This week I have been getting unpleasantly confused by a pre-Christmas present of cloud computing hype. Take the CEBR 2011 Cloud Dividend report, commissioned by EMC, which joyfully predicts that the cloud will benefit the European economy by as much as £148.9 billion per year by 2015. Other highlights include the creation of 289,000 jobs in the same timeframe, although the UK could apparently lag behind the rest of Europe courtesy of our relatively poor broadband infrastructure.

As regular PC Pro blog readers will know, I’ve already suggested that there is such a thing as free cloud computing for the small business. OK, the free lunch option is restricted to the very small end of the small business scale, and even then we are talking more Google Mail than a fully blown data centre in the cloud, but it’s a start. The smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of the free cloud rings true as far as I am concerned. What’s more, I would contend that it’s a damn site more relevant to most small businesses than reports of some notional global economic value of cloud computing sponsored by a company pushing the cloud as hard as it can.

And yet more so when the methodology behind that value is about as clear as mud to anyone without an economics degree. I’m sure that the Centre for Economics and Business Research knows what it is doing, but I’m not so sure that too many people out here in the real world really care.

Seriously, does “the Cloud Dividend report identified the cost savings (CAPEX and OPEX) made by companies adopting cloud computing services and measured these against macro and business variables such as business development opportunities; business creation; indirect gross value added (GVA); tax contributions; as well expenditure on cloud services to determine the Euro value of the technology in each country” make sense to anyone out there?

Back in the real world, I would venture to suggest most small businesses couldn’t give a rat’s arse about predictions of how much the cloud will add to the national, European or global economy, regardless of how that prediction was arrived at.

What your average small business (heck, any business at the end of the day) is really interested in is the bottom line: what will investing in the cloud cost the business, what return will it bring on that investment, and how long will it take to realise it?

The questions I hear being asked include, for example, why should I buy into cloud data storage when storage hardware is so cheap I can have all the onsite and offsite data backup I want, for a sum that is not only a fraction of the yearly cost but a one-off investment at that?

Most small businesses couldn’t give a rat’s arse about predictions of how much the cloud will add to the national, European or global economy

It’s a bloody good question when you come to think about it, and if all you are looking at is the plain vanilla value-for-money equation (and forget the data security, access, ease of use, outsourcing all that jazz arguments), one that is very hard to counter with a cloud-based response.

Or how about questions relating to cost savings on power (servers are cheaper to run if someone else is paying the electricity bill) and support (ditto) which need to be worked out before any move into the cloud is considered? How does the balance sheet compare between purchasing and maintaining an IT asset such a server compare to the ongoing cost of outsourcing that requirement to a cloud provider?

The cost of securing cloud data is often ignored, especially at the small business end of the scale, but that’s definitely a false economy as the Data Protection Act doesn’t care too much how big your business is, just how you protect customer data. Push it out into the cloud and your worries are not necessarily transferred to the cloud service provider, it all depends upon the exact wording of your service agreements.

So I guess what I am saying here is that small business needs to get its calculator out and do some very real world sums before jumping into the cloud with both feet and all associated data, to ensure that it’s not just throwing money into the ether.

No matter how much those who would extoll the virtues of cloud computing as the future of IT try and bombard and befuddle us with macro-economic predictions on a global scale, it’s the here and now that is of concern to the average small business which has its feet planted firmly on the ground.

It is bad enough, for someone with no great interest in the monarchy, that the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton has now dominated TV, print and online news outlets for the past 24 hours solid. I know I risk being verbally scolded by the twin-pronged pro-Royalty army that is the combined forces of the blue-rinsed brigade and readers of Heat magazine, but I think I can safely say that the forthcoming Royal wedding is now officially bad news. I can also say that you would be safer searching for porn than searching for news about the Royal nuptials.

Security researchers at the Websense labs have uncovered the first wave of poisoned search engine results to wash onto Google and Yahoo alike, using everything from promises of ‘Prince William Wedding Photos’ through to the much more generic, and likely all the more successful as a result, ‘Prince William Wedding’ as lures to sites which will hit the unsuspecting and unprotected visitor with the latest drive-by download attacks.

This should come as no great surprise, of course, as poisoned search results remain a popular method of driving traffic to infected sites. In fact, the recently published Websense Security Labs Threat Report suggests that a whopping 22.4% of all searches for current news actually lead to malicious results in some form or other. Can I say arse biscuits here? Too late, and I’m going to say it again, but louder: ARSE BISCUITS!

If the Websense figures are accurate, then that’s almost a quarter of all searches for a current news story end up with toxic results that could take you into dangerous online territory.

