Category: billstuff

or perhaps you prefer ‘digital Bedouin’ – both terms used in this San Francisco Chronicle article which claims that

A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. 

And Cambridge. And Venice. And Delhi.  Over the last few years I’ve moved more and more of my working life onto my laptop and filed copy, taken meetings and even done broadcasts from wherever I find myself.  It’s nice to know that we now have a name 🙂

Mike Southon is an old friend of mine – I used to work at The Instruction Set, the training company he co-founded back in the 1980’s, and we’ve stayed in touch since. These days he spends less time as Mike Fab Gere and more as The Beermat Entrepreneur, and he recently interviewed me for one of their regular podcasts.

You can listen to a ten-minute version of the interview from the Beermat site, or sign up with them and get the full version – also available to buy as a one-off download.

[audio:http://www.beermat.biz/short-podcasts/BeermatRadio-Ed43-SHORT.mp3]

I was interviewed a couple of weeks ago by Gaurav Sood, who blogs as spincycle, and he’s posted the result – edited to make me sound less rambling and more coherent, I’m pleased to say – for your delectation, delight and mocking commentary…

While technology has become an important part of our social, economic and political life, most analysis about technology remains woefully inadequate, limited to singing paeans about Apple and Google, and occasional rote articles about security and privacy issues. It is to this news market full of haberdasher opionating that Mr. Bill Thompson brings his considerable intellect and analytical skills every week for his column on technology for the BBC.

Read the rest….

When we were up in Scotland recently Max was delighted to meet Merlin at Cybernaut, the excellent cybercafe in Ballater.It was great to meet Kevin, who runs the place – and who proved himself an absolute star when we managed to leave a camera in one of the cafes in the village as he found it for us and arranged for it to be returned.

If you’re ever that far north, don’t forget to visit!

Not everything I write goes up here – I’ve recently started writing features and a monthly column for BBC Focus magazineBBC Focus magazine and am also now blogging on the TCS Innovations blog.

On Thursday I’m heading down to London to attend the IEC Centenary Challenge Awards at the IET building on Savoy Place – just at the back of the better-known hotel -and give a talk about why standards matter.

It should be a fun day, with a distinguished audience including professors and students of technology, engineering and business.
It will also give me a chance to catch up with Tom Standage, technology editor of The Economist, who I remember when he was just a fingerling, working on Guardian OnLine back in the day.

It’s not too late to sign up – go to http://conferences.theiet.org/iecawards/ to register.

According to Nick Carr:

Jon Pareles, the New York Times rock critic, has a nicely balanced piece today surveying the various crosscurrents roiling today’s media markets…

Yet over at Buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis weighs has a different take, castigating Pareles for not having faith:

Choice is good, not something to be lamented. Indeed, I find it ironic that a critic, of all people, should be complaining about choice. Choice is precisely what necessitates criticism.

Fortunately Suw Charman already knows the answer, over at Strange Attractor:

we don’t need gatekeepers anymore. We don’t need people who stand between us and our stuff, deciding what to tell us about and what to ignore. We don’t need arbiters of taste. There are so many blogs out there reviewing software and web apps and films and books and every other sort of creativity that we don’t need to rely on the media’s old gatekeepers telling us what we should like.
We do, however, still need help. There’s just too much stuff around for us to know what’s out there, to keep up with what’s good, what works for us, what is worth investigation. What we need are curators. And we need them badly.

There are day when I rather enjoy this brave new world we’ve conjured up 🙂

My piece on why we need to move beyond Web 2.0 is up on The Register, and makes the argument that

Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable.

Update

Nicholas Carr has picked up on what he calls my ‘fire-breathing essay’, and seems generally supportive, though he does call me on my ‘weird, through-the-looking-glass note of techno-utopian yearning’ in the last few paras.

Guily, as charged, I fear – but we have to look forward!

Registration has just opened for the 2007 International Lisp Conference, which will take place at Clare College, Cambridge, England from 1-4 April, with a day of punting and walking around Cambridge on March 31 to get people into the mood.

My mate Nick Levine is one of the organisers, and I’m going along to report on the event and learn some cool stuff.

Continue reading “Lisp conference.”