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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. [more]
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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 [more]
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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 BrunoSky Movies Premiere 3DYou 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! [more]
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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 [more]
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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 [more]
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God, I love PopJustice. This is ostensibly about Shakira’s new album: We always find playbacks like this totally toe-curling. You’ve got someone who’s just spent a couple of years recording their (hopefully) incredible new album sitting in front of you and your fellow ‘scribes’, watching for your reaction to their new songs. But how do [more]
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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 [more]
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Have you been following the TechCrunch/Twitter story? The short version: If you haven’t been following the story, somebody hacked into various Twitter-related online accounts, grabbed a whole bunch of private documents and gave them to TechCrunch. With a heavy heart, TechCrunch is going to publish them. It’s all a bit tabloid newspaper. But it’s not [more]
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Can former online bad boys go straight and not just survive, but thrive? The odds aren’t particularly good. When the Pirate Bay announced its plans to go legit, a strange sound filled TechRadar Towers: “here we go again,” we sighed in unison. Over the years all kinds of tech terrors have gone straight, and the [more]
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I’ve been meaning to post this for ages. In his latest novel The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly makes an interesting point about hacks and books: Deep down, every journalist wants to be a novelist. It’s the difference between art and craft. Every writer wants to be considered an artist. It’s probably the best bit of the [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
