I have always had a love/hate relationship with email… I love to hate it. This always comes as a surprise to people, who assume that techies are all in love with messaging and gadgetry. The truth is that I have always had bad Inbox practices, and after a sabbatical year Read more…
Much digital ink has already been spent on commenting on Judge Richard Posner’s bizarrely reactionary proposal that the only solution to save newspapers is to ban linking. I usually try to avoid stories already heavily covered because most of the times I end up repeating things that some other people Read more…
Two years ago, author Mark Helprin published an article advocating for perpetual copyright, which was received with much derision from Cyberspace communities around the world. Lessig even went as far as starting a wiki to allow readers to respond to it, and the result was a comprehensive thrashing of the Read more…
There are a lot of threats to society as we know it, some more worrisome than others. Were I to draw a list, I would include things like climate change, political apathy, racism, xenophobia, and social disengagement, just to name a few. Nonetheless, I try not to worry too much, Read more…
I have read with interest Henry Porter’s scathing indictment of Google in yesterday’s Observer, an article generating some heated discussion online. While I often enjoy his writings, I have to say that on this occasion he has written a thoroughly misinformed article that seems to conflate concepts and technologies. I Read more…
Here is a list of things I find self evident: pizzas are good, the colour of the sky as seen from the ground in the third planet of the star system Sol can be represented by the RGB hexadecimal code #87CEEB, and whenever a new technology is discovered someone will Read more…
Yesterday was the official “bash virtual worlds” day in the UK press. With the launch of the latest World of Warcraft expansion (Wrath of the Lich King), news sources went overboard in the coverage of thousands of costumed geeks queuing outside Oxford Street’s HMV; at some point the game’s launch Read more…
Here we go again, the Daily Mail broke a story on Wednesday that blames social networking site Bebo for the tragic death of a teenager. What is amazing to me is that other news sources have picked it up. The Guardian has a less strident treatment, as does The Independent, Read more…
The British press is going through a feeding frenzy, as tabloids and mainstream media outlets try to outdo each other in reporting the threats posed to children online. The Daily Mail warns us that “Millions of girls using Facebook, Bebo and Myspace ‘at risk’ from paedophiles and bullies“. Even by Read more…
The British technophobe media are having a field day. As a result of the tragic series of suicides in the Welsh town of Bridgend (17 since last year), some sectors of the mainstream media have been quick to allocate the blame on the internet in general, and social networking sites Read more…