Oct 2nd, 2009 - (Read More)

Sep 11th, 2009 - Twitter founder Biz Stone has confirmed that the network might take advertising at some stage. More specifically he's refused to say it won't. The company has just revised its terms and conditions and as part of the overhaul Mr. Stone has said on a blog that he's keeping the door open to... (Read More)

Sep 24th, 2009 - Another day, another Gmail outage - well, that's the way it can start to seem. Twitter was all a-quiver with how the system was down; people didn't know what to do about it and one wag put a note up saying the human species can last six days without water but only about eight minutes without Gmail.... (Read More)

Jun 15th, 2009 - I think I must be turning into some sort of freak (fill in the kneejerk comment of your choice at the end of this blog, there are plenty to choose from). I've just read this interesting story that says Google is going to launch a microblogging search engine. It's here. You're going to be able to... (Read More)

Aug 28th, 2009 - The wires are abuzz with stories of Twitter and Facebook customers being robbed. It's fairly simple; you Tweet or tell your Facebook friends that you're going on holiday and a thief reads it; they break into your house, knowing full well you're away, and you lose a load of stuff. Insurance... (Read More)

Aug 19th, 2009 - Facebook is going on trial for an alleged breach of privacy it appears. The full story is here. I don't know American law at all but I'm writing in the UK and over here, if a case is coming to court, we have to be very careful about prejudicing the outcome by commenting on it. Given that, plus... (Read More)

Aug 11th, 2009 - Facebook has got in the way of Google and acquired Friendfeed. This is not great news for Google. The search giant has one major chink in its armour; you can't search social media in real time. Once entries have been around for a while you can find stuff; I've certainly turned up Tweets from... (Read More)

Aug 6th, 2009 - ITV has finally put all the rumours into perspective and sold FriendsReunited. It's lost millions in doing so and there's no getting away from it - it was a bad deal. It's worth noting a few details about FriendsReunited. It began as a tiny business putting people back in touch with old school... (Read More)

Jul 10th, 2009 - Google is making it much simpler to work out which photos you're allowed to use for what, and which you aren't. The company is allowing people to search for pictures and you can filter by what's available for reuse, what's available for reuse without modification and so on. It's using the Creative... (Read More)

Jul 24th, 2009 - An interesting story on the BBC site says there's yet another search facility starting up, following the launch of Bing, Wolfram Alpha and Google wave. This one's called Splashtop and the idea is that you can be searching the Net withing seconds of switching on. In other words, it's a bit faster... (Read More)

Sep 28th, 2009 - A poll on whether President Barack Obama should be assassinated, which was posted to Facebook on Saturday, has been taken down after an investigation by the Secret Service, according to NPR. The poll consisted of a single question: 'should obama be killed? ' with the choices yes, maybe, if he... (Read More)

Sep 21st, 2009 - In an attempt to build support for a bill that would roll back a ban on Internet gambling enacted when Republicans led Congress, the online gambling industry is running online ads noting that legal online gambling could raise $48 billion for the deficit-plagued U.S. government. "At a time when... (Read More)

Apr 28th, 2009 - A mainstay of situation comedies is when one of the characters plays hooky at work to go do something else -- bowling, watching a ball game, going to the movies -- and gets caught. Never fails. Now there's a new wrinkle for them to try. Reuters is reporting that a Swiss insurance worker for... (Read More)

Aug 1st, 2009 - Convention and visitors bureaus -- perhaps more than 300 of them -- are increasingly using Twitter to help market their locations, and a recent study examined how they do that. Development Counsellors International, a New York-based tourism firm, said it looked at the convention and visitors... (Read More)

Aug 3rd, 2009 - The Twitter Platform Team is recommending to all Twitter developers that they make sure their applications support 64-bit integers because the popular service has almost reached the limit of 32-bit unsigned integers. "Twitter status ids are fast approaching the maximum 32-bit *unsigned* integer... (Read More)

Jul 26th, 2009 - A recent panel sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) discussed the issue of gay characters in online games, some of which forbid them. Games produced by Bay Area-based Electronic Arts Inc., such as the Sims properties and Spore have no restrictions about revealing... (Read More)

Jul 9th, 2009 - It's said about writers that you should never get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. But United Airlines has learned not to get into fights with musicians who have videocameras. As Dave Carroll, of the folk-rock group Sons of Maxwell, reports on his blog, it all started on... (Read More)

Sep 18th, 2009 - When a complaining consumer starts topping the Google search rankings for your company, perhaps it is time to start taking them seriously? Who says that blogging is a waste of time? Not me, but then I've been blogging for a while now, admittedly in a professional capacity as a technology... (Read More)

May 22nd, 2009 - Just how sick do you have to be to upload hundreds of porn videos, disguised as videos suitable for kids, to the most popular of video sharing sites? And how sick do you have to be to do so under the impression it is either funny or somehow exposing a YouTube shortcoming? I would suggest, in the... (Read More)

Jul 23rd, 2007 - Having returned from a pleasant family vacation where the main topic of conversation was a huge tanker being split in two by controlled explosions off the East Devon coast in England, it was nice to get back to reality and discover the nerdfest surrounding how much power could be saved globally if... (Read More)

Jul 8th, 2009 - In what must go down as one the biggest tech u-turns of the century so far, the ISP that was quite happy to undertake Internet snooping trials without informing those customers being spied upon has changed its mind about Phorm WebWise. BT, the biggest Internet Service Provider in the UK, has... (Read More)

