There are many, many photos of crashed Windows systems running public display systems, so here’s one for the albums – spotted on level 3 of the Austin Conference Centre (Center?) at SXSW 🙂
MacOS #FAIL
MacOS #FAIL
In Texas with Digital Planet
I’m in Austin, Texas with Gareth, Michelle, Julian and Terry, here to report on events for the BBC WOrld Service but also to appear in a special Digital Planet panel at SXSWi. It should be loads of fun – here’s the trailer that Terry has put on the World Service website:
Find me over on Posterous
I’m currently working four days a week within the BBC Archive development team on the top floor of TV Centre, and as a result finding time to blog, write columns and keep up to date on my RSS feeds is proving increasingly tricky.
I’ve started using Posterous to repost material as it’s easier to send them an email than it is to add and edit a post here. I’ve added an autopost feature from Posterous to this blog, too, but it may be worth looking at http://billt.posterous.com/ if you want to keep track of me for the next few months.
Google’s About Turn in China
My latest BBC column looks at what Google is up to in China – read it on the BBC News website as usual.
Google has responded to what it terms “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure” aimed at getting access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists by announcing its desire to stop censoring search results on its Google.cn website.
Writing on the official Google blog the company’s chief legal officer David Drummon says that “over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law”.
But there is clearly little expectation that this will be possible and Google has apparently decided that it will, if necessary, stop operating in China.
However the story has moved fast – I said ‘
Here in the UK, Peter Barron, former editor of BBC Newsnight and now Google UK’s head of communications, has been all over the media giving their side of the story.
I haven’t seen any response from Chinese government spokespeople, and doubt one will be forthcoming.
Google may be big news in the west, but the decision of one search engine provider to renege on its agreement to follow local laws and ask for an exemption is unlikely to merit a formal response.
But I reckoned without the intervention of the US Administration in the row, which is turning it into a diplomatic incident. Perhaps there was more behind the decision than first seemed to be the case… this one might have legs.
We Still See Security Through a Lens, Darkly
My latest BBC column was at the end of the year, as I only seem to manage 3 weeks out of 4 at the moment because of the pressure of other things. It’s about contact lens displays and our inability to design security in from the start, and can be read on the BBC News Website as usual:
As December comes to an end journalists and pundits around the world have been telling us which devices or technologies they think are the most important from the last year.
Here on the BBC tech site Rory Cellan-Jones chooses cloud computing while Jonathan Fildes opts for smartphone applications and Maggie Shiels reveals her love for her Blackberry, to which she is clearly addicted.
Picking one innovation as the most important or as representative of a year is notoriously difficult, but it is at least retrospective.
The iTunes Application Store was one of the year’s biggest successes, whatever one might think of Apple’s arbitrary approvals process or the constraints placed on application authors, and Google really did launch Wave, albeit as an early, buggy alpha release.
Looking forward is much trickier…
Enjoy.
Nearing the end of 2009
It’s been a hectic year, and I’m currently embedded in the BBC Archive Development team until at least April, though I’ll be continuing my work with Digital Planet, Focus Magazine and the Billboard, as well as other gigs that come up during 2010.
In the meantime, here are two of my stories that I didn’t get round to posting here:
The Media and The Message (BBC Technology site, 16 December)
Like thousands of other people around the world I’ve just spent £2.39 on The Guardian newspaper’s iPhone app.
I can now read the paper onscreen, with some sections nicely cached for offline browsing and a cleverly designed user interface that lets me put the Media and Technology sections at the top of the paper, mark articles as favourites and quickly find related stories.
And Ten Years After Doomsday (BBC Technology site, 8 December)
I spent the evening of 31 December, 1999 in the company of Rolf Harris, Peter Snow and a large number of other people in a studio at Television Centre in London, seeing in the New Year as the nation’s official Millennium Bug watcher.
As anyone who knows about calendars will tell you, the real millennium didn’t start until a year later, but I was there because of the very real fear that major computer systems around the world would crash because they could not handle the rollover from 1999 to 2000.
My job on New Year’s Eve was to interrupt festivities every hour of the evening to report on what was happening at midnight in different countries around the world.
Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate such things, Happy Holidays for those who don’t but live in places that do, and ‘have a nice day’ to everyone else…
Keeping Cyberspace a Public Space
[As ever, this can be read on the BBC News website]
I recently had an opportunity to re-read a pamphlet I wrote in 2000 for a series on new thinking about mutualism published by the Co-operative Party. In ‘e-Mutualism, or the tragedy of the dot.commons’ I talked at length about the co-operative basis of the Internet, the need for online public spaces which are not controlled or dominated by commercial interests, and the opportunities that the network offers for mutual organisations of all sizes, from small co-operatives to retailers like John Lewis.
I pointed out that the internet is ‘an excellent example of the power of mutualism, having been created and managed through the co-operative effort of tens of thousands of individuals and organisations’ and that it ‘provides an infrastructure on which mutual organisations can thrive, opening up new potential for fast, effective communication and co-ordination of action, collaborative and consensus- driven decision making and global action.’
More than Digital
[As ever, this can be read on the BBC News Website]
I once got told off by the manager of the BBC’s Heritage Collections for publishing a photograph of Alistair Cooke’s typewriter in its display case on the second floor lobby of Bush House, home of the World Service.
It seemed that photography on BBC premises was not approved of, so I removed the image from Flickr as I didn’t want the people in charge of such things to stop exhibiting interesting artefacts because they were scared we might take photographs of them.
Fortunately things seem to have got a lot more relaxed since 2006, as the stream of BBC-related photos and videos on the world’s many social networks demonstrates.
Cooke’s typewriter fascinated me because it seemed to bring me close to the journalist himself, whose work I had long admired. It’s long gone from the lobby, but I was reminded of it earlier this month when I saw another important typewriter, one owned and used by T S Eliot during his years working at Faber & Faber.
Social Media Challenges Social Rules
[This can be read on the BBC News website too…]
Last week I sat around a large table on the top floor of Bush House in London with about twenty other people while we talked about the ways radio is changing and tried to imagine how English-language programming on BBC World Service could take advantage of the online, multimedia world that is emerging around us.
I was invited because I appear on Digital Planet each week to think out loud about the impact of technology on our lives, but this was an internal BBC meeting rather than an open seminar, and the discussion was never intended to be made public.
That didn’t stop one of the other attendees, technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, from recording a segment of the introductory remarks that Ben Hammersley, the associate editor of Wired UK, made and posting it online via AudioBoo. And it didn’t stop several of us tweeting about our presence, or me posting a photo of the Rory at his end of the table on yfrog.
An Internet That Speaks Your Language
[This was posted on the BBC site at the end of October]
It is forty years to the week since the first data packets were sent over the ARPANET, the research network commissioned by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to see whether computer-to-computer communications could be made faster, more reliable and more robust by using the novel technique of packet switching instead of the more conventional circuit switched networks of the day.
Instead of connecting computers rather as telephone exchanges work, using switches to set up an electric circuit over which data could be sent, packet switching breaks a message into chunks and sends each chunk – or packet – separately, reassembling them at the receiving end.