Author: billthomuk

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Oxford Media Convention

Ed Richards has just finished talking at the Oxford Media Convention and is taking some questions – including the obvious one from a Daily Telegraph journalist, which he will almost certainly kick into touch.

It was, as always with the patrician Mr Richards, a carefully judged, eloquently delivered and cleverly constructed speech, one which could be read as reassuring the entrenched interests in broadcasting while also outlining a view of the future which, if it comes to pass, will almost certainly mean their current business models are redundant.

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A new you?

[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website]

A business user who forgot the password for their account on the corporate network would probably get a withering look from the IT department as they grovelled to have it reset, but it seems that young people who forget their MySpace logins are just as likely to make a new account as fret over their lost friends or painstakingly constructed homepage decorations.

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Digital Planet on net governance and Vista

This week’s DP is a discussion about Microsoft Vista which segues smoothly into consideration of net regulation and governance. Gareth and I were joined by Kieren McCarthy, Hossein Derakhshan and John Palfrey – yes, all men, and it’s an issue which we’re very aware with on the programme and hope to do more about this year.

Kieren has a nice writeup of the whole thing, in which he describes me as

woolly mammoth and terrific IT journo Bill Thompson

which I’m happy to live with 🙂

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From the archive…

I wrote and published this on my blog in September 2003, over three  years ago, and came across it while rebuilding my home page today. I think it is even more relevant now.
In February I wrote a column for BBCi’s News Online in which I called for the creation of ‘OfSearch’, a UK government agency charged with the regulation of Web search engines.

This proposal generated considerable online debate, much of it from US correspondents and little of it positive. As so often in the past, I was chastised for my interventionist socialist proposals and criticised roundly for believing that government and regulation can solve any of the world’s problems.

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Living in the wired world

[As ever, you can read a slightly shorter version of this on the BBC News website]

Anyone who has been online for some years, as I have been, should have felt remarkably smug this year as the Internet and all of its associated technologies, services, protocols and applications went mainstream.
The change was clear in the media, where stories about Web 2.0 startups, Google’s machinations, the imminent consumer launch of Vista and the importance of Wikipedia made the main news pages of the papers, featured in magazines and were covered extensively on radio and television.
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Welcome to the new economy…

This year there has been remarkably little fuss made over the continued growth of online shopping for Christmas presents, perhaps because we’ve finally reached the point where it is just a normal part of our lives.

After years of effusive headlines – the BBC had ‘Internet shopping set for new record’ in December 2002, and ‘E-Commerce set for Xmas bonanza’ in 2003 – we seem finally to have accepted that the network is here to stay and settled down to use it.

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Have yourself a carbon-wasting Christmas…

This Christmas period offices will be empty of staff as the country shuts down for the extended celebration that has become the norm over the last few years. Many staff will head home from work on Friday 22nd, not to return until January 2nd. They’ll leave behind the wreckage of the Christmas party, a pile of unopened mail and, if they are at all typical, a lot of glowing lights.

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Why standards matter

On Thursday I’m heading down to London to attend the IEC Centenary Challenge Awards at the IET building on Savoy Place – just at the back of the better-known hotel -and give a talk about why standards matter.

It should be a fun day, with a distinguished audience including professors and students of technology, engineering and business.
It will also give me a chance to catch up with Tom Standage, technology editor of The Economist, who I remember when he was just a fingerling, working on Guardian OnLine back in the day.

It’s not too late to sign up – go to http://conferences.theiet.org/iecawards/ to register.