My latest BBC column looks at what Google is up to in China – read it on the BBC News website as usual.

Google has responded to what it terms “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure” aimed at getting access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists by announcing its desire to stop censoring search results on its Google.cn website.

Writing on the official Google blog the company’s chief legal officer David Drummon says that “over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law”.

But there is clearly little expectation that this will be possible and Google has apparently decided that it will, if necessary, stop operating in China.

Read the whole thing.

However the story has moved fast – I said ‘

Here in the UK, Peter Barron, former editor of BBC Newsnight and now Google UK’s head of communications, has been all over the media giving their side of the story.

I haven’t seen any response from Chinese government spokespeople, and doubt one will be forthcoming.

Google may be big news in the west, but the decision of one search engine provider to renege on its agreement to follow local laws and ask for an exemption is unlikely to merit a formal response.

But I reckoned without the intervention of the US Administration in the row, which is turning it into a diplomatic incident. Perhaps there was more behind the decision than first seemed to be the case… this one might have legs.

My latest BBC column was at the end of the year, as I only seem to manage 3 weeks out of 4 at the moment because of the pressure of other things.  It’s about contact lens displays and our inability to design security in from the start, and can be read on the BBC News Website as usual:

As December comes to an end journalists and pundits around the world have been telling us which devices or technologies they think are the most important from the last year.

Here on the BBC tech site Rory Cellan-Jones chooses cloud computing while Jonathan Fildes opts for smartphone applications and Maggie Shiels reveals her love for her Blackberry, to which she is clearly addicted.

Picking one innovation as the most important or as representative of a year is notoriously difficult, but it is at least retrospective.

The iTunes Application Store was one of the year’s biggest successes, whatever one might think of Apple’s arbitrary approvals process or the constraints placed on application authors, and Google really did launch Wave, albeit as an early, buggy alpha release.

Looking forward is much trickier…

Enjoy.

It’s been a hectic year, and I’m currently embedded in the BBC Archive Development team until at least April, though I’ll be continuing my work with Digital Planet, Focus Magazine and the Billboard, as well as other gigs that come up during 2010.

In the meantime, here are two of my stories that I didn’t get round to posting here:

The Media and The Message (BBC Technology site, 16 December)

Like thousands of other people around the world I’ve just spent £2.39 on The Guardian newspaper’s iPhone app.

I can now read the paper onscreen, with some sections nicely cached for offline browsing and a cleverly designed user interface that lets me put the Media and Technology sections at the top of the paper, mark articles as favourites and quickly find related stories.

And Ten Years After Doomsday (BBC Technology site, 8 December)

I spent the evening of 31 December, 1999 in the company of Rolf Harris, Peter Snow and a large number of other people in a studio at Television Centre in London, seeing in the New Year as the nation’s official Millennium Bug watcher.

As anyone who knows about calendars will tell you, the real millennium didn’t start until a year later, but I was there because of the very real fear that major computer systems around the world would crash because they could not handle the rollover from 1999 to 2000.

My job on New Year’s Eve was to interrupt festivities every hour of the evening to report on what was happening at midnight in different countries around the world.

Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate such things, Happy Holidays for those who don’t but live in places that do, and ‘have a nice day’ to everyone else…

[As ever, this can be read on the BBC News website]

I recently had an opportunity to re-read a pamphlet I wrote in 2000 for a series on new thinking about mutualism published by the Co-operative Party.  In ‘e-Mutualism, or the tragedy of the dot.commons’ I talked at length about the co-operative basis of the Internet, the need for online public spaces which are not controlled or dominated by commercial interests, and the opportunities that the network offers for mutual organisations of all sizes, from small co-operatives to retailers like John Lewis.

I pointed out that the internet is ‘an excellent example of the power of mutualism, having been created and managed through the co-operative effort of tens of thousands of individuals and organisations’ and that it ‘provides an infrastructure on which mutual organisations can thrive, opening up new potential for fast, effective communication and co-ordination of action, collaborative and consensus- driven decision making and global action.’

(more…)

[As ever, this can be read on the BBC News Website]

I once got told off by the manager of the BBC’s Heritage Collections for publishing a photograph of Alistair Cooke’s typewriter in its display case on the second floor lobby of Bush House, home of the World Service.

It seemed that photography on BBC premises was not approved of, so I removed the image from Flickr as I didn’t want the people in charge of such things to stop exhibiting interesting artefacts because they were scared we might take photographs of them.

Fortunately things seem to have got a lot more relaxed since 2006, as the stream of BBC-related photos and videos on the world’s many social networks demonstrates.
Cooke’s typewriter fascinated me because it seemed to bring me close to the journalist himself, whose work I had long admired. It’s long gone from the lobby, but I was reminded of it earlier this month when I saw another important typewriter, one owned and used by T S Eliot during his years working at Faber & Faber.

(more…)

[This can be read on the BBC News website too...]

Last week I sat around a large table on the top floor of Bush House in London with about twenty other people while we talked about the ways radio is changing and tried to imagine how English-language programming on BBC World Service could take advantage of the online, multimedia world that is emerging around us.

I was invited because I appear on Digital Planet each week to think out loud about the impact of technology on our lives, but this was an internal BBC meeting rather than an open seminar, and the discussion was never intended to be made public.

That didn’t stop one of the other attendees, technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, from recording a segment of the introductory remarks that Ben Hammersley, the associate editor of Wired UK, made and posting it online via AudioBoo. And it didn’t stop several of us tweeting about our presence, or me posting a photo of the Rory at his end of the table on yfrog.

