Archive for October, 2006
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
ippr IP report
The Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) has just published its report into Public Innovation: Intellectual property in a digital age. I was a member of the steering group which helped on the report, written by Will Davies and Kay Withers.
It’s worth reading as a contribution to the ongoing debate, and has some nice press-friendly [...]
No Comments » - Posted in billstuff by bill
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
Building a World Wide Net…
[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website, and Kieren writes to tell me about the IGF Community Forum, where a lot of the issues will be debated over the coming week... worth visiting if you're not in Athens]
It would be nice to think that next week’s first meeting of the Internet [...]
No Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Saturday, October 21st, 2006
Losing Lost
The news that Sky has outbid Channel 4 in the auction for the rights to show the next two series of the multi-layered enigma that is ‘Lost’ has caused a stir in media-watching circles.
Whether or not you care about the activities of a disparate bunch of crash survivors and the people and phenomena they encounter [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Saturday, October 21st, 2006
How copyright gets in the way.
My weekend reading is this (PDF) paper by Jeff Ubois which details the results of a project completed in May, 2005 at the University of California, Berkeley to measure the accessibility of historic television broadcasts.
It outlines the problems he encountered in trying to research one particular episode in recent US political history – [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in I saw this by bill
Sunday, October 15th, 2006
IT and Modernisation: New Statesman roundtable
Last month I chaired one of the New Statesman’s regular roundtable debates where they get a group of people together to talk for a couple of hours about an issue of the day, record the results and print an edited transcript as a supplement.
The topic we discussed was IT and Modernisation, looking particularly at public [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in billstuff by bill
Sunday, October 15th, 2006
Meet the new flaws, same as the old flaws..
While cosmologists explore a universe which exists independently of them or, except at the quantum level, their choices as to what to observe and how, things are rather different for those of us who study what is happening on the Internet.
For although the physics of electronic circuit design and the mathematics of signal processing provide [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in billblog by bill
Thursday, October 12th, 2006
I was so excited… for at least 30 seconds
Five has launched its download service, and you can get episodes of CSI before they are broadcast. I’m not a great fan, but my daughter is, so I thought I’d check it out as a surprise for her.
And what do we find at http://download.five.tv/systemrequirements/? We find the following…
6 Comments » - Posted in I saw this by bill
Thursday, October 12th, 2006
Complete control
[As ever, you can also read this on the BBC News website]
The myth of the borderless Internet, never very credible to those who had any real understanding of the interplay between politics and technology that underpins the network, took another hit last week when the US Congress voted to ban bank and credit card payments [...]
No Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006
Is it just me…
Or is this really worrying? What Technorati thinks is important right now
Blogged with Flock
1 Comment » - Posted in I saw this by bill
Sunday, October 8th, 2006
How long has Ofcom got?
John Naughton’s column in today’s Observer is, as usual, elegantly constructed and convincing, in this case on the problems facing Ed Richards as he inherits (and it was surely an inheritance) stewardship of the organisation he did so much to create.
John doubts that Ofcom has a future, a point I made in an essay on [...]
