- Blog
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Still rotting
A long time ago I ran a company called Webmedia. It was a web design firm and we earned the special distinction of ‘going bust before the boom’ (as one journalist pithily put it). Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it lately since I spent the weekend talking about business ethics in Switzerland. One incident in…
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The last time we tried ID cards
Spot-on opener for the new series of Jonathan Freedland’s The Long View on Radio 4. The programme’s about the last time we tried ID cards in the UK and the court case that brought it all to an end in 1950. I could say something glib: ‘important lesson’, ‘timely reminder’, ‘tinker with an Englishman’s rights…
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New York & India
Rush out and buy these special issues before they disappear from the shelves at the end of the week: The Economist’s terrific Survey of New York and New Scientist’s comprehensive special on science in India. Both are outstanding – the best specialist journalism in Britain and lots of clever, exclusive content. Both mags are really…
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Brand not dead after all
On the way to the airport Friday I found a Swiss Army Knife at the bottom of my bag. Not much of a knife (and the little tooth pick was gone anyway) so I gave it up to the nice lady at the X-Ray machine. On the flight I thought about the poor sods who…
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Food’s Hatfield
Risks to health from the Sudan 1 food dye are assessed to be ‘very small’ by the Food Standards Agency (you’d need to eat two or three wheelbarrows of Branston pickle to get close to a dangerous dose). The simple withdrawal of Sudan 1 from manufacturers’ stock rooms would have been the appropriate response. Instead…
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Being in Switzerland
My hyper-connected friend Azeem introduced me to Beth Krasna, an equally hyper-connected and hyperactive Swiss polyglot technocrat. Beth invited me to participate in a fascinating and more-than-slightly intimidating seminar on ethics in Geneva. So here I am, wrestling with a pointlessly expensive (and unusably faint) Swisscom Wi-Fi signal in my hotel room (actually, sitting on…
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Revolutionary love
Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book is a page turner. Loads of historically resonant words, including these handy phreaking tips: “AT&T, like all public utilities, passes itself off as a service owned by the people, while in actuality nothing could be further from the truth. Only a small percentage of the public owns stock in these…
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Stop the presses
It’s National Chip Week. No, really. It is. So I thought I’d bring you these lovely facts: “A portion of chips (175g) contain double the fibre, 75 times more folate and four times more vitamin C than an apple.” “Kate Winslet loves chips. She recently said “the perfect Saturday night for me is to get…
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Google’s edgy brand
Will a Google takeover of Wikipedia be a good thing or a bad thing? Don’t ask me. I’m more interested in what Google‘s offer says about the company’s persistently geeky culture. I may be wrong but I’m about 90% sure that it hasn’t occurred to anyone at Microsoft to host Wikipedia (this would be more…