麻豆社

We're gearing up for the April 5th show. This is the space to submit your ideas on what we should cover. You can add your ideas in the comments, or you can send us an email. We do read all the emails we get sent.
You don't have to leave a fully formed an idea. Just a suggestion for something we should look at is enough.

We discuss all our ideas at a meeting on Tuesday. After that we'll update this post with our thoughts. Again we'd welcome constructive criticism on what we decide.

UPDATE: Well in the immortal words of Lloyd Grossman we've deliberated cogitated and digested and it's a long list of stories we have to work on. I've put some of them below (others we're keeping close to our chests). If you spot something in the list below you know about, please do get in touch with your thoughts:

Olympic torch The arrival of the Olympic torch will probably be controversial. There's a bit of a media scrum around the issue already. It's very timely for us as the torch arrives in London on Sunday, so can we preview some of the issues on Saturday.

Bad Science - Energy saving light-bulbs may not be all they are cracked up to be. See the comment from Chas here. We'll put the claims to the test.

Exam woes - Clare emails to tell us of problems in the assessment of English GCSE's taken in January.

Heritage wrangles - Alun writes of arguments over historic artefacts in UK museums. Not the Elgin marbles again, but whether British antiquities held in national collections should be returned to the regions from which they came.

Phorm - Lee emails to suggest we look at the targeted ad company which is under continuing scrutiny by privacy compainers. We've covered it before but new elements of the story are emerging, which we are working on.

Last days of distress - Ros emails to tell us about the pain and distress her terminally ill father suffered dying in hospital. What are the issues surrounding death that results from the withdrawal of nutrition? I'll write more on this elsewhere.

Credit Crunch - Variety of different ways of covering this suggested in the meeting from the growth in social lending to crowdsourcing house price pain. Having spoken to another member of the City Unslicker blog team I'm quite interested in whether the media spin isn't a little too positive. I think we're still looking for a clear line here.

Lord of the Blogs. The last bastion of analogue life crumbles as Lord Soley sets up with other peers a blog for those on the red benches. And we note 10 Downing Street has started twittering (they'll be Rick-rolling next!). How do we cover politics2.0

Cybercime Council of Europe are meeting to review international convention on cybercrime. We're watching this to see what comes out of this. At our meeting there was a feeling that one of the issues was a possible law-enforcement gap. We'd be interested in hearing from small businesses that have been victims of cybercrime.

OK so that's the current state of our thinking. Ideas to add, comments, suggestions welcome below.

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A very strong response to the call on the 麻豆社's for news about how the credit crunch is affecting you. And we've had a couple of emails asking us to take a look at what's happening in the markets. For example Leonard writes that:

Equity fund merchants seem not to be in the news recently. They borrowed huge sums in order to take over various companies most of which had no great debt problems before the take-over. Now they are saddled with considerable debt possibly making them vulnerable. Is this being investigated?

Clearly the economic situation will get extensive coverage elsewhere, and the challenge for us on iPM will be to find the stories that the rest of the media aren't reporting. We'll need your help to do that. I'm sure within the PM audience there are many people with expertise in this area. If you think you have an angle on this story the press pack haven't cottoned onto yet, do get in touch.

UPDATE: Finally getting round to updating this post. Thanks due to for some interesting tips on where to look. He pointed me to the and that in turn had a link to this article about

UPDATE II Another chat with the City Unslicker team raises the question of whether the spin on the crisis we get is too positive. It was put to me that Government and financial institutions and indeed the market have an interest in talking down the crisis. Bloggers have rather different motivations of course. I was directed to the which I've enjoyed reading. Are they right, are we underplaying the risk of an economic melt-down.

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UPDATE: The maps mentioned are now live, , also there's a related

Later today, fingers crossed, website will get some fascinating new maps. The maps show the relative density of the population of various ethnic groups in London, groups as diverse as the Welsh and people from the Baltic states. They show among other things, that people of Polish origin tend to live in Zone 3 and that Turkish and Greek people seem to prefer to live in the same part of north London. In the presentation below. Researcher talks through a preview of the new maps.

