- Blog
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Why do I have such a bad feeling about Highfield’s move to Kangaroo?
What message does it send when you hire the country’s top new media manager to run a start-up business in an increasingly lean and competitive industry? What are you saying when you tap the Executive Board of the nation’s state broadcaster (and one of the most important media owners in the world) for your joint…
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Speechification improved (again)!
I’ve been meaning to say for a while that we’ve improved Speechification again. New contributor James Bridle has cleverly embedded a player in every entry so you listen to shows with ease right there on the page. You’ll probably still want to subscribe to the podcast, which is getting pretty popular now. The other thing…
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Why oh why oh why?
I don’t envy your jobbing weekly columnist much: you have to produce something eye-catching with metronomic regularity and you live or die by the feedback you get from your readers. Of course, in the networked age print journalism doesn’t get the feedback it once did (people don’t get the Remington out to fire off a…
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Consensual spoofing in Club Penguin
Here’s another crazy observation from my kids’ use of Club Penguin. My kids (the older two – nine and eight – have Club Penguin accounts) swap logins with their friends so that they can go online and score in-world currency on their behalf! Oliver told me “Joseph logged in as me last night and earned…
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And the web moved on
Ted Nelson is a heretic and a maverick. Everybody knows that. A generalist and a reluctant computer-scientist. He invented hypertext but hates the web. He thinks the web is broken because it doesn’t handle links properly, doesn’t have an embedded citation system and doesn’t care about ownership or remuneration for creators. His Xanadu does all…
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Doctors. Don’t talk to me about doctors
I’ve not been well. Two weeks laid low by a mystery virus. My doctor disagrees: I’m in perfect health, he says, refusing me medication. He’s pursuing some kind of Californian mind control strategy. I take him nasty symptoms and he denies they exist. The other day I told him I was feeling breathless. “Listen”, I…
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Hiding amongst the Penguins
At the weekend I watched my older two kids do something fascinating. They played hide-and-seek. They’re nine and eight so they play hide-and-seek all the time. This time, though, they were playing in Club Penguin, a slick, Disney-owned virtual world for kids. Hide-and-seek isn’t a game offered by Club Penguin, though. There are lots of…
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Wikipedia’s self-awareness
UPDATE April 2022. A 14 year-old blog post, here to remind us that Wikipedia has been a big, useful and thoroughly mature institution for a long time. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. John Broughton (O’Reilly 2008). John Broughton’s a Wikipedia editor. His new book’s about the hidden machinery of Wikipedia, the tools used by editors and…
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Comedy voicemail service prospers
Spinvox, the service that translates your voicemails into text messages, has raised a wheelbarrow-load of money from various top-drawer sources for international expansion. I like Spinvox and the company’s continued success shows that it’s clever to hang out where voice and data meet. Machine translation – especially in noisy environments like mobile – is hard…
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Pledging allegiance
I like the pledge of allegiance idea. I know it’s a bit uncool and as a ‘liberal’ I should reject the idea as jingoistic or backward but I think Helena Kennedy and the rest of the snooty elite have got their response to this one wrong. Kennedy on Today was shocking: it was as if…