Category: billblog

I’m in Venice for the week, but projects don’t stop just because I’m away.

[Also there to read on the BBC News website, as usual]

At the press event to announce that the iTunes Music Store will be selling ‘premium’ songs from EMI’s catalogue without the copy-protection offered by the Fairplay digital rights management system Steve Jobs noted that ‘some doubted Apple’s sincerity when we made our proposal earlier this year … they said we had too much to lose.’

That would be me, then.

Continue reading “Steve Jobs proves me wrong”

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

Tila Tequila has over one and a half million contacts on MySpace and a profile filled with pages of her scantily-clad form draped over chairs, cars and poles. Visit her page and you get some audio bubblegum to entertain you – apparently a track from her eagerly awaited debut album, for the multi-skilled Tila is a singer as well as a model.

Now she has become the latest online celebrity to come into conflict with a social network site after MySpace asked her to remove a link that let visitors buy songs from a competing service, pointing out that ‘we retain the right to block or remove content that violates our terms of use, including unauthorized commercial transactions’.

Continue reading “Building public spaces online”

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

I am, it seems, a neo-nomad.  Or perhaps a ‘digital bedouin’, if you prefer something that makes the computing connection more obvious.

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle recently reporter Dan Fost claims that a new generation of IT workers has grown up, people who turn a laptop, a wireless connection and a café into an office and work wherever they happen to be.

Continue reading “Wherever I lay my laptop…”

[As ever, you can find this on the BBC News website too]

Wikis, or user-editable websites, are one of the most interesting and potentially empowering technologies available on today’s Internet.

Wikipedia, whatever its flaws, has demonstrated that giving people the freedom to add and update material from within a web browser can provide them with an outlet for self-expression in the interests of the wider community, and many organisations use private wikis to enhance communications and planning.

It has become a joke in the tech world that if you’re planning a conference or any sort of meeting you have to start with a wiki, even if you’re working on your own.

And we even have our own private wiki for planning Digital Planet, the World Service technology programme I appear on each week.

Continue reading “Who stands to gain from Wikileaks?”

My mum died today in Manchester. She’d been ill and infirm for a while, but it is always a shock. I’ll miss her.

Won’t be online very much for the next few days, so phone if you need me urgently.

Over the last few weeks we have seen many candidates for the US Presidency launch campaigns to seek nomination by their respective parties, and all have used the internet to get the message out.

Hillary Clinton actually launched her campaign on her website, while Barack Obama has been pushing himself to the bloggers. On the Republican side John McCain seeks to prove his own credentials with a somewhat stilted video outlining his position, and he too will be working hard to ensure that he speaks directly to the wired world.

Continue reading “The Power of the Network”

[As ever, this is on the BBC News Website]

When the Web was young we were happy just to see words and pictures on the screen in front of us. All backgrounds were grey, all fonts were Times and anything other than a static image required a ‘helper application’ to be loaded and run, so that video clips and sounds played in separate windows on screen.

Compared to the text-based internet of the 1980’s it was heaven, but it was only the beginning.

Continue reading “From pages to pipes”

[This caused a bit of a stir when it was published on the BBC website – I was away in Scotland, and offline, so missed most of it… ah well, you can’t always be around.  And now Cory is saying the same about DRM in Salon.]

For a company with a tiny share of the computer market and an increasingly perilous first mover advantage selling portable music players Apple punches well above its weight in coverage of its every move.

In January CEO Steve Jobs single-handedly distracted the attention of the world’s technology press from the hundreds of announcements taking place at the Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by pulling out an iPhone on stage in San Francisco.

Continue reading “Apple and DRM”

Max has a day off school, I’m ‘working at home’….