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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]
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MetaFilter is ten today. Hurrah! When you spend as much time online as we do it’s hard to believe that the internet isn’t entirely populated by loons, goons, spammers, scammers and people who shouldn’t be given crayons, let alone an internet connection. Thank God, then, for MetaFilter. MetaFilter is ten today. That means it’s spent… [more]
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A Google operating system? Yep: Somewhere in America, Steve Ballmer is chucking chairs and bellowing the C-word: Chrome. Chrome is no longer just a browser: it’s a heat-seeking missile heading straight for Microsoft’s core business. If it’s good, it could transform the PC industry; even if it’s just Quite Good, it’s going to be bad… [more]
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Sony said netbooks were rubbish. Sony’s changed its mind. Ah, Sony, Sony, Sony. Just last year your VP of IT products mocked netbooks, describing them as “a race to the bottom”. So what do we have here? My goodness! It’s a netbook! [more]
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Two more things on Techradar. First, the Pirate Bay is going legit. That’ll be the end of it, then: Will The Pirate Bay continue? Of course – but it’ll continue in the same way Napster continues, the old logo and brand name attached to something with very little relation to the original site or service.… [more]
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A superb review of Chris Anderson’s book Free by Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame: The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed… [more]
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Sorry I’ve been quiet. I’ve been away for a few days. Here are a couple of things I’ve written… first up, Mozilla says Internet Explorer is like malaria. Let’s have a tech firm fight! “IE is like malaria, is it?” Microsoft could say. “Well! Firefox is like a big fat boy on a girl’s bike!… [more]
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As more and more of my writing goes up online, that means more and more of it attracts comments – and because I’m a paid-up member of the “journalism is the start of the conversation” club, I’d like to know when somebody adds something substantial to, or spots a glaring error in, something I’ve scribbled.… [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.
