In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.
William Gibson has stopped blogging to write a new book. He thinks the two activities are incompatible and has a metaphor that makes me feel a bit sick:
“The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off.”
Obviously, I’m I’m now wondering if blogging is stopping me coming to the boil!
Friday, schlepped around town with Stuart, talking wi-fi with Mike Nutley, veteran New Media Age editor (He’s pleased to point out that his tenure spans the magazine’s fattest ever issue ? swollen with boom-era dot.com ads ? and its thinnest ? 32 pages) and Nigel Shardlow, Head of Something Exciting and Mysterious at Orange, alumnus of High Concept, boom-era management consultancy The Fourth Room and over-qualified zombie expert.
The big thing, though, wasn’t the interesting range of public wi-fi options on offer but the sheer quantity of caffeine consumed ? Costa Coffee (BT Openzone, ridiculously expensive), Blacks (no wi-fi here. No. Never. No way), Starbucks (TMobile, stupidly expensive), Caff? Nero (Surf And Sip, much too expensive) and Ben Ugo (half an hour free wi-fi with any purchase ? what nice people). What impact is all this extra coffee having on our economy and our culture? Jittery? Moi?
I’ve been playing with Google’s AdWords to advertise my stupid No. I do not have a Nectar Card t-shirts and Google have rejected all of my ads. To summarise: you’re not allowed to dis anyone in your ads. Not even dumb loyalty card schemes. Not even the idea of loyalty card schemes. The best bit of the rejection, though, concerns my ‘grammar’ (the text of one of my ads is in bold):
AD TEXT:
Loyalty Schmoyalty?
“No. I do not have a Nectar Card”
A t-shirt for loyalty refuseniks
bowblog.comAction taken: Suspended – Pending Revision
Issue(s): Grammar
Current: “Loyalty Schmoyalty”
Replace with: “Bowblog stuff“
Click ‘more’ for the rest of the rejection.
The Register with two related wi-fi developments. BT will wholesale its Openzone public wi-fi service and Vodafone will allow business customers to pay for wi-fi access via their phone bills.
Public wi-fi will remain a geeky novelty until network density and accessibility improves and that requires some real business economics. With all due respect to those who think public wi-fi will remain free (the ‘salt and pepper’ argument), it’s going to take an old-fashioned value chain to get wi-fi into enough public places any time soon.
A handy primer for Ofcom’s review of public service broadcasting in Q&A form from Maggie Brown in Media Guardian.