I’ve started using Posterous to repost material as it’s easier to send them an email than it is to add and edit a post here. I’ve added an autopost feature from Posterous to this blog, too,  but it may be worth looking at http://billt.posterous.com/ if you want to keep track of me for the next few months.

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.

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.

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…

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.’

Re-reading it now I wasn’t too embarrassed by my ten-year old analysis. The recently-concluded Internet Governance Forum in Egypt reflects the net’s continuing mutualist principles, while its organising power has been demonstrated many times in the last nine years. We have seen political sites like MoveOn, campaigning initiatives like Avaaz.org and of course the growth of Facebook as the primary way teenagers like my son manage their social life and arrange their many parties.

One of the main themes I explored was the nature of the public online space that emerges when millions of computers – each privately owned and managed – are connected together, the space that comes into existence within the connected computers of the world and which is not, therefore, directly owned by any one organisation, individual or company.

This public space, like public parks or common land, is precious and valuable, but it is constantly under attack from those who would regulate it, control it or seek to use it to promote their own commercial or political interests.  In ‘e-mutualism’ I was most concerned about attempts by service providers to create their own private networks, noting that:

“if non-standard programs and services (as provided by AOL, for example) proliferate then the Internet will fall victim to the tragedy of the commons, as the public space (the standards-based network) is consumed by commercial interests whose success will diminish the connectivity which makes the Net valuable to us all”.

The world has changed a lot since my pamphlet was published, and the danger of internet balkanisation or dominance by private networks has, I think, receded though the debate about net neutrality and whether internet service providers should be allowed to control certain types of traffic or offer higher levels of service to content owners that pay them is perhaps its modern equivalent. We may yet see an internet divided by network speeds rather than incompatible protocols.

The argument over the public space of the network has not gone away, however, although it now relates to a different level of the network. Instead of the internet itself as a collection of linked computers it concerns the social network and the various sites, tools and services that many of us now rely on.

We can see how much public space matters in the furore over what might seem at first to be a relatively small change to the way Twitter operates. The micro-blogging service may be a minority occupation and its attractions may be a mystery to the vast majority of internet users, but the hype does not diminish its importance as a bellwether for the future development of social media.

One of the behaviours that has emerged over Twitter’s short life is the re-tweet, where a user passes on a tweet from another person so that it will be drawn to the attention of their followers. A convention has arisen that retweets are prefixed with ‘RT’, include the name of the original tweeter, may be lightly edited to fit Twitter’s 140 character limit and can include editorial comment, usually in parentheses at the end.

So if @ruskin147 tweets that “it’s been a great day in the office” I might pass this on as “RT @ruskin147 it’s bn a gr8 day in the office (alright for some!)” and everyone will know what is going on.

Most Twitter applications now support re-tweeting and automatically add the prefix. It’s a simple, easy convention that was developed by the Twitter-using public to serve our needs.

And now Twitter, the company which runs the service, has decided that retweeting should work differently. The details are less important than the fact that they have changed the way their software works and added new functionality to their website and interface so that Twitter applications can also change to support the new way of doing things.

Unlike some users I don’t think the new way is broken, and I can see how it might make it easier for Twitter to handle the volume of traffic, provide tracking information to users and even learn more about which tweets are popular – perhaps even as a first step to offering advertising against the service.

But the real significance is that the company simply did what it wanted to a service that it controls and we, the users, had absolutely no say in the matter. This makes it starkly clear that Twitter, no matter what we might like to think in our more optimistic moments, is not a public space in any meaningful way.

It is the same with Facebook or MySpace. When we start using these new social tools we are stepping from the High Street, maintained as a public thoroughfare but offering access to private premises, into the Mall, where the rules are set by Grosvenor Estates or whoever else has acquired the land from the council.  We urgently need to consider whether we need, want or can mantain true public spaces online, and who might act as trusted custodians of them.

Bill’s Links

E-mutualism:

Keeping the net open:
Twitter changes rules:

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.

Typewriters are remarkable objects, precisely engineered tools of creative expression that seem imbued with the spirit of their owners. To stand before someone’s typewriter is to see what the writer saw as they wrote, and perhaps to come a little closer to getting inside their head.

Of course few authors still use typewriters, and I have to admit to wallowing in nostalgia when I came across this particular item of literary memorabilia, one of the many fascinating exhibits on display as part of ‘In a Bloomsbury Square’, the British Library’s wonderful celebration of Faber’s 80th anniversary: it runs until December 6 and is well worth a visit.

Today books are largely written on the keyboards of laptop or desktop computers, and the typewriter belongs to a vanished age – despite the valiant efforts of my eighteen year old daughter who still writes essays on hers.

I was made vividly aware of how much things have changed last week during a visit to Melbourne, where I am speaking at a conference on the role of libraries in the networked world.

