Bowblog

Steve Bowbrick
Steve Bowbrick
@bowbrick@bowblog.com
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  • A parable of sorts (about the music business, I feel obliged to point out)

    The year is 1823. Nathaniel Burrell, sheep farmer, has stumbled upon a method for duplicating sheep. To cut a long story short, after years of essentially random cross-breeding he now can produce new sheep on demand at no cost. A quick twist of the tail of one of his miraculous cross-bred sheep and you’ve got…

  • Wordle: my last 1000 tweets

    UPDATE April 2022: do you remember the time before Wordle meant ‘addictive daily word puzzle bought by the New York Times’?

  • Michael Grade whistling to keep his spirits up

    The inner workings of the BBC news operation are a mystery to me (although I did get a peep into the newsroom a while ago which was very exciting) so I find myself wondering about the orgins of this item on yesterday’s Today programme. The premise is that Saturday evening primetime TV in Britain is…

  • Measuring the health of the open source economy

    Here’s a fascinating thing. A really detailed analysis of a single very important open source project, Open Office.org (OO.o). The author, Michael Meeks, a prominent Open Office hacker, has tabulated and analysed the application’s CVS logs (CVS is the system that stores and organises the code contributed to the project by its many developers). What…

  • Filter it or lose it: free speech on the net depends on good filters.

    Geeks and Internet industry types like to say that Andy Burnham, our Minister for Culture, doesn’t get the Internet. They’re wrong. He gets the Internet all right. He just doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like its pretensions to autonomy and ungovernability and in particular he doesn’t like its inability to protect kids from stuff they…

  • In defence of Twitter

    Top debunker Andrew Orlowski put the boot into Twitter and to poor old Rory Cellan-Jones in a very entertaining way in the tech Private Eye The Register the other day. Orlowski’s kind of militant scepticism is useful. Everything new and especially fancy should be tested against an Orlowski figure (if you’ve got one handy). And…

  • Brand and Ross are innocent

    The Russell Brand show was outstanding radio and didn’t deserve censure. I’m just going to come out and say this because I have a feeling you might not agree with me (at least not if you’re over about 35). The Russell Brand show—the one with Andrew Sachs’ answerphone—was absolutely brilliant. Offensive and childish (clever Howard…

  • Magazine masterclass

    Right, I’ve been very busy with my new thing: I’m blogger in residence at the BBC. Honestly. It’s really cool. Follow my comings- and-goings at the special blog I’ve set up for the purpose at commonplatform.co.uk (the feed’s here). More about the whole thing here later… In the meantime, I just want to share with…

  • Social media smog

    I ran a session for Deirdre and the Chinwag crowd at the Ad:Tech conference yesterday. The theme (which we’ve covered before) was ‘micromedia’: widgets and microblogging and the atomisation of content and app functionality that’s going on out there. My speakers were: Nick Halstead, whose fav.or.it is an interesting entry in the social bookmarking/blog aggregation…

  • George Osborne revives ideology

    I sat in the front row at Demos this morning for shadow chancellor George Osborne’s speech to the think tank (I’m an associate of Demos). Osborne was personable and relaxed. His speech was intelligent and fluently delivered. The man’s a natural. Much that he said was also rather persuasive (but this isn’t the blog post…