Category: Media

  • The wisdom of tramps

    One of my world-weary .net columns has made its way online: I’m not suggesting that social networks are bad. But again and again I’m finding that I seem to be living in a different world to the tech triumphalists [with] their sunny Californian positivity.

  • Just what the Internet needs right now: tax

    From the You Couldn’t Make It Up department: you’d need a very special brand of lunacy to decide that the best thing to do right now would be to put a tax on internet ads and broadband connections. Guess what? The government’s considering exactly that… To appreciate the genius of the idea, you need to…

  • Free costs money. Who’s going to pay for it? Er, you

    Me, on Techradar: We’re so used to the idea that everything online should be free that we don’t even think about it. Of course the iPlayer should give us HD video for free. Of course Spotify should stream music for free. Websites? Free. News? Free. Video? Free. Software? Free. There’s only one problem. Free costs…

  • Who should you sneer at online?

    It’s all very confusing: one of my recent .net columns is up on Techradar: Print out this cut-out-and keep guide, pin it to your monitor and you’ll always know exactly who to look down on… If you’re on Bebo, you’re 14. If you’re on MySpace, you’re not in a band and you’re not an imbecile,…

  • Get annoyed more easily: a whole bunch of my Techradar columns in one place

    Techradar has very kindly used some Internet magic to collate a big bunch of op-eds and link to them from a single page. It’s here, if you fancy getting annoyed all over again.

  • TV tweets are killing the cliffhanger

    Aaaaagh! The last time we looked, that big box on the Twitter homepage says “What are you doing?” Maybe it changes at 9.55pm on a Wednesday night to say “Why not tell the entire planet who’s been fired on The Apprentice?”, or maybe Americans get a special version that says “Quick, tell the Brits who…

  • How Yahoo became Boohoo – and what’s next

    Me, on You Know Where… Yahoo decided to take on Google. It bought search company Inktomi, Google’s closest rival, in 2002, and it bought search advertising firm Overture in 2003. All Yahoo needed to do was to put them together and integrate them with its existing search system. And that’s where the wheels came off.

  • Ding dong, the database is dead. Isn’t it?

    Jacqui Smith is scrapping the uber-database that would monitor everything we do online. Isn’t she? In an unexpected press conference yesterday, Doctor Evil admitted that his unpopular plans for “sharks with frickin’ laser beams” were “extreme” and too expensive, so the entire programme is being scrapped. However, when journalists examined the details of the policy,…

  • eBooks won’t have a happy ending

    Publishers are getting ready to embrace eBooks. I think they’re making a big mistake. Books aren’t music. You don’t read a book when you’re concentrating on something important, you don’t skip between chapters, books and authors in the space of a few minutes and you don’t need 1,000 different titles to read on the bus.…

  • The sodding new media evangelists

    Over at Will Write For Food, Dan Oliver gets annoyed about yet more “blogging is better than journalism, so nerrr” punditry. I’m inclined to agree with Dan: journalism isn’t dying, but the model is changing. I’m not convinced it’s changing for the better, but it’s definitely changing.