The final panel at today’s Oxford Media Convention.
Michael Lyons speaking
Facing the Music
[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]
The coming year is not going to be a comfortable one for Facebook.
It might just manage to avoid upsetting its users with new services like Beacon, the misjudged advertising feature that told your friends about your purchases.
It might spot fake profiles of famous people, like the two Bilawal Bhutto entries that fooled both Facebook and some newspapers, and remove them before they get noticed.
And it could even avoid falling victim to one of the frauds that are likely to be perpetrated against users of all social network sites, outlined in Mark Ward’s review of the biggest security risks of 2008.
But even if Facebook is lucky it will still get a lot of coverage.
A cloudy look ahead..
[As ever, you can also read this on the BBC News website]
If you’re ever asked to forecast the way computing will develop, offer to look three to five years ahead. It’s a good, safe time frame because if you’re right then people may just remember your prediction when you remind them how clever you are, and if you’re wrong it’s very unlikely anyone will think to point it out.
Giardini – after the Biennale
In Venice over Christmas I went to the Giardini, home to many of the national pavilions for the Biennale, to see what the place looks like a month after the festival ended. More pics on my Flickr feed…
Coffee Venexiana in Florian’s
Christmas in Venice is no time to abstain from one of life’s greatest pleasures… so we didn’t.
Customer Disservice
[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]
I’m an indulgent father, as any of my friends will attest, and I’m also a bit of a gadget freak, so it is little surprise that my son was the lucky recipient of a cool black Xbox 360 Elite on his recent birthday.
He has been an Xbox user since the original console launched in 2002, moving to the much more powerful 360 when it came out last year, enjoying games like Oblivion and Halo 3 and spending a lot of time on the online service, Xbox Live.
Now that Microsoft has started offering full game and film downloads from the Live Marketplace it seemed like a good idea to upgrade, since the Elite sports a reasonably sized 120Gb hard drive compared to the frankly embarrassing 20Gb of the original.
Evening, London
A lovely view
Give me rice, but give me a laptop too
[Also available from the BBC News website – 10 years of shiny goodness!]
Update: there’s a discussion going on over on Dvorak’s blog.
One of the best things about being on the World Service radio programme Digital Planet each week is that I get to hear about interesting technologies from many different countries and explore the impact that computers and the internet are having in people’s daily lives.
We often follow stories as they develop, coming back to them from time to time to see if early promises have been kept or bold predictions have been borne out.
It’s been nearly three years since Nicholas Negroponte came onto the show to talk about his plan for a low-cost laptop for the developing world. He wanted to build it for under $100 and sell millions to governments who would then give them away to schoolchildren.
Who Pays the Paper?
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]
If you live outside the United Kingdom then the BBC website at bbc.com has a surprise for you, in the form of some prominent advertisements.
While the license-fee supported sites provided to the UK population remain free of ads, the BBC has started treating the web in the same way as it does the TV channels it broadcasts around the world by trying to generate revenue from them.