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Cambridge Film Festival: final weekend

It’s the final weekend of the Cambridge Film Festival and while we’re all tired we’re pretty happy because it has been a great success. We’ll be finishing off with BRIDESHEAD REVISITED tonight, and we’ve got Werner Herzog’s ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD tomorrow. But I’m most excited about Peter Greenaway’s NIGHTWATCHING, not just because I want to see the film but because Greenaway will be there to introduce it and I’ll get a chance to meet the man whose cinematic imagination has inspired my thinking for decades…

Bill introducing the Screen Stories session
Bill introducing the 'Screen Stories' session. Photo: Tom Catchesides
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A link to eternity

[You can read this on the BBC News website – sorry it’s late being posted here. But one day I’ll be late too..]

While Google is as secretive about its internal processes and systems as Apple is about product development, every now and then senior people post articles on the official Google blog and offer their thoughts on the development of the web.

In the latest posting two Google engineers, Alfred Spector and Franz Och, look at how search strategies will benefit from the faster computers, greater volumes of data and better algorithms we are likely to see in the next decade, speculating that “we could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognise the plot or the symbolism.”

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The value of Chrome…

I’m writing a piece for Ariel, the BBC’s in-house newspaper, about Google Chrome, so I did some searching and was surprised just how many entries about the browser Google managed to find and how many of them were about the browser rather than the metal: if you search for ‘chrome’ on Google then the top seven hits refer to their browser

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Yet a similar search in Microsoft’s live search offers a range of Google-related news articles as the top hit, followed by a lot of links about chrome-plated cars. For those who have ever believed that Google’s organic search is somehow an objective reflection of the internet’s current interests and activities, this should make the Google-centrism of its worldview clearly evident.

When you search at google.com you are looking through rainbow-coloured glasses into a representation of the web where Google values and Google interests come first.

Later, via Twitter from mattjones

@billt Ranking algorithm at work? More queries relating to the browser, not chrome plating. So top results should be about Chrome, surely?

I’m not convinced…

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A soggy future for paper?

[As ever you can read this on the BBC Website too. And thanks to NationalExpressEastCoast for their crowded train and late running service, which provided the inspiration…]

The UK launch of the Sony Reader has sparked another round of frenzied speculation over the future of the printed book in a world of screens, networks and digital data.

Like the iLiad or the US-only Kindle, the Reader is a paperback-sized electronic book with a high-resolution display that uses ‘electronic ink’ and looks and acts more like paper than a screen.

They have been available for a while in other markets, and I almost succumbed to the temptation to buy one on my last visit to the US.

The  quality and ease of use of the new generation of readers means that they appeal to the general population rather than those who like to live at the leading edge of technological innovation, but although sales have been good they are far from spectacular.

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Heading North

I’m in Newcastle for the weekend to do some plotting with the fine people at Tyneside Cinema and to see Nicolas Roeg introduce his new film, Puffball.  Unfortunately getting here was more of an adventure than it usually is thanks to the heavy rain, and the train was stuck outside Darlington for about an hour. When we got moving we all saw why:

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Cloud City

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

When I’m asked to give a talk about technology I like to pull out my iPod Touch, wave it at the crowd and point out that ‘in the future’ it will be a supercomputer with parallel processors and terabytes of storage.

Well, it seems the future has arrived rather earlier than I imagined, as a new service called ‘Oosah’ has just started offering a terabyte of storage for the iPhone/Touch ‘in the palm of your hand’.

On closer investigation it seems that they aren’t ripping the case apart to install some cool new quantum-effect anti-matter memory that has just emerged from the labs, which is a shame.

Instead they have a website that gives your phone access to remote data when you’re on the move and lets you copy files back and forward.  As long as you’ve got a signal or a wireless connection you’ll be able to play music, watch photos and read documents as if they were local.

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End of the Internet: Pictures at Eleven?

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

We journalists like nothing more than a forthcoming apocalypse, especially when it involves something that most people don’t properly understand. It’s easy to frighten people with talk of ‘superbugs’ or argue that when the Large Hadron Collider is turned on it will create ‘strangelets’ that will destroy the known universe, and even if the stories are more speculation than fact you get a good headline and lots of interested readers.

It has got a lot harder to write this sort of story about the internet over the years as more and more of us are online from home, work or school and have some idea about how the network operates.

You can still get a good ‘internet meltdown’ headline out of projections that show we’re using up all the bandwidth and filling up our network with spam – I’ve done it myself.

But it’s even better if you can focus on aspects of the network’s core architecture that few users ever notice, like the unique numerical addresses assigned to every internet-connected device and the complex mechanisms used to move information between those devices.

And if you’ve got an authoritative report from an international body calling for something to be done then you’re on to a winner.

Continue reading “End of the Internet: Pictures at Eleven?”

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Fools rush in…

The House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Select Committee recently issued a call for more regulation of online content, and I wrote about it for Index on Censorship

It would be nice to think that the latest call to ‘do something’ about online content from the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee was grounded in some new development that made it trivial for websites to identify adult-oriented content, an online identity system which reliably linked social network profiles with age verification for all users, or the release of a user-friendly but unbreakable watermarking scheme that could identify copyrighted material whenever it appeared on an Internet-accessible computer.

Because the alternative would be that a bunch of MPs has decided the best way to get some publicity at the start of the summer recess, when newspaper editors are starved of ‘serious’ stories, is to announce that the Internet is like the Wild West, and children are constantly exposed to unsuitable material on YouTube, reveal intimate personal details on Bebo and surf the web looking for pro-anorexia or suicide support sites.

read the whole thing here.