urbanism — World City — Last night, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Spencer de Grey and Archie Galloway discussed the future of London as a ?World City? at a Foreign Policy Centre evening beneath the luminous Great Court of The British Museum. Nations need World Cities to attract a rich enough mix of economic…

warchalking — Matt’s Meme — A sketchy etymology (backwards) for Matt Jones’ astonishingly infectious ‘warchalking’. Warchalking: depression-era hobo private language married by Matt to > war-driving: Wi-Fi era update for > war-dialing: 1980s phreaker lingo for automatic redialing derived (really?) from > Wargames-dialing: from the 1983 film in which acoustically coupled teens nearly start a…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Quirky POS graphic at West Hampstead station cappuccino stand (photo now lost). 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 me laugh. Is it the…