techno-culture

Observer columnist John Naughton has a superb blog post today on Cyberspace and its Discontents which nails exactly the Janus face of the internet: why the net is wonderful/the net is hideous. An adept picking apart of the Stephen Fry/Jan Moir/Trafigura twitter situations.
His quotes from Stephen Fry’s blog also leave me deeply impressed by [...]

Many hours later, I hope I’ve cleaned out the RSS hack that happened sometime in the approximately two months between my last postings. Man, one ugly hack — malicious code in a database table that is actually coded backwards (eg in mirror text — weird!). That’s deleted out (which taught me a bit more about [...]

And as a summary of the negatives of both these forms of communication, he is spot on: “…monetisation must eventually happen somehow. People aren’t being connected, they’re being bundled up and sold.” Of course this ‘downsides’ view is not the only view, but he certainly throws some needed cold water on some very overexcited tech [...]

Tags: blogs, Twitter

Six years ago today I was slumped into a couch in the Shelbourne interviewing William Gibson, for nearly two hours. Well actually, the interview ran for about 60 minutes but then there was a gap before the photographer came and so he suggested we just sit on and gab and drink coffee, which was a [...]

Tags: Pattern Recognition, Shelbourne Hotel, William Gibson

Finalleeeeeeeee the blog is up and running once more. Well, epic effort involved to get my database back again from former hosting company; a long tale of woe! What a nightmare — I wish there were a set of standards for blogs that made it possible to easily move between blogging applications with a database [...]

Tags: hosting

A recent paper indicates that social media tools can be more distracting than productive (I know, many will say, DOH!). At least in the case of adding tags — people had poorer comprehension of what they had read when they added them, compared to when they simply read the article. I have always had the [...]

Tags: Mike Butcher, social media, tags, Twitter, William Gibson

I first came across the incisive thinker Clay Shirky in 2001, when I attended O’Reilly’s excellent, and I believe it was the first, Emerging Tech conference in San Francisco. I was there for an HP event and conveniently that ended the morning of the O’Reilly event, so I had registered in advance and wandered [...]

Tags: Clay Shirky, newspapers

Suzy Byrne (aka Mamanpoulet.com), Damien Mulley (at Mulley.net) and Val of Valskitchen.com all did an excellent, informative, lively segment on blogs and blogging on Ryan Tubridy yesterday morning (Ryan can always be a tricky gig both because he’s not generally comfortable with new technologies and can be quite cynical about them, and also because often [...]

I’ve just put the new podcast up, a recording of a talk and Q&A session with Joe Rospars, the man behind Barack Obama’s phenomenally successful use of Web 2.0 technologies in his presidential  campaign and in particular, on his campaign website, barackobama.com. Rospars was in Dublin on Wednesday for the launch of Fianna Fail’s new [...]

Tags: podcast

I have blog archives going back years and years — to early 2002 on Radio Userland. I’d like to pull those archives into this blog, or let them stand alone, and have the folders… but am not sure on the best way to do this. When I transferred over to Wordpress the only way to [...]

… as the first ever White House new media director, Macon Phillips,  takes up his role. All change at www.whitehouse.gov with its all new look and new blog with more to come. I think we can all confidently predict more White House website Web 2.0. The Obama-Biden administration’s technology policy statement is up on the website now, too.

Tags: white house website

I have just read that blogger Roland Piquepaille has passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at only 62. In recent years he had blogged for ZDNet, but for a long time before that he was with Salon.com blogs (when you could sign up there to get one) and I would often link to his latest odd, interesting, or quirky [...]

Tags: Roland Piquepaille