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In the two years Gordon and I have been presenting The Lab, we must have interviewed hundreds of people. It’s not the famous guests that have impressed me most, though. Jonny Ball, Patrick Moore, Lucas Tyler - while it was great to talk to them if I was ranking the most inspirational guests it would be the guy who set up Friends Reunited, and Matt Jones, who we spoke to this evening.

Just a week ago he came up with the idea of warchalking, and it has spread around the world in a matter of days.

It is deceptively simple: so many companies are now setting up wireless networks that where they have not been properly secured secured their access hotspots are leaking beyond the walls of the buildings in which they are housed. Now, when people who know about warchalking find a place where the network can be accessed in the wild using a wireless ethernet card they use a series of common symbols to mark the point and indicate how the open node can be accessed.

I’ve made that sound more complicated than it is, but after the interview Gordon and I both agreed that it was one of the most original and exciting technology ideas we have seen in months, and if its spread continues at the rate it has over the last week Matt Jones will be very famous very soon among the online community. Kind of a Phil Zimmermann for the 2000s.

Meanwhile, on a less techy note, I found some sound advice from the world of online shopping: “Don’t buy a thing until you’ve bought yourself a Kegelmaster.”

The BBC World Service is fast becoming the Voice of America with better accents. Its 11pm (2200hrs GMT) World Today was the best news programme the UK could hear. In the last few months, though, it might as well have been renamed News from the States, as the vast majority of its stories seem to obsess on events across the Atlantic, or things Americans have done overseas.

Last night, I had a long soak in a hot bath while it chattered away in the background. That was the day when it was revealed that a safety device at Swiss Air Traffic Control had been switched off, and there were suggestions that this could have contributed to the mid-air crash of two planes that killed 71 people. Rather than lead wit that, though, it kicked off with a story about George W Bush incorrectly filing a tax return ten years ago. Even those condemning him admitted that it was too minor to prosecute.

The other two headlines were the US threatening the future of UN peacekeeping missions, and the US investigating how it managed to bomb 40 innocent civilians in Afghanistan.

We had to wait until 11.26 for the first non-American story, which was 90 seconds on the state of the Japanese economy. It then focussed on business confidence following a series of US accounting scandals.

I don’t have any hard evidence, but this does feel like a developing trend. Monday night’s leaders were predominantly American, too, with stories two and three being the US offering no apology for the Afghan bombing, and US balloonist Steve Fossett becoming the first person to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon.

It’s a shame that the BBC has so many excellent journalists posted around the world yet the majority of its primary international news service for Europe seems to be focussing such its attention so disproportionately on America.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 4th, 2002 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.