Last month I presented a paper about Web 2.0 broken expectations at a conference in Sweden. It seems relevant as there is once more talk of the death of blogging. Last year’s Technorati report first raised the alarm when it was noted that out of 133 million indexed blogs, only Read more
Feargal Sharkey has taken on one of those jobs that attract almost universal derision. The former vocalist for The Undertones has become the spokesperson for the UK music industry, a job akin to serving as the front for a kitten pie manufacturer in the eyes of many. Respect must go Read more
I’ve been in New York for the sixth edition of State of Play. For those not familiar with the event, State of Play is probably the biggest academic conference showcasing research into virtual worlds. This is my second visit to SoP, and enjoyed it as much as I did the Read more
This video conveys perfectly how I feel: Just another example of that creativity that is not supposed to exist on social media sites.
The final Digital Britain report was released yesterday. It is long, filled with something for everyone, from digital radio to a new broadband strategy. Some interesting commentary already from panGloss, Charles Arthur, Chris Marsden, and TorrentFreak. The report will be dissected by Internet pundits in the following days, but I Read more
Why do I get the impression that someone somewhere has declared open season on Google? The Google Book Search deal is under scrutiny from anti-trust regulators in the US; Jeff Bezos thinks that the settlement is a bad idea; it has even been criticised for bad design decisions. Although I Read more
Yet another Harry Potter copyright case, but this time, the one being sued is the bespectacled teen wizard. The estate of the deceased children’s author Adrian Jacobs is suing Harry Potter publishers Bloomsbury for copyright infringement in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In 1987, Jacobs wrote a book Read more
Very funny Alex strip: It’s so tempting to simply delete all of my Inbox…
Recently I have been re-reading several seminal works on Internet regulation, and I have to say that I have regained a lot of respect for Lessig’s Code (the original of course). Although I always respected the idea of regulation through architecture, the more I look at the way in which Read more
The adoption of the French version of three-strikes legislation has been filled with more plot twists than a Brazilian soap opera. First it got rejected by Parliament, then it passed, and now the French constitutional court has rejected it on the grounds that access to the Internet is a human Read more