Triplesourced

Less than two weeks now till I am off to Kenya. Together with two colleagues from CNET Networks, Will Sturgeon and Helen Cooke, I'm taking part in a cycle challenge on 2 February 2007 to raise money for the IT charity Computer Aid.

Computer Aid takes donated PCs and refurbishes them for use in developing countries which stops them ending up in landfill and provides much needed educational technology to schools and other organisations.

The 400Km cycle from Mount Kenya, the second highest mountain in Africa, to Lake Victoria, will cross some pretty rough terrain with temperatures over 30 degrees most of the time. But we think it’s going to be worth it as, with your help, we’re aiming to raise enough money to set up at least five computing centres in Kenyan schools. We’re hoping to raise £20,000 for this unique and important charity.

You can sponsor us quickly, easily and securely here:



I will be updating this blog regularly throughout the trip as well as pulling together a video diary which will be posted on ZDNet UK when I get back on the 12th February.
Thanks again to our sponsors:









Thanks also to Consilium Group UK.
for making our event t-shirts!

Big kudos to our Australian cousins on ZDNet down under who have managed to get a one to one video interview with the daddy on Linux himself Linus Torvalds! They've cleverly broken the interview into five digestible chunks which we will rolling out over the next week.

You can see the first part here: .

We'd love to hear your feedback on this video and video generally on ZDNet, so don't forget to use the Talkback facility to let us know your thoughts. You can also rate all our content good or bad with a handy little device at the bottom of the article.

God knows they have had long enough to implement the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive, but it seems the DTI and the Environment Agency still haven't got their heads around how it's going to work in practice.

I attended a special seminar in Westminster this morning which was meant to clear up a lot of the confusion and obfuscation on the part of the government but actually seemed to create more questions than it answers.

To be fair, the concept behind WEEE is a horribly complicated to make real. The idea is basically to make manufacturers, retailers, and even some businesses responsible for disposing of old technology. Fair enough you might say – so they should – so we should – but when it comes to actually working out who should pay in the frighteningly disjointed supply chains that exist in the tech market, it ain't that simple.

This mornings meeting was littered with questions from importers and distributors trying to work out if by simply re-branding a piece of kit they imported from say China, would make them liable to cover the costs of disposing of the tech at the end of its lifecycle. In some cases the answer is yes and in some no.

I clearly got the impression from the weary, and frankly expletive riddled responses from the DTI and Environment Agency that the sooner they see the back of this bit of legislation the better – they didn't seem to be hiding the fact that it has been foisted on them by Europe; in fact the two plus years the UK has dragged its feet over implementing the law is all the evidence you need of this government's attitude to it.

If you want to find out more about the IT manager's responsibility under WEEE – check the Green IT Toolkit..

Along with a fondness for a lunchtime tipple and a propensity towards scruffiness, impartiality is one of the characteristics that most journalists strive to affect when possible.

As far as our news coverage goes – we do try to present the facts in as balanced a way as possible – free from bias and what we might actually think about an issue. Some readers however have a hard time distinguishing us reporting what someone else claims to be true from what we believe as a publication. At the risk of generalising – another slightly more unfortunate characteristic of the trade – stories about Apple seem to attract comments that typify this confusion around the difference between reporting and opinion.

If you want to find out what we think about an issue – check out our Opinion. section and our daily leaders but don't try and infer it from our reporting – it is not the same thing.

Anyone who thinks that ZDNet is anti-Apple. should check out the enormous amount of content we have devoted to the company over the last few weeks and all of it fair and balanced. Take the Apple month of patches story – while other publications simply recycled the stories that were out there – we went to the effort to chat to the open source developer at the centre of the story
Landon Fuller .

As for the accusations that we are pro-Microsoft – we are not pro-anyone and the boys from Redmond would probably be the first to point out how rigorously we deal with them:

Choose your future vista carefully

Vista needs safety in numbers.

Microsoft's unpromising start.

(An Intel dual-core processor and motherboard bundle is on offer)

Our Xmas competition is winding up this week so don't miss your chance to enter. You can find the details of all the brilliant prizes here.