“Social media is overhyped” a friend said to me in a social setting yesterday. “Look at the Arab Spring – it failed!” I agree with the latter part – what happened at Tahrir Square (and how people came to the square), and indeed Gezi Park, would seem to indicate the […]
My MacBook needed a bit of a spring clean, so I decided to wipe it, reinstall Mac OS, and then re-install all my apps. Rather than just restoring apps from a backup I wanted fresh installations of all of them – easy enough for things like Firefox and Skype that […]
The German tech and politics conference re-publica has been going a decade now, and the tenth edition (in its third and final day today as I write this) is supposed to be about reflection. I’ve been to eight editions of re-publica – I was first a speaker back in 2009 […]
Danny Yadron in The Guardian today wrote a piece entitled “Why do normal people struggle with Twitter?” that, via a conversation with Mathieu, drove me to write this piece. For Yadron’s alludes to an issue that has not been afforded much attention during Twitter’s current woes – namely the very […]
Today Twitter turned its Favorite* function (with its star symbol) into a Heart – as the company explains here. This met with a lot of criticism from regular Twitter users, perplexed by the new function. Here are a few example tweets from Anne Roth, Armin Wolf and Patrick Jackson: These […]
So, having taken apart the behaviour of European Commissioners on Twitter earlier this week, the critique has poured in – most of it to me personally in private, and some of it on Twitter. In this blog entry I am going to examine each main avenue of the critique, piece […]
In Gartner’s hype cycle, users of a technology encounter a trough of disillusionment after the initial peak of inflated expectations. The use of Twitter by the 28 Members of the European Commission (Twitter list here) feels like being in such a deep trough that it’s almost as if this is […]
I have been a jury member for Quadriga’s Digital Communication Awards in 2014 and 2015 and, prompted by fellow jury member Aurélie’s post about this year’s awards, here are a few thoughts about the awards this year, and what projects might like to do to stand a chance of winning […]
I’ve been experimenting with running Linux on Macs for some time and – for a variety of reasons – needed to make a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my early 2008 24″ iMac. The Mac is now on its last legs, and Mac OS does not run very […]
My old 3G mobile is on its last legs, so I am investigating how to upgrade to a 4G/LTE phone, and hence will need an accompanying data plan. A blog about my handset choice will follow – this blog entry is devoted to the choice of data plan. I do […]
This blog is now more than 10 years old. Now the little party to celebrate the anniversary is behind me, I need to set about working out what this blog is for these days. The brutal truth is that this blog is struggling – reader numbers are down month on […]
On 18 May (18 days ago) I started a little experiment. Using SocialBro I started a private Twitter list called People Who Interact. This list was automatically created – out of everyone who either replied to a tweet I wrote, or RTed a tweet of mine. The summary of the […]