Sep 8th, 2009 - A week ago today, the unthinkable happened. That's right, Gmail went down...for *two* hours. You would have thought, judging from the amount of chatter on Twitter that we were experiencing an epic attack, a horrible natural disaster, perhaps the end of life as we know it; but it was none of that.... (Read More)

Aug 14th, 2009 - I'm special, so special. I got to have some of your attention, give it to me! ~Pretenders, Brass in Pocket Ah the games companies play trying so hard to get our attention. For the last 6 weeks or so Microsoft has done a fine job of turning the media attention machine on itself, so you just... (Read More)

Aug 25th, 2009 - In a wide-ranging interview with the German Magazine Der Spiegel recently, the Head of Google Europe, Philipp Schindler, defended his company against the latest round of attacks from publishers who claim that Google is siphoning profits without creating content. Truth be told, this argument is... (Read More)

Aug 13th, 2009 - You have to give Steve Ballmer and Microsoft credit. After years of sitting on the sidelines playing defense and catch-up, this year they have definitely been on offense. Whether it's the ad wars, releasing Bing, the deal with Yahoo!, the retail strategy or its latest move, a deal with Nokia , the... (Read More)

Aug 1st, 2009 - Yesterday was the major league baseball trade deadline and lots of teams made big deals and took huge gambles for short-term gain, while possibly risking the future in the form of younger, cheaper, but unproven talent. Microsoft and Yahoo! also made a trade of sorts when they signed an historic... (Read More)

Jul 21st, 2009 - Today Yahoo! is releasing a new version of its search tool with many changes. This is significant for a number of reasons: Yahoo! has been in the news lately mostly as Microsoft's take-over target. The make-over provides the company with a news opportunity that's actually about an upgrade to... (Read More)

Jul 17th, 2009 - It's not always easy, And sometimes life can be deceiving, I'll tell you one thing, its always better when we're together ~Jack Johnson, Better Together News leaked out this morning on the All Things Digital Blog (and subsequently widely carried by the New York Times, PC Mag Online, Wired and... (Read More)

Jul 15th, 2009 - When Microsoft first announced their retail strategy back in February I wrote a post called Microsoft Retail Strategy Doomed to Fail and I haven't changed my view. Today, it became clear that in the face of all common sense they are continuing to push forward with this wrong-headed idea. ... (Read More)

Feb 24th, 2009 - The great Gmail outage, which as far as I can tell lasted a couple of hours over night in the US has prompted some nasty articles such as this one from TechCrunch where they derisively refer to Gmail as Gfail. Let's grow up, people. Software fails all the time and online services like Gmail and... (Read More)

Jun 20th, 2008 - Cloud computing or software as a service (SaaS) has a lot of advantages, especially for small and medium sized companies with fewer resources to devote to an IT infrastructure. The cloud vendors, whether Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com (or whatever company) provide all the software and back-end... (Read More)

Jul 9th, 2009 - At the end of May, Computerworld reported that Asus, one of the early Netbook success stories had all but given up on Linux Netbooks. This was telling because the Asus Eee (of which I own one) has a very nice, simple-to-navigate interface. It starts up fairly quickly and has long battery life, but... (Read More)

Jul 8th, 2009 - I've speculated in the past that nothing could keep Google from moving Android from a phone to a computer. After all a phone is just a hand-held computer, so it should come as no surprise that Google officially announced yesterday that it was getting in the computer operating system business with a... (Read More)

Mar 19th, 2009 - The folks over at Gmail have been busy rolling out all sorts of new features in the last few months but the one they dropped on users today is by far my favorite -- Undo Send. I don't know a single person who hasn't had the gut-wrenching experience of typing up an email, hitting send, and then... (Read More)

Jun 23rd, 2009 - Over the years there has been plenty of speculation regarding the sanity of Steve 'Monkey Dancing' Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO. But what is it with Microsoft and this obsession to pursue the search supremacy dream at any cost? Sure, I know Ballmer has sworn to kill Google before but the truth is... (Read More)

Jul 29th, 2009 - The independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industry, OFCOM, was charged by the government to reveal consumers' experiences of electronic communications services, including broadband provision, and the results do not make for happy reading. The research saw in... (Read More)

Jul 28th, 2009 - According to a new Gartner survey, despite companies driving down overall IT budgets this year things are looking good for global software spending in 2010. Well, I say good, but perhaps I should say a teensy weensy little bit better than this year. Gartner reckons that organisations surveyed... (Read More)

Jun 28th, 2009 - Most often, when someone talks about a filesystem or file system, they're referring to disk filesystems such as NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, ISO 9660 and many others but can also refer to network file systems such as CIFS (Common Internet File System aka Samba) and NFS. A filesystem is a... (Read More)

Jul 8th, 2009 - Yesterday, Google announced that they are entering the Netbook operating system market with the Google Chrome OS--a Linux-based, web-oriented effort. On the surface, I see this as yet another ploy to take my Netbook from me. No, Google won't realize any direct profits from taking over my little... (Read More)

Apr 1st, 2008 - If you don't know anything about the microblogging phenomenon called Twitter, it's about time you started. The idea behind microblogging is that you summarize your thoughts in 140 characters or less -- you're actually limited to the space available. Blogs with 250 word minimums need not apply. ... (Read More)