(more…)

[This was posted on the BBC site at the end of October]

It is forty years to the week since the first data packets were sent over the ARPANET, the research network commissioned by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to see whether computer-to-computer communications could be made faster, more reliable and more robust by using the novel technique of packet switching instead of the more conventional circuit switched networks of the day.

Instead of connecting computers rather as telephone exchanges work, using switches to set up an electric circuit over which data could be sent, packet switching breaks a message into chunks and sends each chunk – or packet – separately, reassembling them at the receiving end.

(more…)

It’s been a hectic few weeks so little bloggage – and I’m in Melbourne for a week so in an unusual timezone. I’ll post some stuff now, though..

are condemned to write bad newspaper articles about it.

Read this, from Ian Katz in The Guardian

Despite the huge success of its website over the last decade, the Guardian was a relative latecomer to the business of online news. While competitors such as the Daily Telegraph built efficient and well-used digital facsimiles of their print editions, the Guardian instead established a new media “skunkworks” team, tasked with dreaming up innovative online ideas, in an airy old warehouse just across the road from its main offices.

There a group of programmers and young journalists dabbled in a curious range of experimental projects from a wildly ambitious, multilingual website for Euro 96 to Shift Control, a webzine so painfully cool that every issue was redesigned from scratch. When, in 1997, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger dispatched me across the road with instructions to redirect their efforts to building an online version of the Guardian itself, the team wore the despondent look of a bunch of German soldiers who had just been sent to the Eastern Front.

But though many of the hipsters soon departed, some of the lateral, webcentric spirit of the New Media Lab animated our plans for the online Guardian.

Then read this, from my ‘my life as a new media dog‘ on this very website

In early 1995 Tony Ageh of The Guardian suggested I join them there full-time to do Web stuff, having already made The Guardian the first UK national paper with any online content. In January 1996 Tony left to go to Virgin and I became head of the New Media Lab. I stayed until September 1996, having seen the successful launch of The Guardian site, The Observer site, GO2 (Guardian Online online), Top Marques online and the phenomenally wonderful Eurosoccer.com, covering Euro ‘96.

At The Guardian we were convinced we could change the world of newspapers, We were playing around with design, navigation, content and approach, looking for ways to take the printed newspaper online while preserving the values and attitude that made it work: we were all about brand extension, not about being an income-generating business unit. This gave us a freedom that others could only marvel at – when Vauxhall gave us £250,000 to build a Website for the Euro ‘96 tournament I spent all of it on the best site in the world, drawing the wrath of my director, Stella Beaumont.

But I was right – the point was to spend the money and do something great, not feed 10% to The Guardian. Two years later, at the time of the World Cup in France, eurosoccer.com was still the benchmark for how to do a major sporting event on the Web.

I left The Guardian for many reasons, not least being the tension between the newsroom and its journalists and the Web team under my direction. Since leaving I can’t understand why I stayed as long as I did. My successor, Robin Hunt, lasted a matter of months. His successor, Ian Katz, threw away all the Guardian had learned, and it was left to Simon Waldman and Emily Bell to turn the experiment into a viable, brand-building proposition.

Funny how things can look different from different perspectives.

I left my job as head of The Guardian’s New Media Lab in 1996 to work as a freelance writer and consultant, and also to look after my two young children. After a few years of freelance life I started to describe myself as ‘unemployable’, and to tell anyone who would listen that not only would I never want to go back to office life but that I doubted anyone with any sense would take me on. 

When I did take on a role as interim publisher at openDemocracy during one of its crises I expressed astonishment that people could schedule meetings for me without actually asking me in advance, and swore never to subject myself to such humiliation in future (or something like that – I may have been drinking at the time).

So it was with some surprise that I found myself seduced by Tony Ageh, the man who brought me on board at The Guardian all those many years ago and who now rejoices in the title of Controller, Archive Development at the BBC, into taking on what many might describe as a ‘proper job’ at the BBC, as opposed to my casual appearances on websites, radio programmes and the odd TV news bulletin. 

For the next six months I will be working part-time as Head of Partnership Development for the BBC Archive Project, working with Tony and the team under Director Roly Keating to build relationships between the BBC and other cultural institutions based around a shared interest in digitisation, standards and practical applications of the enormous archives that form Britain’s cultural history.

I get a desk and a computer on the seventh floor of TV Centre, access to the staff canteen and a chance to bump into Director-General Mark Thompson in the corridor early in the morning as I stagger in to the office, clutching my coffee.  And I get to have some influence on what I believe is the most important project the BBC is currently working on, finding a way to take the vast amount of material that the Corporation has accumulated over the decades and put it to work in our digital world.

This isn’t an editorial role, and I’m not working as a BBC journalist in the way Rory Cellan-Jones does, so I won’t stop working as a freelance and general hack, though the things I write for the BBC will now have to follow editorial guidelines.  I’ll still be giving talks and presentations as an independent commentator, since very little of what I normally talk about overlaps with the work I will be doing on the Archive and I won’t have any public profile in my work for the Archive Project.  I’ll have less time for such things of course, but no less interest in the whole range of issues that have motivated me over the years.

I think it’s important that anyone who seeks a public voice, as I do, is open and transparent about their interests, activities and sources of income, so now you all know what’s going on. I probably won’t be able to write much about what I’m actually up to at the BBC, as most of it is about getting projects and relationships to the point where they can be talked about by other people.  However I’ve set up a new Twitter profile, ‘bbcbillt’, where I’ll tweet about what I’m up to so that I keep it out of my main timeline.

And we’ll see how it goes – I’ll watch the ripples change their size, and perhaps leave the stream of warm impermanence.  Changes, indeed.