Oh yes it is.

The information superhighway, as pundits described it in the dark days of the 1990s, was going to change not just the way we lived and worked, but the way we thought.

No longer would we languish in the darkness of dumb despair. The internet would shine the Torch of Truth on each and every one of us, and it would feed our minds with the Flan of Facts.

Didn’t quite work out that way, did it? All over the internet people are saying really stupid things, and the problem seems to be getting worse.

So what’s going on? There are only two possible explanations. It’s either simple demographics, or the internet works exactly like our brains – and that means its mental age is seven.

You know who, you know where:

For one tenth of the money it would have cost to buy Twitter, Facebook has got itself some of the best brains in the social networking business – brains who are used to building things to a Google scale.

Why, you’ll have to read The Sad, Slow and Entirely Predictable Death of Friends Reunited to find out.

ITV bought Friends Reunited in 2005, by which time it was pretty obvious that free social networking was going to be a big deal: MySpace was already attracting millions of users, and Facebook was catching up fast.

Despite this, Friends Reunited was convinced that charging people to get in touch with other people was a really brilliant idea. Until April 2008 if you wanted to harass your first love or send a cheeky “I’m rich and you’re not! HA HA!” message to your teenage tormentors, you had to pay for it.

Amazingly, a lot of people did: subscriptions accounted for around 40% of the site’s revenues in 2008.

I think augmented reality is ridiculously exciting.

My brain crashed yesterday. I was sitting in the BBC, waiting to blab about gadgets, and I was next to a distinguished-looking chap who looked incredibly familiar.

“I know him,” I thought. “I know that face.” But my brain wasn’t playing, and it was only when I asked somebody later on that I discovered I’d been sitting next to one of the greatest novelists in the entire universe.

Wouldn’t it have been great if I’d been able to surreptitiously point my mobile at him to discover who he was, Google what I should and shouldn’t say to him, and then post geotagged ransom notes to his publisher as I kidnapped him and bundled him into the boot of my car?

Augmented Reality promises all that and much, much more.

Words on the Internet? I writes ’em!

First up, what will we be able to watch on Sky TV when it goes 3D next year?

7.00pm Bruno
Sky Movies Premiere 3D
You know that bit where the focus group sees Bruno’s pilot for a TV programme? Remember THAT bit? Now you can see it again – in 3D!

Six things Ofcom could do to fix the sorry state of UK broadband:

ISPs that deliberately throttle traffic – such as peak-time iPlayer nobbling – or block entire protocols should say so up-front. Ryanair isn’t allowed to replace its planes with trampolines, although we suspect it’d like to. ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to do the tech equivalent, either.

Just when you thought the EU launch of Windows 7 couldn’t get any more confusing, it gets more confusing.

it seems rather silly to wait until you’ve started manufacturing install DVDs before deciding that a browser-free Windows is a donkey.

It’s the tech equivalent of getting married, climbing into the marital bed on your wedding night and telling your partner: “I’ve just realised something. You’re a minger! God, I wished I’d noticed that earlier!”

The real Steve Jobs’ liver transplant appears to have given Fake Steve a new lease of life:

We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.

Despite my ongoing cynicism about high definition TV, I’ve just upgraded my Sky box to a shiny new HD one – not for the HD content, but because I wanted more storage space (series-linking Waybuloo and Timmy Time takes up more space than you’d think) and the ability to record two things while watching something else. Going through the schedules has been interesting, because I can’t make up my mind whether HD’s any cop or not.

The good: picture quality and sound are superb, if you can get them.

The bad: you can’t get them very often.

That’s partly because of my HD box – it’s one of the models that doesn’t have the new electronic programme guide yet, so ITV HD is absent for another month – but it’s more because there’s an HD chicken and egg thing going on. There’s not much HD content because there aren’t very many HD viewers; there aren’t many HD viewers because there’s not much HD content.

Assuming you’re a cheapskate like me and don’t pay extra for the HD movie channels, there’s not a lot: a best of the beeb (which seems rather heavy on Torchwood and repeats of Wallander), Sky One, FX and Channel 4 (which broadcasts everything in HD, although not everything is filmed in HD). There are a few other channels that I won’t watch and neither will you, and there are some surprising omissions – so for example you can get In The Night Garden in HD, but not Top Gear. I’m not sure toddlers really give a shit whether something’s SD or HD, whereas the cinematography (is that the right word for telly?) in Top Gear’s car features would look superb with more pixels.

The other thing about HD is that when you have it, switching to normal channels is jarring. Everything looks blurry, and the over-compressed stuff on the more obscure channels becomes completely unwatchable. It’s like going to the cinema and seeing a YouTube clip. It’s even worse when the HD channel you’re watching actually shows a YouTube clip – such as Rude Tube on Channel 4. Not that I’d watch that crap, but you know what I mean.

The money? It’s £9 per month extra for basic HD, over and above the cost of the HD box and installation. The box itself is nice (horrible dated interface aside), but unless you’re desperate to see 8 out of 10 Cats in HD – and who is? – then that works out as about a pound per programme: four episodes of House in HD and five other things per month. It’s a lot of cash for not a lot of programming.

One way to reduce that cost, incidentally, is to have a look at the Sky packs you’re getting. Turns out I was paying for a bunch of packs – the news and events pack, the lifestyle pack, the something else pack – that I don’t watch, and bumping them cut the Sky bill by £3 per month. So upgrading to HD means I’m paying about 80p per programme.

Don’t get me wrong, HD is lovely. The installer tells me that demand has recently gone through the roof due to price cuts and supermarket promotions, so perhaps things will change quite quickly, but right now it’s a bit like the Xbox 360 movie service in the UK: a great idea that desperately needs more content.

Do any of you have HD? Am I talking out of my arse?

A great post by Eric Karjaluoto of smashLAB on the subject of web design celebrity:

Don’t get me wrong; I believe in design and am a vocal proponent of it. At the same time, I sometimes feel that we too easily inflate the importance of what we do. We talk a good game with terms like “strategy”, “problem solving” and “design thinking”. Mostly though, these remain lofty ideals that surface only occasionally in our daily practice. On the flip-side, we designers love our toys, the novelty of our profession, and the fact that choosing type is arguably more pleasurable than reconciling bank statements.

Aside from a very limited few who concentrate on more socially relevant design, our work rarely dabbles in the kind of relevance we’d like to claim. We don’t save lives or fight poverty. Even those talented designers we laude most aren’t curing cancer. Mostly, we solve minor problems; the rest of the time, we do window dressing. I like to think that we’re the “plumbers” of communication.