Category: billblog

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Dreamers of the Network World

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

Last Saturday morning I woke up and reached for my phone so that I could spend five minutes catching up on email, Facebook and of course overnight updates on Twitter before I got up to make some coffee and start the day.

Radio 4 is the best way to find out what’s happening in the rest of the world, but having easy access to news from my online social networks in bed is one of the boons of having  home wireless connection and a small portable computer that masquerades as a mobile phone.

One of my Twitter friends, game designer Jane McGonigal, had not slept well.

Had a nightmare last night. Ustreaming from home. In the chatroom, everyone starts typing INTRUDER! INTRUDER! Someone snuck in

she tweeted, followed by:

They saw it but I didn’t. I’m terrified. I wake up (for real) and can’t shake the feeling someone is in the apt. Very hard to sleep.

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Pavement computing


IMG_0051

Originally uploaded by BillT.

Spotted on St Peter’s Street, Princes Street (on the corner with Elm Hill) Norwich, on my last visit to the New Writing Partnership office.

[Update: I got ithe street wrong – foolishness of not geotagging pix as soon as they are taken. thanks to my commenter for the correction]

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Connecting Clouds

[As ever, this can also be read on the BBC News website]

History is littered with manifestos, the public statements of principles and intentions that announce policies, revolutions or ambitious visions in politics and the arts.

Every political party produces one in advance of an election, and significant manifestos from history include the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 and André Breton’s  Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, which opens with the glorious claim that ‘so strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost.’

In the internet age we’ve had the Cluetrain Manifesto, various ‘Internet’ manifestos and of course John Perry Barlow’s famous  Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace which tells the governments of the world that ‘You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather’, and is a manifesto in spirit if not title.

The great manifestos demonstrate a clarity of thinking and expression that can galvanise public opinion, reinforce political movements and create new cultural modes of expression,  often because they are strikingly expressed and written in language that motivates and inspires.

Who could fail to be moved by the Futurists’ claim that ‘the essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt’ or Cluetrain’s twelfth thesis: ‘There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products.’

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So say we all!

[This should be up on the BBC News website soon]

There is a famous and hilarious episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, the BBC sitcom from the 1970’s, in which our eponymous Geordies, Bob and Terry, spend an anxious day trying to avoid hearing the result of a crucial football match because they will be watching it later that night on Match of the Day.

It was one of my mum’s favourites, partly I suspect because she came from Hebburn and had grown up among men who resembled the Likely Lads in many ways, my dad among them.

Despite many mishaps and near-misses all goes well until just before they are about to settle down in front of the TV, but the ending is both funnier and less predictable than you might expect, as it usually was in this fine old British comedy, so I won’t give it away here.

I thought of Terry and Bob this weekend, since I found myself avoiding Facebook and other social network sites, refraining from reading much email and staying far away from any of the many manifestations of Twitter for fear that someone would give me even the smallest hint of the denouement of Battlestar Galactica, which has just come to an end after seventy-three episodes and numerous webisodes and extras.

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Worming our way out of trouble

[As ever, this is on the BBC News website for your delectation and delight]

The Conficker worm will be active again on April 1st, according to an analysis of its most recent variant, Conficker.C, by the net security firm CA.

This malicious piece of software, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, spreads among computers running most variants of the Windows operating system and turns them into nodes on a multi-million member ‘botnet’ of zombie computers that can be controlled remotely by the worm’s as yet unidentified authors.

Since it first appeared last October it has apparently infected over fifteen million computers around the internet, though even that number is no more than an educated guess because the worm works very hard to disguise its presence on a PC.
Conficker spreads through a security vulnerability in the Windows Server Service that allows a carefully written program to persuade the attacked computer to run malicious code instead of the Microsoft-written software.

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Tomorrow’s Culture, Today

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website, and follow the debate on the Pixel Palace site]

I had one of the strangest experiences of my online life last Friday evening in the bar of the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, and while I’m still not sure what it means I enjoyed it, in a odd sort of way.

It came at the end of a conference on the future of cinemas and other artistic venues in a digital world, while we were enjoying a DJ set from Captain Buck Rogers. The music we were listening to was being streamed live into the virtual world of Second Life, and being played out in replica of the renowned Baltic Mill gallery, situated on a newly-opened virtual Tyneside island developed by a local company, Vector 76.

Avatars from around the world were dancing to the music we could hear, while we watched them projected onto the wall of the cinema bar, so I got out my laptop, logged in to Second Life and made my way to the virtual Baltic, where I joined in the dancing.

I could see my avatar moving around on the screen of my computer, but I was also clearly visible among the crowd projected onto the wall, dancing like every teenager’s embarrassing dad in cyberspace while drinking a deliciously cold beer in the real world.

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Digital politics is different

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website, and the Modern Liberty site has lots of links and content to delight and entertain…]

In November 1988 Stuart Weir, at the time editor of the New Statesman,  published a special edition of the magazine asking those concerned with the health of British democracy to stand up and be counted.  The proposal, which he called ‘Charter 88’, called for a new constitutional settlement, one which would guarantee civil liberties and the rule of law.

Shortly afterwards 348 people paid for and signed an advert in The Guardian newspaper asking people to offer support, and a year later an organisation called Charter 88 was founded to take the campaign forward, with Anthony Barnett as its first Director.

The Charter was eventually signed by over 85,000 people, including me, and the organisation it inspired continues to campaign for democracy, rights and freedoms as Unlock Democracy.

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Beware complacency, not cancer

[As ever, this on the BBC News website.  And as of this morning Facebook seems to have decided to open up some of its processes to user engagement, so the dangers I talk of may be avoided]

The fuss over Facebook’s attempt to modify the contract with its millions of users has died down for the moment, and I haven’t noticed any of my friends closing their account or even significantly changing their behaviour in protest despite the widespread coverage of the incident.

The problem started in early February when Facebook updated the section on its site which establshes the legal agreement with its users.  Like most people who use it I didn’t notice the change, and even though Facebook clearly knows who I am and how to contact me I didn’t get a message or see a notification in my news feed about it.

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