- Blog
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Another confirmed speaker for the Common Platform debate
Jon Gisby, who is Director of New Media at Channel 4, is now confirmed as a panelist in our debate next week about the BBC’s public service obligations—and beyond! (echoey sci-fi voice there). Jon is listed in my address book as ‘Managing Director, Freeserve’ which a) shows you how useful my address book is and…
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A common platform?
What does the future of public service media look like? What comes after the current crop of public service entities, which are all essentially channels? Could it be a kind of platform? We already have lots of platforms: Playstation, the web, Windows, Ubuntu, Series 60 mobiles. Systems that live low down in the stack, providing…
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Is the BBC Trust a Trojan Horse?
Looks like it, doesn’t it? The history: a short-term crisis (Hutton and then all that premium-rate stuff and the lies about the Blue Peter cat?) produced an apparently innocent change in the way the BBC is governed (and a new royal charter to go with it) and now, eighteen months later, it’s just sinking in…
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Googlification vs picklification
Before I get my teeth into the BBC Trust’s service review (I feel obliged to sooner or later) I enjoyed the collision of cultures (or contrast of cultures I guess) evident in two announcements made last week. In the first one Google announced that the company’s personal health platform thingie Google Health now works with…
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Five nines? No nines at all, more like
A very long time ago I ran a web-based email service (allow me to tell you about it one day). It was moderately successful and, before the latter unpleasantness it had well over a million users and substantial traffic and brand awareness. I learnt one really big lesson from that particular experience, though: never run…
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Message for the Parliamentary Labour Party
It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the awkward, pudgy, indecisive sociopath, stupid. Your problem is installed in Number 10 Downing Street. There’s your problem. But then you probably knew that.
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What is Speechification?
Here are some words I wrote to prompt me in a meeting that Russell and Roo and myself went to at the BBC yesterday. It was like the nicest pitch meeting you’ve ever been to. Lots of important and interesting people from the Internet side of the BBC asked many questions and made many suggestions:…
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Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
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Five reasons it might not be so bad to have Boris as Mayor after all
UPDATE April 2022. I’m leaving this up, although it’s obviously a bit embarrassing (and wrong – Johnson ultimately served two terms as Mayor). 1. The Mayor doesn’t have much to do anyway. He may have an £11B budget but it’s really only half a job. New Labour deliberately hobbled the Mayor’s office from the beginning…
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Cheap, reusable and accessible IT for schools
Right. What’s the definition of a really good bit of primary school IT? Is it ambitious and over-arching, integrating dozens of systems, forcing new behaviours all over the place and generally rending the fabric of reality? Or is it something really simple and quick to build that benefits the whole school community, costs nothing and…