Category: Uncategorized

Brewster Kahle, web archivist, asserts that the history of world cinema has produced no more than a hundred thousand feature films ? even at 5 gigabytes per movie that?s a relatively trivial 500 terabytes of digital storage ? a big investment for a single organisation but a drop in the ocean of networked storage. He… Continue reading “It’s just not that big”

The digital ideologues in Government, industry and the media have got us all convinced that the switch to digital is inevitable and that ITV Digital?s failure is a potential disaster for Britain. The fact is that a policy of total switch-off makes less sense now, technologically or socially, than it ever did. In the analogue… Continue reading Analogue is not dead yet…

Net-heads and civil libertarians are worried that the public domain is being eroded and enclosed. Media owners fear a ravenous, technology-enhanced public domain will eat their businesses. Who’s right? Neither. The public domain is a tricky concept to define. As a starting point, we can be sure that every community in history has had a… Continue reading Public domain in peril? Not again!

We always get the final effects of new technology wrong, usually by a mile. The big media companies are no exception. People routinely over-estimate the effects of change – technological change especially. Where technology is involved, the machines are assumed to be in charge. This is what they call technological determinism. Bill Joy, programming guru… Continue reading Being wrong about technology

Since the draft of the Communications Bill came out a few weeks ago, I’ve been worrying (here and elsewhere – see my letter to The Guardian) about the net’s mysterious (but total) omission: not one mention in over 300 wide-ranging pages. In 1992 I’d have expected such a gap, in 1997 I guess I might… Continue reading Dot.com Entrepreneur Demands More Regulation Shock!

“Don’t put full cup in backpack for later” Quirky POS graphic at West Hampstead station cappuccino stand. The stand (part of a new chain, or at least new to me) is covered in whacky urban irony, all done in one of those fucked-up-beat-poet ALL-CAPS manuscript typefaces you get from Emigre or somewhere. This one made… Continue reading “Don’t put full cup in

The BBC’s admirable web site sets the standard for the rest of the UK media. In adding a web search feature and pitching it as an improvement on the commercial search engines, has the beeb gone too far ‘off-charter’?

The unlikely persistence of the PC Draft Communications Bill notwithstanding, the digital action is still resolutely – and against all the odds – on your PC. With the doughty exception of Sky TV, digital telly in the UK is a basket case. 3G is looming but more as an existential threat to the operators than… Continue reading The unlikely persistence of the

In the distant past I helped some friends with a blog (only that’s not what they were called then) called tired.co.uk. It parodied the ‘wired’ generation and it got its start in the wake of the failure of the UK edition of Wired Magazine. We ripped off the prototypical blog style of Suck.com (also no… Continue reading Protoblogging