Musings from Bill
Due to the unfortunate timing – he was speaking just as I was recording Digital Planet at Bush House – I missed John Naughton’s inaugural lecture as a professor at the Open University (only four years late, as Quentin points out). Fortunately the transcript is now available, and the webcast will soon be viewable – perhaps they’ve forgotten their YouTube password over in Walton Hall 🙂
Memex 1.1 » Blog Archive » The social life of networks
Blogged with Flock
[As ever, this is on the BBC News website]
The news that Bill Gates is giving up his role as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect was the second item on Radio 4’s Today programme on the morning it was announced.
While Gates will stay at Microsoft for the next two years, and even then will work part-time and remain the major shareholder in the company he founded, the announcement marks the end of an era. Continue reading “One gates opens…”
I’ve just downloaded Flock, which advertises itself as:
a free web browser that makes it easier than ever to share photos, stay up-to-date with news from your favorite sites, and search the Web. Take our tour to learn what’s different about Flock, then download the beta to get started – and please tell us what you think.
Flock — The web browser for you and your friends
So far it’s really nice – especially the ‘web snippets’ and the integrated blogging, which I’m using here. I also like the way it integrates with Flickr so I can have my photos – or those of my friends – along the top of the window.
Too early yet to see if it will replace Firefox in my affections, but it’s clearly superior to Safari.
technorati tags:flock
Blogged with Flock
From Lawrence Lessig’s blog
The Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project has filed a law suit against Stephen Joyce, who claims the right to control access to the papers and letters of James Joyce. The context of the suit is described well in this article appearing in the New Yorker by D. T. Max. The complaint in the case can be found here.
From reading the New Yorker piece mentioned, this seems about time – and I’ll make sure to read out large chunks of Ulysses on Bloomsday this Friday!
Blogged with Flock
[As usual, you can read this on the BBC News website]
The computers know everything. They know what you look like, where you go and who you meet. They know everything you say, can read every message you send and even know what you are looking at at any particular moment. If you raise your left hand, the computers know – and they know whether you’re holding a sword or a pen.
but are some more equal than others? As ever, you can read this piece on the Technology pages of BBC News online.
The Federation Against Software Theft, FAST, was set up over twenty years ago to raise awareness of software piracy and lobby Parliament for changes in the law to help software companies protect their business.
Media Guardian has just published my piece on the problems posed when professional journalists enter the blogosphere. Extract:
Unlike amateur bloggers who can rant, comment, express bizarre points of view or promote their latest acquisitions and obsessions with no concern for conflict of interest or even internal consistency, we are not mere citizens in the world of the blog and the MySpace profile, and it is about time we stopped trying to act as if we ever were.
Head to their site for comments… see if you can do better than ‘what pretentious, self-important nonsense’ 🙂
Update: Jeff Jarvis has picked up on the piece, but seems to see it as an attack on the unwashed bloggers rather than a warning to my fellow hacks.
Another update [June 4]. The discussion over at BuzzMachine contines, and I’ve just added this, which may help clarify things.
I think Steve makes a really useful point when he points out that ‘we all have reputations, our associations, our jobs’, and mentions 10th graders on MySpace. This discussion – and those taking place elsewhere – is helping me greatly as I try to clarify my thinking on this issue [which, of course, supports Jeff’s main argument, but I’m happy to do that]. It is about reputation, and about whether the things one writes in one place can be seen as separate from things written elsewhere.
My main contention is that once you’re a paid journalist – which I am – then everything that is not private becomes part of the corpus of your writing. Not finished product – I’m with Jeff on that one too, that the articles we now write are the zeroth draft of history not the first, and that they cannot be considered closed or final any more – but part of our output. Because of that we can’t apply different standards to ‘journalism’ and ‘personal blogging’ because they occupy the same space, one that those who want to comment and criticise have access to.
This applies to a greater or lesser degree to every blogger, and over time, as blogging becomes part of the general conversation, it will apply to more people. So those who are currently blogging about topics that seem to have nothing to do with work, or the teenagers writing about their drug experiences, should observe the position we professional journalists find ourselves in and realise it will apply to them in future.
It doesn’t mean that we should stay away from blogging, or that what we produce is somehow ‘better’ or more objective. It means we will be judged by it in ways that, at least for the moment, other bloggers aren’t. If we embrace this new world maybe we can use some of the skills we have to provide a good example to those who are speaking online for the first time, but that would take a degree of humility and openness to criticism that few of my colleagues seem able to demonstrate.
I wrote a piece about the ways that the Web encourages rather than destroys serendipity, and it has attracted some attention online. So this morning when I discovered that ask.com has a new blog search engine [thanks, Mike] I used it to see what discussion there had been recently about my piece.
And this is what i found…
Case proven, I think 🙂
I’m currently making plans for an exciting project, producing a daily podcast for the Cambridge Film Festival, which takes place from July 6-16th this year and will be packed with great films.
We’re going to be interviewing members of the audience as they queue to go into each show, and since it’s always a good idea to give each section of a radio show its own name, as it helps people understand the structure, we had been looking for a suitable snappy title. I remembered about six months ago coming up with ‘vox pod’ for this, as a play on ‘vox pop’, short for ‘vox populi’ or ‘voice of the people’. Â Â I googled it and nobody else was using the phrase, so it seemed like an excellent plan.
I was surfing around today and came across this extract from the Media Guardian podcast, and knew just how Newton must have felt when he heard about Leibniz’s work on calculus…
I reckon we’ll still use it, though…
As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website. It’s already attracted comment from Steven Johnson and Nicholas Carr…]
One of those rumbling arguments that betrays a deeper discontent is going on within the loose collection of blogs, newspapers and academic websites that has replaced public lectures and university common rooms as the space for public debate on matters of intellectual significance.
The question of the day is whether the online information sources we use today limit our potential to find material by accident and so reduce the chance of inadvertently discovering wonderful things or life-changing facts.