Hello, and welcome to the online-only, monkey-special IT Week Insider.

This week we devolved all control of the Insider to the army of unruly monkeys with which we share our office space. We gave them a couple of hours to come up with a text we could send out.

When we returned most of them were clustered around the photocopier, screeching and howling while blowing up copies of our faces from IT Week. Others were busy making some sort of effigy, and filing blunt instruments down into sharp ones. Needless to say they had not touched their infinite number of typewriters.

When we came back again a couple of hours later, the door was locked but we could hear an intermittent thudding noise, interspersed with monkey cheering. But they'd slipped a typed Insider under the door. Well, we assume it was them; we thought we spotted the work experience lad who went missing two years ago crouching behind the filing cabinets the other day. It's unlikely, though. According to the monkeys' blog, the workie went feral more than a year ago.

Anyway, this is all just pointless digression. On with the Insider...

Editor's choice
Review: BlackBerry 8700g
Since two of the simians once survived for two weeks on nothing but berries foraged from bushes and drive-in Big Macs, this item pricked up a few ears in the office. Of course they were disappointed to see that they couldn't eat it - until they'd broken it down into tiny chunks. But that didn't stop them from swinging on the back of Daniel Robinson's chair while he wrote up this review. Find out what Dan managed to get done, here.

IT Week Podcast
News Editor Madeline Bennett chairs a lively discussion dissecting the key events of the week. This week the team discuss a new hosted customer relationship management option, a novel approach to safe internet shopping, and the merits of the .eu web domain. Oddly, there is still no sign of a .ape domain...
http://www.itweek.co.uk/podcasts/

Comment: Hosts versus the possessive urge
James Murray has too many CDs - we told him not to buy that Robbie Williams boxed set - and like James, IT managers can sometimes have too much kit and not enough means to control it. But, unlike our tone-deaf colleague, it'll take more than a trip to Ikea to sort out their mess. James says the primeval urge to hoard stuff - nuts, berries, VAX clusters - may be a significant barrier when it comes to letting go and signing up with a hosted software provider.

News: Fingerprint checks move online
Pay By Touch, a firm that offers fingerprint scanners for point-of-sale retail sites, has launched a fingerprint scanner for home e-commerce users. The need to place your finger onto a scanner to gain access to sites should limit the risk or theft and fraud, according to the firm. That all sounds good, but they should try telling it to the monkeys' good friend 'Mittens', who lost all his money - and ten other things as well - through over-reliance on biometrics.

News: More mergers putting up the cost of freelancers
Apparently if you add a pinch of mergers to a cupful of government plans to get public services online you get the sort of sentence that makes monkeys bite you on the hand. So we don't do that around here. Instead, we say that those two factors have led to a rush on freelancers and, as a result, fatter pay-packets for the I-only-work-when-I-want-to-work brigade. Well, we've got news for you lot: we only work when we want to as well. But we don't get paid at all.

Analysis: Is the accessibility message getting through?
All too often, demands to improve web sites for disabled users fall on deaf ears. The bitter irony of this is not lost on those who can't use the services that the majority of us enjoy without thinking.

To respond to any of the above, contact us (or the monkeys) at
itweek_letters@vnu.co.uk