Category: billblog

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Speaking Truthiness to Wikiality

[truthiness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness]

My article [available here on the blog or here on the BBC] about Wikipedia and the plans by the German edition to put new editorial controls in place on their edition on the site seems to have been taken by some of those involved as an attack on the site and its philosophy, at least if the postings to the English-language mailing list WikiEN-l are typical. This is a shame, since I’m on their side and thought that what I’d written was supportive, although definitely not sycophantic. Unfortunately it seems that anything less than complete approval of whatever happens inside the Wikimedia Foundation is an act of treachery, so you’d better mark me down as an apostate and draft the fatwa…
Continue reading “Speaking Truthiness to Wikiality”

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Castro’s birthday




Venice: August 2006

Originally uploaded by BillT.

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!

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Travelling in Turmoil

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”

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Talkin’ about my generation

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”

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Which terms are you on?

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?”

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I’m tired of spam

[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.

Continue reading “I’m tired of spam”

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New rights? Old tactics..

[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..”