An advantage of being abroad is having access to a wide range of TV stations from Latin America. I’ve been watching news reports from the excellent TV Chile about the rise of sexting amongst urban teenagers in emerging economies. While it is difficult to filter out the moral panic prevalent Read more
Who could have guessed? Social networking sites have proved to be a serious privacy threat. The new MI6 chief (who looks nothing like Dame Judi Dench), has been involved in a bit of a scandal because his wife had posted all sorts of personal information, pictures and other family details Read more
Much digital ink has already been spent on commenting on Judge Richard Posner’s bizarrely reactionary proposal that the only solution to save newspapers is to ban linking. I usually try to avoid stories already heavily covered because most of the times I end up repeating things that some other people Read more
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
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
Very funny Alex strip: It’s so tempting to simply delete all of my Inbox…
Two years ago, author Mark Helprin published an article advocating for perpetual copyright, which was received with much derision from Cyberspace communities around the world. Lessig even went as far as starting a wiki to allow readers to respond to it, and the result was a comprehensive thrashing of the Read more
Big news from the Wikimedia Foundation, the governing body of Wikipedia. The Board of Trustees has announced that Wikipedia will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (BY-SA). This is a huge step for Wikipedia, and follows an unprecedented governance exercise by the Wikipedia community, where 88% of an Read more
After yesterday’s rant about journalists, it is fair that we highlight informed commentary. Billy Bragg has written a refreshing article calling on the music industry not to penalise fans with their misguided 3-strikes strategy. He comments that: “Stating that a “write and sue” policy will not work is an admission Read more
Anyone who studies technology knows about the tiered nature of its adoption. Whenever a new technology or application is invented, you get the early adopters, the trend-setters, the cool-hunters; these are people who are usually clued into new applications and have a knack of joining winning technologies at the very Read more