The deadline to add people to the electoral register has passed. The campaign is entering its final straight. Those of us caught up with the debate about the referendum see an end in sight after months of spending dozens of hours thinking and writing about nothing else. But up to […]
“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 […]