Bowblog

Steve Bowbrick
Steve Bowbrick
@bowbrick@bowblog.com
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  • Will the geeks break our democracy?

    Geeks are purists. Or at least, most of them are. Pragmatism is tolerated but deprecated. (of course, some people think geeks are autistic but that’s another story). Purists (and autistics) find much of the business of being human far too messy and random. This manifests itself in a generalised impatience with the inefficiencies and inequities…

  • Right you lot

    According to my web site stats, at least 60% of you are viewing this site in one or other version of IE on a PC (85% if you add all those ‘unknowns’). Take a look at the picture above (click for a bigger one). If Bowblog doesn’t look like the screenshot (i.e. three columns, nicely…

  • Sterling’s green links

    Bruce Sterling has this fantastically useful list of green (and green-ish) resources at Wired Blogs. Did he dig these links out for himself?

  • World’s oldest company?

    I sat down today to write 300 words for a special New Media Age to mark ten years of ‘new media’ in Britain and I thought I’d just get some perspective and see if I could find out how old a business can really get. Anyway, in Japan, I learn, there’s a family-owned building firm…

  • Reading

    Things I’d have read before if I hadn’t been so busy nodding off in front of Hell’s Kitchen. The Economist’s encouraging survey of eCommerce from a couple of weeks ago. Another nice piece from The Economist, this one about the imminent transit of Venus. Freeman Dyson on theoretical science and a fascinating review of a…

  • Firing myself

    This is the kind of thing you find when you’re cleaning out your storage unit: my P45 from Webmedia, given to me (by me) when I finally closed the doors in October 1998. The first time I made myself redundant but not the last…

  • Franz Schubert vs George Formby

    This is why a public service broadcaster needs a stable online archive. A year ago I blogged a really lovely Radio 4 programme about Schubert’s C major quintet and linked to the show’s RealMedia stream. I assumed at the time that the stream would be overwritten in a week or so and, sure enough, if…

  • Fantasies of control

    Does anyone know how much David Blunkett’s ID cards are going to cost? No. Doesn’t look like it. There are no costs in the draft bill (PDF) and only some misleading estimates of how much you’ll have to pay for a biometric passport and driving license on the otherwise excellent Home Office ID cards page.…

  • The food industry is not the enemy

    Ad people are clever – problem-solvers by nature. Stopping them from using celebrities to promote food to kids is dumb because it’s just another creative constraint and ad people eat creative constraints for breakfast. Likely net effect on the sales of high sugar, high fat food to kids? Zero. A clever approach would exploit the…

  • Abu Ghraib Reading

    2023 UPDATE: when I read my old posts from this period I’m surprised and sometimes apalled at how apparently forgiving I was of the solecisms and straightforward lies of those who supported the various hideous adventures of the Americans and their ‘coalition of the willing’ in the middle east and Afghanistan (and elsewhere). Of both…