Tag: web 2.0
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Don’t shoot the Blackberry Messenger
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Andrew Orlowski
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BBM does things no web social network can do… it mirrors the flexibility of real lifeRIM’s fortunes have taken a catastrophic, Nokia-style nosedive in the past year – but it has a chance of pulling up. Admittedly, the odds are long, but this week the Canadian company began its fightback.
It’s certainly right up against it.
Fewer enterprise customers are dependent on RIM’s email servers. The trend to ‘bring your own’ device to work, one that works well enough … Read More
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The BBC struggles with the concept of ‘tech bubble’
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Andrew Orlowski
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The BBC has a real problem with social media. It’s delighted when something new appears. It slips into the patrician role that comes naturally to broadcasters – and especially the BBC. It can express childlike wonderment – Wow! – at something new and amazing. Getting beyond that though, is where the trouble starts.
Perhaps the BBC is haunted by the idea that people simply get on and use new communication tools without “Auntie’s” assistance. The viewers typically also have much … Read More
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The Autistic Network
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Andrew Orlowski
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Andrew’s Mailbag Isn’t it time for a War on Stupid Generalisations? These usually need a Czar, and I’d gladly volunteer.
Novelist Zadie Smith has written about the movie The Social Network and wonders if Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent extreme autism doesn’t manifest itself in both the reductive view of humanity that Facebook (and Web 2.0) software demands. That’s fine. It’s when she steers into observations about autism – largely borrowed, because she’s not an original thinker – from Jaron Lanier’s You … Read More
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Nathan Barleys to fill Olympic chasm – PM
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Andrew Orlowski
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Prime Minister David Cameron has cast his gaze east across to Essex – and dreams of a landscape filled with social media marketing consultants and SEO boutiques as far as the eye can see.
In the aftermath of the Olympics, Cameron wants to put the land and property on the Lea Valley to private sector use, and his Big Idea is to “nudge” the Shoreditch and Hoxton crowd eastward.
“Our ambition is to bring together the creativity and energy of … Read More
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Greatest Living Briton gets £30m for ‘web science’
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Andrew Orlowski
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As an alliance of the desperate, this one takes some beating. The Greatest Living Briton (Sir Timothy Berners Lee) has been thrown £30m of taxpayers’ money for a new institute to research “web science”.
Meanwhile the Prime Minister waxed lyrical today about the semantic web – how “data” would replace files, with machine speaking unto machine in a cybernetic paradise.
It’s really a confluence of two groups of people with a shared interest in bureaucracy.
Computer Science is no longer … Read More
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Panorama on the Digital Economy Bill
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Andrew Orlowski
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BBC1’s flagship current affairs program was devoted to file sharing last night, and contained something to piss off a range of lobbyists.Usually when this happens, BBC producers often conclude “they’re doing something right”, and pour themselves a large, congratulatory drink. They shouldn’t, because while the program succeeded in trying to be “fair”, it failed in its larger mission to present the issue properly – something we already understand.… Read More