Ronnie Reagan's done it, John Major has, so has Jacques Chirac - that is forgotten the mike close to them was still open and active - and it seems that web demos can also trip up the unprepared. I recently had a one hour web demo where the vendor presented its next latest and greatest - under embargo.

Unfortunately I can't do shorthand yet and didn't fancy using the old water-cooled pen for nearly an hour. However, I can dump phone calls straight to hard disk courtesy of a dongle attached to the phone mini-jacked into the audio input. Unfortunately speech recognition hasn't progressed yet to the stage where you can present a low signal-to-noise .WAV file to speech recognition software and get a neat transcript of the call ready to cut and paste into articles.

A pair of headphones mini-jacked into the audio output was a good alternative to holding the phone for an hour. When the questions had been answered at the end of the demo, I put the phone back, but blow me down when I could still hear somebody at the other end through the headphones. Nothing dramatic and no scoops were in the offing - but the potential was there. So check those mikes after web demos - you might just save yourself a shedload of pain.