Bowblog

Before its inglorious founder takes it down with him or before it’s chased off the Internet by enraged governments, it’s worth remembering what Wikileaks was before it became a cause celebre: It used to be a wiki. It stopped being a wiki in 2010. It was an anonymous drop-box. Whistleblowers could deposit documents without fear [...]

I adapted the name from Kevin Werbach’s Werblog, which seemed like a cool thing to do at the time. I’d been blogging for a few years before that (since the twentieth century) but only fragments survive. The archive suggests I used to update it a lot more too – back before Twitter. Anyway, I’ll tweet [...]

Everyone’s going on about curation these days. We’re all curators now. But yesterday I witnessed some of the old-fashioned variety, the kind they do in art galleries, and I was blown away. I took two of my kids to Tate Britain (four different modes of transport: train, tube, boat and bus – I suspect that’s [...]

The latest Mac OS is the first that can only be bought from an app store, from a tightly-integrated, locked-down, official source. I reckon that’s pretty much it for the freerange, open platform we call the PC. Googling myself the other day, I found this article from The Guardian nine years ago. It’s about the [...]

I’m not a geek. I missed the boat. When I left school they’d just acquired a computer. It was a mysterious, chattering presence in a room in the maths department – a teletype connected to a mainframe somewhere – and I never met it. But when I first encountered a computer – in a roomful [...]