The Library’s head of learning, Andrew Hiskens, gave me a tour around the marvellous collection at the State Library of Victoria, and it was a real treat – here a volume from the Medici library, there a hand-written edition of Boethius in a script that looked like a modern font, while next to the illuminated manuscripts sits one of Caxton’s earliest printed volumes.

Then we came across a display case containing the iBook G4 laptop on which Peter Carey wrote ‘The True History of the Kelly Gang’, sitting beside a marked up manuscript and editions of the book it was used to write.

On first glance the laptop and the typewriter are just two different ways of putting words in order, but in fact there is a fundamental and very significant difference: the laptop remembers. The typewriter has no memory of the poems and letters written on it, while the laptop can be persuaded to recall the book it was used to create, and it may be the only place from which early drafts and abandoned versions can be conjured back into existence.

Eliot’s typewriter and Carey’s laptop exist on the two sides of a gulf as wide as that between the hand-written copy of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and the early example of Caxton’s printing that share space in the Victorian library, the gulf between the pre-computer world and the world we know today.

It is a world we are still building, and although we can make out some of its boundaries the final shape is far from certain.  But it is not a ‘digital’ world, and I think it’s time we corrected the misapprehension that it might be.

We are not abandoning the physical or planning to give up our organic bodies and sublime into a mysterious form of conscious energy like the advanced species in Iain M Banks’ Culture novels.  We remain resolutely physical, and we remain reliant on old-fashioned analogue systems like eyes, ears and brains.

Digital content remains dependent on the physical world too, since data has to be stored somewhere, and some machine built of atoms is needed have to process it.  The ‘digital world’ is really a hybrid world, one where analogue and digital co-exist, where the physical and the virtual come together in a mutually dependent relationship.

Those of us living in developed countries already inhabit a world in which most of the information we deal with, most of the time, is either created, manipulated or distributed as bits and relies on networks and computers for its existence or availability.

The change to this way of doing things is, as the long-time commentator on network culture Glyn Moody puts it, not just a once in a generation shift – it is a once in a civilisation shift. So it is no wonder that we feel dislocated by what is happening or that we are uncertain about the future.  The last time our species tried to change things on this scale we invented agriculture.

[Based on a talk given to ‘The Big Issues’, a symposium on libraries, learning and social inclusion held at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia on November 16 2009]
Bill’s Links:

In A Bloomsbury Square:
State Library of Victoria:
Glyn Moody:

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.

None of us revealed the substance of the debate, and the online activity was in some ways just a good way of making the point that the world has changed, but we could easily have crossed the line with an ill-considered tweet.

It wasn’t the only time that week that I broke the implicit social rules at an event.

On Tuesday I was one of the fortunate few to have acquired a ticket for Boffoonery, a benefit event for Bletchley Park that featured great comics like Robin Ince and Robert Llewellyn performing for a cause that’s dear to my heart.

During the show I was taking photos, updating my Facebook status and twittering away in a manner that would have got me kicked out of the National Theatre but seemed entirely appropriate for an event that began with geek pinup Simon Singh showing us a real enigma machine.

I did it again the very next day when I spoke conference organised by Nominet, the company that runs the .uk domain name registry. During a lively panel session I tweeted about the event, posted a photo of the ‘panel-eye view’ and even used Google to look up the details of the ENUM service that translates a VOIP telephone number into a domain name so I could answer a question.

At the end of our session the chair, broadcaster Sarah Montague, expressed her surprise that we been checking our mobile phones so openly, and Wendy Hall, Michele Neylon and I all loudly protested that we hadn’t been reading emails but engaging in debate with the audience, although I’m not convinced we persuaded her that we weren’t just being impolite.

Thanks to the easy connectivity provided by smartphones and the growing number of people connecting online through social media sites it is now possible to reach out to the audience at an event or people anywhere in the world while talking on a panel, speaking on stage or sitting in an audience.

The shift in the boundaries was in the news this week for much more serious and sombre reasons. On Friday Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, shot dead 13 people and wounded many others at Fort Hood army base in Texas.  Once the military authorities realised what was happening the base was locked down and information was provided through a US Army spokesperson but one of the soldiers caught inside Fort Hood, Tearah Moore, used her cameraphone to tweet and upload photographs throughout the incident.

Tearah Moore has been widely criticised for doing this. Much of what she said was incorrect, as although she was present she did not actually see much of what was happening, and she seems to have posted without any consideration for the feelings or privacy of those affected.

in Techcrunch UK, where he argues that ‘her behaviour had nothing to do with getting the word out; it wasn’t about preventing harm to others, but rather a simple case of “look at me looking at this.”’  One of the most trenchant criticisms of this ‘social reporting’ came from Paul Carr

Carr also notes that: ‘For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation… and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.’