There are many more groups on show than the 16 captured in the census. The research team at the Department of Geography and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis () lead by were able to get this fine grained data, by using names to identify ethnicity. Certain names can be tied to certain ethnic groups, and while it's obviously something of an approximation it does allow you to identify individual nations. They've already done some work on names and geography. People named Mair are apparently from

The beauty of the London Profiler, created by , is that is that it allows other data to be compared with ethnicity, crime, deprivation, higher education, healthcare etc. Maps of these are all visible via the site. While the current map is for London, where 40% of the population belongs to an ethnic minority, they hope to extend the Profiler to the rest of the UK

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If you are visiting this blog from Digital Planet, the interview with Google can be found here...

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I had an interesting chat with my mobile phone company about what kind of online activities I'm allowed to use my 3 gigabytes per month internet data allowance for. According to the terms and conditions they emailed to me, Any other use of the tariff will not be a Permitted Use, including but not limited to:

• Instant Messaging (IM)
• IP Telephony
• VoIP
• Video and TV streaming
• Slingboxes

Their customer support told me the reason for this is lack of bandwidth. Fair enough for internet TV, but IM?

Of course, a phone company can specify whatever rules they like, and we can choose whether to sign the contract or not, but are the restrictions made clear at the point of sale?

I've no recollection of being run through these limitations when I signed up for the contract. Anyone had similar experiences?

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In the interview below recorded while I was at SXSW, Dr Carlos Brown a former Navy surgeon talks about what he learned from his tour of duty in Iraq 2006-2007, and why he videoblogged his experience. Dr Browns .

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So iPM's return draws close, but in the meantime I'm still working on pieces for the blog, for PM and for BH. All ideas are very welcome drop me an email ipm {@} bbc.co.uk, or leave a comment in the blog. Here's what I'm working on at the moment

• Blogging civil servant, . I'm interested in the issues that arise. Can you blog anonymously? Should civil servants blog?
• News is coming out of . What other sources of infomation via the web should we be looking at
• Are search engines changing the pub quiz as people reach for their mobile phones to answer question? I've some interesting interviews already recorded, but who else should I talk to?
• Next week WATO and PM will be doing a series of special programmes on immigration. I'm interested in what web tools can tell us about the patterns of immigration in to the UK. Official statistics only give part of the picture, are there any online metrics we could use?

Naturally other ideas are very welcome. Please email your ideas to ipm [at] bbc.co.uk or leave a comment.

View our list of del.icio.us links to see other websites catching our attention:

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If you listen to Broadcasting House this Sunday morning you should hear a short tour through the South by South West festival. Among the voices you'll hear , , , a taxi driver, , , a bit of accordion, and music by

In the meantime here's one of the many fan made videos to Jonathan Coulton's music. This one, an ode to the

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Douglas Sarine is a close, uh, personal friend of the Ninja in the . The show is a hit comedy online, Douglas estimates it's been downloaded at least 80 million times. Figures like that attract a lot of attention, it's a formula for online success that businesses, politicians and media companies are trying to copy. Indeed I wrote a piece for 麻豆社 News Online a while ago looking at how shows like Ninja . In the interview below Douglas expresses scepticism about the ability of big organisations to copy this kind of success, and he also talks about the future of the show. We also hear from the Ninja.

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According to the Observer is the , a remarkable achievement for a site that hosts subtitled pictures of kittens, cats and other cute animals. While it is a judgement might wholeheartedly endorse, for the rest of us the ranking is a little puzzling, but Icanhascheezburger has the keys to something very special online: like YouTube or Wikipedia it's harnessed the power of the crowd to build a vast database of user submitted content, over a million images we are told. At SXSW the site received two . In the interview below the founder and CEO of the site discuss how cute kittens became a focal point for a community large enough to punch with some of the biggest social networks on the web.

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Meebo, Pownce, Dodgeball, Twitter, Kyte, Qik - a bewildering array of different services are producing content at SXSW. In microcosm we see the rapid growth of the net played out at this festival, more data, more means of producing data - but the same 3lbs of biological computer to try and process, order and understand it.

The key tool that enables us to sift this information is search. At present there are two trends in search, human and socially powered approaches (Maholo and Wikia to name but two) and computational, rule based systems like Google.

Douglas Merrill is . In his view the evolving nature of the net means that human based approaches won't be able to cope, "The internet changes a lot, it more than doubles every year 10% of pages on the web change each month..everything changes every year..so having humans in the loop to filter is a pretty hard problem" .You might contrast this with Jimmy Wales view which

In the interview below we cover a range of themes mostly about how we can order and organise the wealth of information that comes our way:

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The world of arts and craft might seem rather insulated from technological change. What could be less hi-tech than sewing, knitting or macrame? But now a knitting needle in one hand may well be accompanied by a soldering iron in the other. Craft is moving into the future.