To put that figure into some perspective, it means that searching for current news stories is now more dangerous an activity than searching for porn, which could leads to malicious sites 21.8% of the time. It’s all the more worrying when you also take into account the fact that, according to the same report, some 79.9% of websites that contain malicious code are actually legitimate sites that have been compromised.

The answer is obvious (no, not search for porn instead of celebrity gossip and Royal news) and involves only visiting known and trusted sources when feeding your news habit. Although you can never say for sure that the likes of the BBC, The Guardian, The Sun or even PC Pro for that matter will never get compromised by some clever hacker, the chances of that happening are far, far less than the bad guys targeting an unpatched small business site server and pointing at that.

The Google Instant what, I hear you asking? Ah yes, it’s not exactly something that the search giant is shouting about from the rooftops, unsurprisingly, but certain keywords and phrases are censored when you use Google’s new predictive search feature.

As a writer, I understand better than most that some words can be offensive, but more often than not that offensiveness comes from the context in which words are used. And that’s where I start running into real problems with the kind of all or nothing, list-based censorship that Google is employing – and the impact it has upon the innocent small business struggling to get noticed online.

Sure, if you are using some racially or sexually offensive slang in your marketing I have no sympathy when your campaign and business crashes and burns. In fact, I jolly well hope it does. However, if you’re using keywords such as ‘domination’ and ‘naked’ within a totally innocent business-related context then I fail to see why that business should be penalised by a severe dose of misguided political correctness.

I was pointed in the direction of this censorship by one ‘Dok Gummi’ on Facebook, who happened to know that as well as being a Contributing Editor of PC Pro I am also a reader of another Dennis Publishing title by the name of Bizarre. Now Bizarre is certainly not for everyone, but nor is it a ‘top shelf’ publication and can be found in WH Smith. Anyway, the point being that Dok Gummi discovered that one of the fetish models featured regularly in Bizarre was actually being censored on Google Instant by name.

I’ve got Google Instant on and SafeSearch off, yet Google still censors my Instant results. Surely if SafeSearch is toggled off then Google can assume I’m all grown up

Adding a real name to a blacklist is always dangerous, as most people don’t have totally unique names, so by blacklisting one person you are effectively blacklisting anyone with the same name. There’s a very famous former porn actress called Jenna Jameson, so Google Instant censors any search that gets as far as ‘Jenna J’, which makes no sense at all.

Interestingly, the blacklist only affects the results that are automatically displayed as part of the autocomplete results functionality of Google Instant, blanking them out and putting up an instruction to ‘press enter for results’ instead. So the search results themselves are not considered to be offensive, but revealing them instantly apparently is. My fellow PC Pro Contributing Editor, Steve Cassidy, should be grateful Google Instant hasn’t opted to blacklist his name, seeing as he shares it with a well-know gay fetish model. Nevertheless, the leather fetish chap and his NSFW search results rank higher than the award-winning business columnist of the same name.

Banned words

If you are not easily offended by words and words alone, a list of  some of the keywords and phrases being censored by Google Instant is being compiled at 2600.com and makes for shocking reading, not least for some of the words that have been included but also for some that have been left out.

The whole Google approach to this censorship has been very scattergun to say the least. Try this one: type Murd and Google Instant will happily start rolling out results about the Murderdolls and Rupert Murdoch, add an ‘e’ and you get a screen of ‘murder’ results but throw the last ‘r’ into the mix and the word murder itself triggers the censoring. It’s just plain daft: surely results for Murdoch should be filtered out?

Seriously though, why is Google applying this filtering at all? PC Pro has already addressed the broader issue of Google search censorship but what about this new autocomplete blacklisting approach? It’s an interesting question, and the most common answer I’ve seen is ‘to protect the children’ although I’m at a loss as to how. My kids, for example, are quite capable of understanding what ‘press enter for results’ means. Surely if Google doesn’t want kids to see these results it should say ‘do NOT press enter for results or you will be mentally and emotionally scarred’ or similar?

There’s also the small matter of the Google SafeSearch switch which exists, or so I thought, to filter out the NSFW results and, err, protect the children. Now, in my case, I’ve got Google Instant on and SafeSearch off, yet Google still censors my Instant results. Surely if SafeSearch is toggled off then Google can assume I’m all grown up and not bother filtering the results I can see in autocomplete view?

I put some of this to Google, and a spokesperson told me:

“We apply a narrow set of removal policies in Autocomplete for pornography, violence and hate speech, regardless of the user’s SafeSearch setting. We also apply a limited set of filters to remove certain thumbnails from Images and Video Universal, including pornographic and violent images. Users also have the option to opt-out of our new feature. We’ve heard feedback from our users that they very much dislike seeing especially offensive queries for pornography, violence and hate speech. While we don’t want to be actively filtering the search queries that appear in Autocomplete, we do think it improves the user experience if we can apply a narrow set of removal policies.”

