Archive for 2009
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
Nearing the end of 2009
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 [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Monday, November 30th, 2009
Keeping Cyberspace a Public Space
[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, [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Monday, November 30th, 2009
More than Digital
[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 [...]
No Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Social Media Challenges Social Rules
[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 [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
An Internet That Speaks Your Language
[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 [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Been a long time..
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..
No Comments » - Posted in billstuff by bill
Friday, October 30th, 2009
Those who do not understand the past…
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, [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in I saw this by bill
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Turn and Face the Strain
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 [...]
23 Comments » - Posted in billstuff by bill
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Start Me Up..
[As ever, this can be read on the BBC News website, as part of their Windows 7 coverage]
In August 1995 I queued to buy the newly-released Microsoft Window 95 from the PC World store in Ropemaker Street, near Moorgate in Central London and hurried off to install it on my desktop computer.
It was hard to [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
What Would Foucault Do?
[This one was on the BBC News website on October 16]
Broadband speeds may remain painfully slow, but the desire to provide access for all will be driven by the pressing need to save money by reforming public services, cutting costs and improving efficiency, whoever is in power.
So we’ll see universal access simply because the financial [...]
