Posts

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Making the Market Work

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

Twitter, despite the attention it receives around the place with its high-profile users like Stephen Fry, is not the only micro-blogging service out there.

I quite like Tumblr, and Stumbleupon does something useful, while BrightKite links notes and photos to your current location and is growing fast.

One service I never really tried seriously is Pownce, and now I’ll never get the chance as the company has been bought by Six Apart and is going to be shut down.

Continue reading “Making the Market Work”

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Want a Second Classroom?

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

Although it’s common to hear technology entrepreneurs and investors express concern about the possibility that Google will move into their market niche and take away their business, the reality is that neither Google nor anyone else is guaranteed success in a new area.

Google’s social network, Orkut, has not challenged MySpace or Facebook, online calendar services like 30boxes are still doing well despite Calendar, and the recently-launched voice and video add-on to Gmail is unlikely to supersede Skype as a business tool.

Last week Google announced the closure of Lively, the web-based virtual environment it launched in July, in order to ‘prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business’, as the announcement puts it.

Continue reading “Want a Second Classroom?”

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Relive 08 Panel




The Panel and Chair

Originally uploaded by Lady__Jane.

I was at the Open University (Walton Hall, Milton Keynes) on Thursday and Friday for Relive 08, a conference on the educational use of virtual worlds. I took part in a panel debate on the Friday morning, and here I am with Ted Castronova, Roo Reynolds, Claudia L’Amoureux and Ren Reynolds. A fun time was had by all…

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Ties that bind

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

One of the throwaway remarks I sometimes make at conferences is that “Google knows you’re pregnant before you do”.

I can say this because the things you search for will change as your life changes, and search engine providers may well be able to spot the significance of these changes because they aggregate data from millions of people.

Now Google’s philanthropic arm, google.org, has shown just what it can do with the data it gathers from us all by offering to predict where ‘flu outbreaks will take place in the USA.

It has found that “certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity”, in that they correlate well with reports from the official Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Continue reading “Ties that bind”

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Grimpen Mire

A while back I wrote a column about cloud computing in which I noted that the physical location our online services still matters, and commented that:

In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.

Nick Carr coined the phrase ‘miasma computing‘ in response (and I wish I’d thought of it first!), and at GikIII recently the excellent Miranda Mowbray presented ‘The Fog over the Grimpen Mire: Cloud Computing and the Law‘, which organiser Andres Guadamuz called ‘a virtuoso remix of Sherlock Holmes and cloud computing’ that was ‘both endearingly performed and absolutely spot on.’

I’m sorry I missed it, but her slides are here…

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Elizabeth Anscombe’s grave




Elizabeth Anscombe’s grave

Originally uploaded by BillT.

Wandering through a damp Cambridge yesterday I made my way to St Giles’ Cemetery (as was, it’s called something else now) to visit Wittgenstein’s grave, and also to call on Anscombe, buried nearby. An important philosopher in many ways, she was also Wittegenstein’s translator.

I remember her lectures from my undergraduate days.

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Wired for a cause

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

By the time you read this we may well know who is to be the next President of the United States, [indeed we do, and the result has given us hope] hanging chads, voter challenges and defective e-voting machines willing, although as I write both McCain and Obama are in the midst of their last minute campaigning.

Here in the UK media interest in the election has been intense, reflecting the fact that the outcome matters enormously to those of us without votes or influence.

Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle is planning to keep its media lounge open for election night, and some of my more politically oriented friends – the wonks rather than the geeks – have an all-night session arranged at a local pub.

Continue reading “Wired for a cause”

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Is Privacy Dead?

I’m in the bar at FACT in Liverpool having just had an excellent time debating privacy with Jeffrey Rosen, Jonathan Sawday and Sonia Livingstone, expertly chaired by Philip Dodd. It’s part of Radio 3’s Free Thinking festival and will be broadcast on Monday’s Night Waves on Radio 3.

FACT is a fabulous building, and there’s  a real buzz in the atmosphere. And since there’s free wifi I’ve been Qiking:

and

Of course, it’s all a great breach of privacy… 🙂

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Who is responsible in our cloudy world?

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

In the next few days [in fact it is now published] a number of large technology companies, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are going to announce that they have signed up to a voluntary code of conduct on how they do business in countries that curtail freedom of expression like China and Singapore.

The code has been drawn up by the Washington-based digital rights group The Center for Democracy & Technology and a non-profit in San Francisco, Business for Social Responsibility, and it is believed to address the terms of business companies should adhere too and also to call on them to try to ensure that suppliers and business partners also sign up. Continue reading “Who is responsible in our cloudy world?”