Oh well, that’s as clear as mud then. Users may well have the option to not use Google Instant, but it’s on by default and that’s what most people will stick with. Which means, if you’re a business that happens to be using a prohibited word or phrase in your business name or SEO strategy, even if it’s totally acceptable within the context of that business and not offensive in any way to anyone other than the Google blowhards behind this blacklist, tough luck – it will be invisible to those people who use Google Instant as intended.

You might say ‘fair enough’ but is it really fair to the innocent business on the receiving end? I feel sorry for the Paris Hilton, a hotel that doesn’t exist courtesy of the blacklist. I also feel sorry for people looking for the Paris Hilton fanclub, for so many reasons, as that will also be invisible.

Most of all, I feel sorry for the small business using keywords on that blacklist (which we’re not allowed to know, in full, remember) who may well find their SEO being less effective than they expected and not have the slightest idea why. If Google Instant takes off, as I believe it will and indeed is doing, then it will mean ‘instant traffic’ is being lost courtesy of a misguided blacklist that protects nobody from anything.

In research which covered more than 1,000 workers from a number of UK-based businesses, OnePoll (on behalf of salesforce.com) concluded that “unnecessary emails are the bane of the modern office, with seven out of ten workers complaining about being sent irrelevant emails or being copied on emails of no interest”.

To be specific (with my specifically sarky remarks in parenthesis) the research suggested that the average office worker receives 43 emails per day (yay, I’m above average in the amount of email I get: 500 per day here) and some 11% get between 51 and 150 emails per day (hah! still above average). That 38% complained about suffering from information overload is the statistic which blew me away. Not because I think it’s one of the big problems facing the average small business today, but exactly the opposite.

I actually found myself thinking that it implies 62% of office workers are sensible enough not to be in trouser-browning territory when it comes to reading their email. That’s a good thing, obviously. But that 38% are apparently incapable of getting to grips with something as simple to deal with as email is hard to believe, and why does the press release accompanying the research results warn me that “trends suggest that this is set to get worse”?

Tim Barker, a vice president of strategy at Salesforce.com reckons that email has become counter-productive as people “blast out” emails to large groups so not to miss anyone, and as a result office workers are faced with the choice of “trawling through countless emails that have nothing to do with them or ignoring them and potentially missing out on vital messages”. Or using some kind of email filtering system which saves them from both scenarios, of course.

In fact, to be honest, I thought that some kind of ’scare the buggers into using our latest email filtering product’ was the point of the press release from Salesforce.com. I was wrong, but not greatly so. What Salesforce.com was apparently doing was suggesting that the “consumerisation of corporate IT” with a “skyrocketing adoption of social media by today’s workforce” mean that businesses should dump email altogether and use it’s new real-time enterprise social collaboration application, called Salesforce Charter.

This, according to the press release, uses profiles, status updates and feeds to enable staff to decide what matters most to them in terms of who to connect with and which groups to collaborate with. It unleashes, I am informed, a “new way to work for people around the world”.

I’m sorry to rain on this strategic sales parade, but I’m not convinced that business needs a new way to work – it just needs to ensure that the current way is working properly and effectively.

Readers of my blog last week will know that I have a penchant for keeping it simple and free when it comes to running the office these days, and that includes my email filtering. Sure, I admit to paying up for my own domain and use a business email hosting company to provide my mailboxes for me. However, when it comes to my day-to-day usage, all the email sent to my happygeek.com email addresses gets forwarded to Gmail where I pick it up. Not only does this provide an instant backup of my inbox, but it also provides a totally free and totally effective method of keeping on top of the email flow.

Of the 500 or so emails that the virtual postman brings in his sack to my door every day, no more than 50 come through my letterbox. The rest end up in the virtual wheelie-bin at the end of my virtual drive, the one marked spam, courtesy of the virtual postman (also known as my email filtering functionality) dumping them there instead of delivering them. But it gets better. Of the 50 emails that are actually delivered, I only have to worry about reading maybe 20 or them with any kind of business-driven urgency.

Priority Inbox

That’s because Gmail now has something called a Priority Inbox function, or spam filtering in reverse if you like. So once all the crap has been filtered out of my email stream, the system goes into reverse and filters what is left into important stuff and not so important stuff. It’s clever, if not exactly at the quantum mechanics scale of brainboxing, looking at what you tend to read, what you tend to throw away, where the mail is coming from, subject matter and keywords etc.

The main thing is that, after a little bit of training anyway, it works: my important email rises like cream to the top of the inbox, leaving the good but milky stuff floating in the middle, and the slightly smelly yoghurt at the bottom. The totally sour content is poured away and I never even see it.

