Swatch time, also called internet time, in the begining was a clever marketing ploy by the Swatch Company. But it has evolved into more than that, it is a timezone independant method of determining the time of day. Obviously something like that is good for the internet where people will be in multiple timezones. Basically what they do is divide the day up into 1000 "beats" so therefore a "beat" = 1 minute 26.4 seconds. BMT is the GMT of swatch time (why they couldn't just use GMT I don't know, perhaps, if I'm remembering correctly, it's because the Swatch Corporate Headquarters happens to be in BMT), anyway, what they do is eliminate the concept of hours minutes and seconds and just use beats. 1000 beats = a day, therefore noon BMT = 500 beats. Personally, I don't use it, determining what "time of day" a beat is is a pain since in school you aren't taught "we eat breakfast at 334 beats" you're taught "we eat breakfast at 8:00am" so it makes it hard to realize what time of day you are talking about. Obviously that is necessary since the clock on your desk isn't in Swatch time so you need to be able to convert on the fly which is hard since you have to determine the number of seconds between 00:00 and 08:00 then divide by 86.4, maybe it's just me but I can't easily do that in my head. Personally I find it easier to just say "8am GMT-5" or "1pm GMT" when I'm talking to someone somewhere else in the world, but some people seem to like Internet Time for whatever reason, the concept is nice, but seeing as how almost nothing in the real world uses Internet Time, it becomes a nuissance imho.