This union of tech and craft produces some unlikely offspring: hoodies that take pictures when your pulse races, scarves that include mp3 players, but it's also exploring new avenues in small scale production. In the interview below , and talk about the new craft

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I'm at SXSW (South By South West) in Austin, Texas. It's a major social and business gathering for the technology community, as well as a leading indie film and music festival. So far I've counted at least 2 billionaires in the assembled gathering, and it would be easy just to focus on the big names, but SXSW has a definite indy feel, and it's the cool kids doing interesting stuff that really rule the roost here..

So far I've recorded material on life after the mouse with the people behind Guitar Hero, and Microsoft Surface and looking foward to a session lead by the folks who run The Onion's hit podcast. And plenty of serious stuff too, currently a very interesting presentation from about preventing radicalization and presenting a non-stereotyped image of Islam online

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After the iPM blog post on Phorm I had a call from the PR firm acting on their behalf. They offered me an interview with Phorm's Chief Executive Officer Kent Ertugrul. I accepted the result is below.

There's more background on - including an assessment from Privacy International who say they are, " impressed with the effort that had been put into minimising the collection of personal information."

This latest assessment may go some way to . They want to know how much information will Phorm collect about what we do on-line? What information will they keep? How will it be used? Kent Ertugrul answers these questions, and others, in the interview.

Among the key points discussed: When will the sytem roll out? Which ISP's are involved? What data is passed to Phorm from the ISP's, how is deleted/discarded data handled? Will targetted ads include "embarrassing" material like adult content? How will the system deal with forms and webmail? How will people opt out? What does opting out mean? I also raise the issue of PeopleonPage

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Heard of ? What about , or ? And while we're at it what do you know about ? Well all of the above are covered in the interview below with Charlie Abrahams of , one of the delegates to attend the first day of . The interview I should note is more or less the raw audio rapidly edited:

The congress is a meeting of key thinkers in the world of internet security. I even think I saw one delegate walking round with a "US Secret Service" name badge. It's all very secret squirrel...

Tomorrow

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UPDATE: I'll be speaking to Phorm tomorrow 1pm GMT. If you've any questions you'd like me to put to them leave a note in the comments or email ipm [at] bbc.co.uk

The Guardian's Charles Arthur posted Friday an surrounding Phorm, and the targeted advertising systems they are delivering for three of the biggest UK internet service providers (BT, Virgin and TalkTalk). The programme is attracting a lot of scrutiny, this link to gives a sense of the range of opinion.

The Phorm system is a significant development in the way these ISP's handle our surfing data, and as befits their role, the Information Commissioner's Office is taking a good look at the detail of the scheme: this is no bad thing for Phorm, if they pass scrutiny by the information watchdog without incident it will go a long way to allaying any concerns. When I asked the ICO on Monday whether they were indeed interested in Phorm this is the reply I received from a spokesperson:

鈥淭he Information Commissioner鈥檚 Office has spoken with the advertising technology company, Phorm, regarding its agreement with some UK internet service providers. Phorm has informed us about the product and how it works to provide targeted online advertising content. At our request, Phorm has provided written information to us about the way in which the company intends to meet privacy standards. We are currently reviewing this information. We are also in contact with the ISPs who are working with Phorm and we are discussing this issue with them. We will be in a position to comment further in due course.鈥�

Phorm's website can be found

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The threat from cyber-attacks, whether from nation states, criminals or terrorists is not just to one individual company or website, but to the net itself. That's the verdict of Kenneth Silva Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for VeriSign. Mr Silva oversees the management of two of the world's 13 key infrastructure for the internet. In the interview below, where we also hear from Roderick Jones a former Special Branch Officer and internet security expert and Andrew Cochran of the Counter Terrorism Foundation, Mr Silva points to the recent owing to action by the authorities in Pakistan as indicating some of the vulnerabilities of key systems.

The panel came together ahead of a meeting, held on Friday, hosted by the looking at "Meta-Terror: Terrorism and the Virtual World". Roderick Jones has made a special study of the security risks associated with virtual worlds, and there's much more on this in the interview.

In collaboration with my colleague Mark Ward at 麻豆社 News Online there's an article based, in part, with much more detail about the US "Reynard" project we mention in the interview.

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