If the past is a foreign country, how much more so the future. There have been endless articles – to say nothing of entire books – about the digital generation, but few of them in my experience really bring the differences to life. I was struck by a piece danah boyd has just written which [...]
Months can go by without encountering a single guru, then before you know it, three come along in a single week (actually there were more, but they were so thick on the ground that some I merely brushed past on staircases, rather than hearing them speak). Second of the three was Howard Rheingold, famous as [...]
Hard on Martha Lane Fox’s speech at Reboot Britain yesterday – with a fuller account in today’s FT – comes a piece by Eszter Hargittai on the tacit social exclusion in access to tickets for the Michael Jackson memorial service: Having the chance to win a ticket … required Internet access at several levels. First, [...]
I have mixed feelings about a day spent at Reboot Britain. I am glad I went: I saw some interesting material and had some interesting conversations. But I also found it quite frustrating. The event as a whole seemed perpetually to be on the verge of breaking into a rich discussion, but it never quite [...]
The latest Oxford Internet Survey was published a couple of weeks ago. It’s been going every two years since 2003, so starting to build up an interesting picture over time. There’s a splendid summary by somebody called Paul Reynolds writing from New Zealand which is rather more user-friendly than the one in the report itself. [...]
The Australian Government has just announced a Government 2.0 Taskforce, which seems to be getting some of the same sorts of reactions as our own Power of Information Taskforce – that it is an establishment fix, that it needs to deliver instant radicalism, that it is a huge opportunity ready to be taken. I know [...]
I wrote about the voices of government last month – five categories of public sector bloggers, with the fifth largely empty. Step forward John Duncan who blogs and twitters in his role as UK Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament. In my earlier post, I had the FCO bloggers in category 3 – People [...]
The bloggers of government are an impressive bunch. So much so, that it’s easy to overlook just how skewed a sample of the population they still represent. I have been thinking a bit recently about who does – and who doesn’t – blog from government, and have come up with five categories: People whose job [...]
Qimo is an operating system with a difference: it’s aimed at three year olds. Application software for toddlers has been around for a long time, of course, but the existence of an entire operating system (even if it’s Ubuntu a little bit under the skin) gives food for thought. The much hyped digital natives are, [...]