Month: June 2002

Every weblog tool has a ‘blog this’ button. Clicking the button copies the URL of the site you’re looking at to your weblog so you can annotate it later. Now that mobile phones have built-in cameras, how about a ‘blog this’ button on your mobile that takes a picture and posts it, with your txt… Continue reading Blog this (experience)

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!