The contrast between me tweeting from a conference panel and the tragic events at Fort Hood is of course enormous, but it shows the range of situations now being affected by the new social media. The challenge posed by easy access to online tools and services affects everything.

Paul Carr doesn’t believe we can or should try to stop this or censor what is published, but thinks that ‘we need to get back to a point as a society where – without thinking – we put our humanity before our ego’. It’s a point echoed by Kathryn Corrick, one of the shrewder observers of the social media scene. In a typically eloquent blog post on ‘the ethics of real-time social reporting’ she points out that ‘gossip and news has always travelled quickly. What’s different is the reach and speed now possible and the wider and deeper impact.’

Our social rules seem to have been overloaded by our mobile phones, netbooks and laptops, because behaviours developed for the industrial age simply cannot cope with the new possibilities for information sharing. We are clearly going to see a lot more inappropriate use of social media before new rules emerge.

Bill’s Links

Rory’s AudioBoo: http://audioboo.fm/boos/74607-ben-hammersley-on-not-making-assumptions
Boffoonery: http://www.boffoonery.com/
Writeup: http://simon.hildrew.net/2009/11/04/boffoonery/
On Twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=boffoonery
Bletchley Park : http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
Nominet: the audience: http://img690.yfrog.com/i/elc.jpg/
ENUM: http://www.nominet.org.uk/enum/
Paul Carr on Fort Hood: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/07/nsfw-after-fort-hood-another-example-of-how-citizen-journalists-cant-handle-the-truth/
Kathryn Corrick on social media: http://kathryncorrick.co.uk/2009/11/08/the-ethics-of-real-time-social-reporting/

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.

Late on October 29 1969 Charley Kline sat down at a computer in the computer laboratory at UCLA, where he was a student, and established a link to a system at the nearby Stanford Research Institute, sending the first data packets over the nascent ARPANET. Later in the year permanent links were made between four sites in the US, and over the following years the ARPANET grew into a worldwide research network.

ARPANET was one of the computer networks that coalesced into today’s internet, and the influence of the standards and protocols established there can still be seen today, making this anniversary as important for historians of the network society as July’s celebration of the 1969 Apollo 11 landing is for those who study space science.

Technology does not stand still, and over the years the way computers communicate with each other has changed enormously. Early ARPANET computers used the Network Control Protocol to talk to each other, but in 1983 this was replaced with the more powerful and flexible TCP/IP – the transmission control protocol and internet protocol. Today we are in the process of migrating our networks from IP version 4 to IP version 6, which allows for more devices to be connected to the network and is more secure and robust, but work continues to improve and refine all aspects of the network architecture.

One area that is changing is the domain name system, DNS.  This links the unique number that identifies every device on the internet with one or more names, making it possible to type in ‘www.bbc.co.uk’ and go to the right web server without having to remember its number.  Designed by engineer Paul Mockapetris in 1983, DNS is a vital component of the network as well as the web, including email and instant messaging.  Every time a programme uses a name for a computer instead of a number, DNS is involved.

However DNS, like so much of the network’s architecture, was developed by english-speaking westerners, and its original design only allowed standard ASCII characters to be used in names.  ASCII, the American Standard Code for

Information Interchange, is a way of representing letters, numbers and punctuation in the binary code used by computers, and was originally based on old telegraphic codes. It works really well for English, but had to be extended and updated to cope with other alphabets, and has now been replaced by the much more powerful and capable Unicode standard, able to represent non-Latin languages as well as those based on the Latin alphabet.

Being able to write in your own language is one thing, but it’s also important to be able to have email or website addresses that use it. Unfortunately some key services would not work with anything other than ASCII, making it impossible to simply add in Chinese or Arabic characters to domain.

Work has been going on since the mid 90’s to change this and provide what are called ‘internationalized domain names’, and many organisations are now able to have websites and email addresses that include Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and many other alphabets.

The process took a significant step forward this week when ICANN, the international body that looks after domain names, fast-tracked a proposal to provide internationalised versions of two letter country domains, like .uk and .jp.

This will finally allow users of these domains to have a domain name that is entirely in characters based on their native language, and marks an important point in the internationalisation of the whole internet.

It has taken a long time to make this happen, but the problems of re-engineering such a key part of the network infrastructure without breaking anything are enormous, and anyone who reads through the technical documentation will see just how complex the process has been.

And it was definitely necessary to do it properly – the fuss over the recent retuning of Freeview boxes in the UK was bad enough, but trying to persuade a billion internet users to update their software to support a new form of DNS would have been impossible.

Over the next five years the majority of new internet users will come from the non English-speaking world. It’s good to see that those of us who have helped build the network so far are making it more welcoming for them.

Bill’s Links

A Brief History of the Future (John Naughton): http://www.briefhistory.com/
Internationalized Domain Name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
ICANN: http://www.icann.org/
ICANN on IDN http://icann.org/en/topics/idn