhone without the phone bit? Want. The new Nano? Looks ugly, no good for video. No thanks. iPod Shuffle. Never cared before, still don't.

But yes... the iPod Touch. What really surprised me about the media coverage on its announcement is that nobody seems to have mentioned Apple's latest One More Thing this time around.

For the sake of completeness, I transcribe it here:

STEVE JOBS: Oh, and one more thing. I'd like to introduce you to our latest hire. You may remember him as the main voiceover guy from Midway's Mortal Kombat games back in the 90s. As our new Vice President of Gloating, his brief is to travel the country, listening out for anyone mentioning the Zune in public, and announcing... Brian?

MK ANNOUNCER: APPLE... WINS! FATALITY!

The iPhone Touch really is one of the most exciting pieces of tech I've seen of late. I'm not a fan of mobile phones; I rarely remember to carry mine unless I'm out of town. It was the iPhone's other features that really interested me, from the multitouch interface, to the Safari browsing, and now, the ability to grab video from the iTMS to take on the go.

When you take as many train journeys as I do, the thought of being able to grab a few TV episodes or similar for the journey has some serious appeal. Obviously, DVD ripping isn't difficult, but it's time consuming - and anyway, if I've got it on DVD, I've probably already seen it. In the words of Number Five: Input! Need more input!

Getting the whole lot for the price of a replacement iPod almost has me excited enough to accidentally leave it in my pocket next laundry day. Obviously, that's a lie. When it happens, it'll totally be the monsoon due to hit in a couple of weeks. Insurance forms never lie.

Would the genius who decided that Vista should be able to hard-reset to install updates without so much as a by-your-leave, regardless of if the user is in the middle of something, please report to Execution Booth 2. Message repeats. Most annoying person in the universe to Execution Booth 2.

Thank you.

Facebook. Great fun. But it has ways of kicking you when you are down. This last bank holiday weekend, traditionally the closing farewell to the summer (if the British weather over the last two months counts), is usually celebrated with fun, barbeques, drunken antics and people enjoying themselves.

Except me. I had a weekend of cleaning grime from the kitchen surface, vacuuming, throwing out junk etc, in preparation for my move this week. Fantastic.

Depressed after the boring weekend, I arrive at work 5 minutes early today with a bit of time to spare. I log on to Facebook, and what am I greeted with? Everybody has posted their photos of how much fun they had over the last few days. Londoners who went to the Carnival, others who went to the Reading festival. Then I noticed a few status updates:

"... is looking forward to Global Gathering this weekend"
"... is counting down the hours to the super amazing house party"
"... is rubbing your nose in it"

I’ve spent some time reflecting on this sorry state of affairs and you know what, I’m not prepared to except this status quo. How long are we, the British public going to continue to swallow what the music industry gives us? I can’t believe that I’m alone in wanting to voice my objection and I believe that if UK music fans were aware they’d be fighting these kind of excessive fees all the way to Number 10.

In fact, we’ve decided to do just that – at least virtually. We’re sticking our necks out and have submitted an e-petition to Number 10 to gauge how many UK music fans want to see these excessive fees removed.

If you want the right to listen to personalised music services like Pandora in the UK and want to support all musicians in their struggle to earn a crust, then put your John Hancock to the Save Net Radio UK e-petition here.

Here’s what we’ve asked Mr Brown to consider and if enough voices complain, we believe things will change:

We, the undersigned believe that the current licensing fees for musical and lyrical composition (issued by the MCPS-PRS) for music webcasters are excessive and detrimental to the growth of the Internet music industry in the UK. We also believe that they remove a potential revenue stream for hardworking musicians to earn from their talent.

We request that the Government investigate the current licensing cost, and legislate if appropriate, so that independent webcasters and online personalised music services only face reasonable fees that make business in the UK economically viable.

We also request that the Government oversees that performance fees (issued through the PPL) for Internet music, which are yet to be agreed, are also set at a rate which are reasonable and make business in the UK economically viable.

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