I’ve used the Gmail Priority Inbox example as it’s the new kid on the mail filtering block. It’s not only low-cost but it’s no-cost, it works and I’m using it on a daily basis. But it could be any mail filtering solution, and there are plenty of them out there to suit every business budget and every business size.

I say if you are drowning in email then you are doing it wrong and need to start swimming with the postman….

To mark his passing, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has dug out what it bills as an “epic rant” to poor Jim Allchin, describing the world of pain the Microsoft boss sufferred when he tried to download and install Windows Moviemaker in 2003.

My favourite lines from the five-page diatribe:

“So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time. What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?”

A question we’ve asked ourselves many a time. And what about this little insight:

“Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.”

Perhaps you should try re-installing Windows, Bill. He goes on:

“So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.”

And the icing on the cake:

“When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.”

I bet Jim couldn’t wait for the second installment to ping into his inbox.

It’s good to see that even the man in charge of Microsoft suffers the same infuriating problems we do. It’s just a shame he didn’t do more about them before jetting off into the sunset.

You can read our Farewell Bill Gates feature here

Basically, you can use Yahoo’s SearchMonkey technology to tart up your web searching or at least that’s the idea. The Beta version of the Yahoo Search Gallery has been launched, and this features a whole host of plug-in enhancements that are meant to make searching a better looking experience.

So you get enhancements from the likes of LinkedIn, IMDB, Epicurious, WebMD and the like to provide additional wrappers for your search data: want ratings by your movie hits, or perhaps maps next to restaurant listings, well that’s the kind of thing to expect.

Yahoo itself says that SearchMonkey lets programmers package search results on the site with more sophistication, opening up the web search concept to third party developers in order to bring a richer and more semantic web approach to the where the heck is it party. Of course, Yahoo’s own in-house developed stuff is switched on by default for your Yahoo search, or at least 3 of them are: a video player, hotel info application and a Flickr viewer. The most popular, however, appears to be the LinkedIn plug-in that shows LinkedIn profiles alongside search results.

And why do I not approve of this advance, of this added functionality, of this extended search concept? Because all I really want are results that are accurate and relevant, that get delivered as quickly as possible, and which are not buried within a screen full of fancy wrapping. No matter which SearchMonkey extensions are running it slows down the search process because you have to wait, in effect, for all those additional little web pages within your web page to load before you are presented with the full picture. It does nothing to improve relevancy, just brings a load of frankly irrelevant waffle into the search arena. That plug-in will bring less relevant results to the top, pushing them at you and crying ‘but they look nice’ as a defence.

I am not buying it, in fact I am pushing for a return to the early days of Google when all you got was a search box to start with and a text based list of accurate and relevant results to finish. Which is probably why I find myself using the text only, totally stripped back to basics, mobile Google search more and more these days.

Well, I am a rural broadband user and while it did, I have to admit, take a couple of years longer to arrive in my village than in the nearest market town a few miles away, it is here now and working well. I get an average speed of between 3000 and 3500kbps, which is not stellar by any means but god damn if it isn’t fast enough for sending my email, browsing the web and even streaming the (very) odd bit of video when the wife is out.

My ISP, Zen, do not apply any additional ‘out of area’ service charges just because I chew straw and eat with my hands, and I do not feel like a second class netizen it has to be said.

But, argues Phillips, “rural users are relying more heavily on their broadband services following the decline of their local services with banks and post offices closing out of town branches at an alarming rate.  The internet is now a lifeline for many in rural areas as they do not have access to a number of key services available to city dwellers.”

Nor do they have access to the same public transport network, but we do tend to have cars which get used rather a lot. As far as online supermarket shopping, and pretty much every other e-commerce scenario I can think of, even my ‘I’m considerably more rural than you’ brother-in-law with half the speed that I get manages to get by just fine. There is no need for a 20Mb/sec line just to buy your bread and milk.

Even if you go all Mystic Meg and predict an immersive 3D online-shopping experience around several corners, a slowish broadband connection will suffice. I have spent hours within Second Life on a line that hovered around the 1Mb/sec mark and can’t say that I suffered greatly in the immersion stakes as a result.

“The Government must take action now to improve internet speeds for rural communities and not rely solely on market forces to drive change,” insists Phillips, concluding “Internet service providers are unlikely to improve the infrastructure in rural communities on their own volition due to the lower population catchments and therefore lower commercial potential.  Replacing the existing and out dated copper wire network with 21st century technology is key to redressing the balance.  This is a national problem and needs a national solution.”

But is it, really, such a massive problem? Sure I would not kick faster broadband out of bed, but then neither would I suggest for one minute that the lack of a Korean speed connection is high on my priorities when it comes to things the government should be doing.

Any other rural readers out there? What do you think?