Archive for July, 2009
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Follow in the footsteps of geeks
[As ever, this is on the BBC News website too]
About ten years ago I went on a family holiday to Cornwall, and one day I dragged my unwilling kids to a delightful but otherwise undistinguished beach so I could point out to them the spot where the world’s first undersea telegraph cable came ashore in [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Learning to live offline
[This was on the BBC News website last week, but I've only just got round to posting it here... lazy, I know]
I have just endured a week of limited connectivity and it has given me a salutory lesson in what life is like for the digitally dispossed here in the UK and around the world. [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in billblog by bill
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
I Needed Music ‘cos I Had None…
The latest report on young people’s online music-finding habits from consumer research company The Leading Question has attracted a fair amount of coverage for its headline finding that UK teenagers use of filesharing services has dropped by a third.
‘Speakerbox’ polls a thousand young people, so it’s a reasonable survey although of course there’s a margin [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in billblog by bill
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
Being Open About Secrecy
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website too]
It must be tricky to be an advocate of transparency when your job involves selling serious encryption tools to government departments, large and small companies, hospitals and people who are concerned about having their bank account details hijacked from a home PC.
After all, the [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in billblog by bill
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
Giving Life a Shape
[This is also available to read on the BBC News website, as always]
One of the more interesting shifts in the technology world over the last quarter century has been the way that cultural organisations have gone from being the late adopters, inheriting office-oriented computer systems from business and making do with them, to being those [...]
