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So, it's not often I wake up to find that the BBC has run an article promoting the importance of businesses like mine, but this morning, there it is: Spelling mistakes 'cost millions' in lost online sales.

To be honest I'm not overexcited about Mr Duncombe's anecdotal evidence. I'm not querying his statistics for the website he analysed, and I think he's probably right, but it's a long jump to extrapolate from a single website to the entire internet.

The most cogent argument in the article comes from Professor William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University (now that's what I call relevant credentials). Professor Dutton notes that there is a high tolerance for spelling mistakes in 'informal' parts of the internet but points out that online businesses, asking not for casual consequence-free friendship but for consumer confidence and financial interaction, are held to a different standard:

I hope the mods will forgive me for pointing out that if anyone here isn't entirely confident in the standard of English on their website, and would like it checked over just to be on the safe side, they are welcome to contact me for a proof-reading quote.

So, I got an invite and got in...

They want full names, and the rumbling is that they're going to be strict on people who try to use screen names instead. That doesn't make me happy. I'm content to give Google my full name, and to have it appear on my emails, but I'd really prefer my surname to be obscured from Strangers On The Internet.

The other problem this causes is that those of us who are used to thinking of our friends as usernames like "sjr4x4" and "garde" are staring at the screen wondering who the "Robert Smith" who just added us might be - do we know them, and if so, how? And are they going to be upset if I ask them?

Apart from the "full name" thing they've done good work with the privacy settings. For each snippet of information you can choose whether it's entirely private, entirely public, available to only your contacts, available to only *some* of your contacts... that's good. There's also a "view profile as" function where you can check visibility by viewing your profile as (name of any contact, or public) and make sure that it's only as visible as you want it to be.

The two main selling points are Circles and Hangouts.

Circles is arranging your contacts into groupings (although a single contact can go into more than one Circle) so that you can control who sees what outgoing information. It also enables you to filter your incoming Stream - so for instance, if you don't want to see anything from your Work Circle at the weekend, you can just temporarily ignore the people in that circle.

Hangouts are small real-time group chatrooms with video, voice, and typed-chat capability. You click to "Hangout" and it creates the room. Your contacts may join you there (you can filter which ones) and anyone inside the Hangout can invite any of *their* contacts in, so it could be a good way of being introduced to new people. It seemed a bit patchy when I was using it at lunchtime - service dropped out a few times - but when it works I can see it being both fun and useful.

It is very much still in beta with a permanent "send feedback" tab at the bottom of the screen. The Google+ for mobile is apparently not yet available in the UK, which is annoying. Also, most of the conversations in my stream at the moment seem to centre around how the various features work, so it's hard to predict where it is going to go.

On the whole, I like it so far and I hope it will develop well.

always the right room for an argument!

I agree that anything posted on the internet has to be written as though it will be seen by your grandmother, your boss, your future offspring, the police, News International, the man behind the counter at the local chippy, and of course by whoever it is you're writing about. Even more so if you are posting on an open forum.

On the other hand, remarking that

It's awesome watching this unfold.

One particular element that's tickling me is the involvement of Hugh Grant. Actor, basically only plays one character, dated Liz Hurley, got caught out with a lady of negotiable affection in LA, not much else to know. Yet somehow in the last few months - albeit with a little help - has become an investigative journalist who manages to hold his nerve enough to collect useful evidence while wired, and then last night was on BBC Question Time outclassing the squirming politicians from *all* major political parties. Where the heck did that come from?

I also liked that the sub-editors of the Sun held a walk-out while the NotW employees were being addressed about their notice period. To the best of my knowledge that's about the classiest thing the Sun's ever done.

It was going to be "hello, Sunday Sun" anyway, although possibly not with the name change. Here's an article from June 28th, before all this broke, where News International cheerfully outlined in a press release their existing plans to integrate their weekday and Sunday titles at either end of the market.

"Yes, yes, we'll put out the fire in a minute, but tesco had an offer on beefburgers and it's a shame to waste it..."

I think an employee who wants to muck about during office hours is going to muck about during office hours - block Facebook, they'll either use a workaround or find a non-Facebook way of mucking about. Block the whole internet if you like, they'll still be writing blogposts and fan-fic in Word, remove their computer and I bet you they'll develop a sudden interest in reading industry-relevant magazines, or "negotiating" and "improving relationships" with supplier reps... there's always a way of killing some time for a person who wants to avoid their specific work tasks. Or indeed for a person who isn't sure what he/she should be doing and doesn't have the confidence to just start tinkering, or to interrupt the Very Busy Boss and ask what comes next.

I don't believe it's related to pay grade, and permitting or restricting internet access based on salary rather than on job role is just going to insult the lower-paid employees. I think it's more related to whether someone reckons they can get away with it.

Depends how it died. If it's that the battery has gone fizzlepop, then yeah, the data should still be on the disk and a techie can yoink it out, plug it into another machine, and retrieve the files. If the disk itself is the bit that died it starts to get a bit more tricky.

Storing data on a secondary disk in the same computer is an extra layer of safety within that machine. However the machine is still a single unit and no more secure from theft, fire, flood or rogue elephants than a machine with only one disk. Always back up to an entirely separate location - either a reputable backup service, or a physical external disk that is stored in a different room or even a different building from your computer.

Steve... I am giving you a cynicism award for that one.

I want to try it, but I need to get hold of an invite, and I'm not so desperate to try it that I'm going to buy one from eBay or beg from strangers.

I think the invites system is what made gmail great but also what killed Wave and is going to disadvantage this.

For Gmail, the scarcity of invites meant they were desirable - but, crucially, it was an email provider, which meant you could drop right into it and start emailing other people regardless of whether or not they had also been able to obtain an invite.

For Wave, I remember getting my invite, being excited, logging in, familiarising, and then... Time passed. A lizard scuttled under a rock. A tumbleweed rolled past. Only one other person I knew had been invited and they weren't online that day. So I logged out and did something else. By the time enough of my contacts had been invited, the excitement had dissipated - the new invitees weren't super-keen to try it out, and very few of the early adopters could still be bothered.

I don't understand it. Google can hardly be struggling to scrape up the money for another server.