From the category archives:

Web/Tech

Dave Winer, comments, and blogging: some thoughts

February 25, 2012

Dave Winer has turned off comments on his blog, and I have just started reading him again after a hiatus of a couple of years. I do not think that these things are unconnected. These days, I don’t get that many comments here. That’s not surprising: I’ve gone from being a fairly prolific blogger who [...]

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Google’s path is the right one. It’s just going to hurt

February 12, 2012

Sarah Lacy: Now, a source tells us that CEO Larry Page, who seems to be hell-bent on competing with Mark Zuckerberg whether it’s the right thing for Google or not, had this to say to employees at a Friday staff event after the Search Plus Your World launch: “This is the path we’re headed down [...]

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When you think you’re in a walled garden, remember this

February 7, 2012

Esther Dyson: In a world where Facebook can go from dorm-room project to $100-billion IPO in seven years, it may seem careless to suggest that we can wait for 5 or 10 years for a backlash if one is necessary, but I think that’s the case. Dyson is right. What looks like a permanent problem [...]

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The Chromebook challenge – Update

November 25, 2011

I’ve been promising that I’d give an update on the Chromebook challenge that I undertook a while ago, but one thing and another have meant that I haven’t really had enough time to do it. But, finally, here it is.

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Heaven help me, I’m taking the Chromebook challenge

October 30, 2011

A while ago, I wrote a column for Tap on the differences between Apple and Google’s vision of “the cloud”, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) came down hard on the side of Apple’s. iCloud, as I saw it, was very much the more user-centred version. The iPad and Chromebook represent two different views of the future of [...]

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It’s all about discovery

October 22, 2011

The biggest problem online since the turn of the Century has been that it’s really hard to discover new stuff. Not find stuff: discovery isn’t the same thing. If I know roughly what I want, Google makes it easy to find. But finding things that I might like that I don’t know about yet? Much [...]

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The definition of “being a dick” in comments

September 2, 2011

Martin Belam: I’d define dick-ish behaviour on a news site as including, but not restricted too: personal attacks, using “amusing” clichés like EUSSR and Tony Bliar, making the same off-topic point day after day, being rude and grumpy and unwelcoming to newcomers, mocking other people’s spelling, bullying and hectoring staff and journalists appearing in the [...]

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The unbearable impoliteness of being, online

September 2, 2011

Why do people feel the need to be abusive online? Why do they believe that behaviour which they would never consider to be acceptable face-to-face is perfectly fine when using the Internet? A case in point: these two tweets directed at Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat: Calling someone a “cunt”? Declaring that you’d like to perpetrate [...]

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Google Data Explorer: Why doesn’t Google make more of this stuff?

August 23, 2011

One of the things which you notice watching Google is that they make a lot of stuff. A huge amount of stuff, in fact. And a lot of the time, they don’t really shout about it much. Take this: Isn’t that just brilliant? I can think of a hundred applications of this – and then some.

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