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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… [more]
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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. [more]
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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.… [more]
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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. [more]
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David Hepworth has a theory. The decline of the so-called “lad’s mag” – a sniffy name invented by the posher men’s titles, who know their readers are no older or wealthier but are in the business of selling luxury advertising – is not down to a sea change in society. It’s down to Photoshop. [more]
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There’s been a bit of controversy over Digg.com’s DiggBar, which shortens URLs and provides Digg-specific features. The main criticism is that you get the bar if someone sends you a Digg-ed URL, but it’s also annoyed website owners because it frames their content. Digg announced some big changes to the bar yesterday that will address… [more]
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It’s Tuesday! Over the weekend, Twitter exploded with anger directed at Amazon.com. The bookselling giant had effectively blacklisted GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) books by blocking them from search results and sales rankings. We’re not just talking about explicit books, either. The affected books included scholarly works, award-winning novels and even Brokeback Mountain. Depending… [more]
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The teachers’ union ATL wants Wi-Fi to be ripped out of schools because of its evil brain-eating properties. Amazingly, I have an opinion about that. Techradar: Our kids are growing up in a confusing world. Marketers use pseudo-science to flog their products, online misinformation abounds and newspapers are all too happy to run scare stories… [more]
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The Windows Rookies campaign is really quite cute: [more]
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It doesn’t exist. So I’ve invented it! Your web browser is probably the most important thing on your computer – and you almost certainly spend more time with it than you do with family or friends. It’s no wonder, then, that browser battles cause so much controversy. Some browsers don’t render sites properly, others don’t… [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.
