Musings from Bill
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]
For some time now the people behind Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia assembled from reader contributions and edited and maintained by those who care to get involved, have been coping with the fallout from a widely-publicised failure of their quality control mechanism.
Continue reading “What makes a Wiki?”
[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]
The imminent release of Vista, the latest incarnation of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, could mark the point at which the ongoing argument between two very different models of how software should be developed and maintained is finally resolved.
Continue reading “Will we want to open the Windows?”
Fidel Castro was 80 last Sunday, and I was in Venice But I’d remembered to take along my last cuban cigar, bought in Havana on my trip there with Lili earlier this year… and so we toasted the great survivor in style!
This should be coming to you from Venice, where the cybercafes have started offering wireless connections and you can even log on while sitting at the Palenca vaparetto stop.
Instead I’m sitting on my living room floor trying to decide whether the seven pm Ryanair flight to Forli I booked myself on last night will actually take off, and looking at the Trenitalia website trying to decide whether I’ll be in Italy in time to catch the last train to Venice’s Santa Lucia station.
Continue reading “Travelling in Turmoil”
Fifteen years ago the World Wide Web started to live up to its name when its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, posted a message to the alt.hypertext discussion group about his work on ‘The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project’, which aimed ‘to allow links to be made to any information anywhere’.
Berners-Lee had been working on hypertext-based information services at the CERN physics lab for many years, and had written the first web server and browser late in 1990, but on August 6th 1991 he started to tell people outside CERN about it.
Continue reading “Talkin’ about my generation”
Billy Bragg’s music is back on MySpace, and we should all be pleased.
Even if you’re not a fan of his jangling guitar, political sensibilities and poetry of failed relationships and broken promises – and I am – it’s great to see an artist with such a long history making good use of the network to reach a new audience. Continue reading “Which terms are you on?”
[Read an edited version of this on the BBC News online, as ever]
About two weeks ago I started getting a lot of bounced emails. Most of them were notifications from the ‘postmaster’ somewhere that my email could not be delivered because the recipient didn’t exist, but quite a lot were from spam filters to tell me that I’d sent messages that they weren’t willing to accept.
It seems I’ve been pushing stocks in dodgy companies, offering pharmaceuticals without prescription and even sending virus-laden images to unwitting users.
[You can also read this on the BBC News site, as usual]
Earlier this month the Association of Indepedent Music had one of those roundtable debates that industry bodies are so fond of.
As well as the independents there were people from the Musician’s Union, the Music Managers Forum and the MCPS-PRS, who license the use of music on behalf of songwriters, composers and music publishers. All in all they claimed to represent some 85,000 UK music companies and individuals, though obviously they couldn’t all fit in a room at once. Continue reading “New rights? Old tactics..”
Also on the BBC News website, as usual]
The latest Google service, Checkout, launched at the end of June and within a week had been banned by eBay on the grounds that Google does not have a “substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services.” Continue reading “Online payment”
Taken from the roof of the arts picturehouse, this shows the sidewall of the new Robert Sayle department store – except they are going to call it John Lewis when it opens in 2008… we must stop this!
