Copyright, Free Speech Vs. Hate Speech, And Other Interesting Internet Conundrums
What Is The Internet? Depends Who You Ask Do you spend much time thinking about what shape the internet is? Following on from that – do you expend much energy in wondering what it is that allows it to retain that shape? If it really is just a black mirror then...
Amazon Making Good On It’s Healthcare Idea
Whether It Is Ultimately A Success Or Not It Promises A Change What do people want? You have to imagine that Jeff Bezos is asking that a lot. Why? Because he seems to provide a lot of things that people need and want. Easier access to medication is definitely one of...
Combating Trolls While Protecting Privacy
Anonymity And Criminality Are Not Intrinsically Connected Should anonymity on the net be done away with? Should lack of anonymity be imposed on people who commit certain offenses? It is something of a minefield that pulls in all kind of laws regarding privacy and...
My 11 Year Faceversary
A Look At What Facebook Does Well The videos they compile out of your own photos and videos for these things generally hit the right mark, unless they excavate a problematic relationship – though thankfully you can edit that out. But after a few instances where...
China Built A Social Media Control Mechanism For Its People
When You Track Yourself For Others, Who’s In Control Of The Data? Use what you have. Want to control the people? Connect them all up and then use them to monitor and regulate each other, reduce the burden on the state. This seems to be working in China. The...
Zuckerberg And Cook And Facebook And Apple
Ethics Are Observable In Action Not Demonstrated In Words Watch how people operate under pressure and you can learn a lot about them. It wasn’t too long ago that Apple ran afoul of the intelligence services, when the FBI, due to an error on their own part, were...
Here Together With Facebook Forever
Public Relations Isn’t About Spin, It’s About Honestly Promoting What You Have Done When you are working on fixing your reputation excuses are perhaps not the best policy, nor is glossing over it. If you can tackle it head on and provide real solutions to...
You Should Have An App! We Build Apps!
Apps Are Essential Apps are where it is at. Considering that a growing number of people who are interacting with your website are doing so through their phone, or that more and more people are using apps instead of websites to access the data and services that they...
Societal Mediation
A Social Media Evolution May Be Underway Social media is just a set of tools that are bolted together and left to grow in the laboratory that is the world. A platform from which something is launched. A filter that mediates communication between people, with some...
Let’s Spread Some Good News
Just Imagine If Everyone Thought About Solutions Rather Than Problems This seems like an unlikely thing to be said in a meeting with any News Editor – that he tells you to go out there and dig up some feel-good stories. Bad News sells, right? That is the old...
The Truth About Google Review Reputation
Google Review Reputation 101 If you have been alive and participating in society to any degree than your have heard of one of the biggest tech companies called Google. It started out as a search engine and has in recent years had it’s hand in most tech advances...
The Promise Of Blockchain
The way most people will have heard of the concept of a blockchain is in reference to Bitcoin, where it has been used to track and make secure the history of the evolution of the crypto-currency. It has been a really good testing ground for the functionality of the...
Page Load Speed
Page Load Speed Is Important Ever sat there and suffered from a page that just doesn’t seem to want to load? Ever gone to a site and wondered if you have suddenly been transported back in time to a period when dial-up was the latest technology and you could go...
Extremism Tax – Making Social Media Platforms Responsible
Russian influence on social media was being dug into throughout most of last year, and the debate about hate speech versus free speech was also on the table – with social media companies being strongly urged to police their content better. Intellectual safe...
Cryptokitties Snarling Up The Blockchain For Ethereum Users
I Can Haz Cryptokitties? Cats and the internet go hand in hand, and apparently the same is true of cats and blockchain technology. Why? Because cats. A game called Cryptokitties has spiked in usage, and at the same time pending transactions on the Ethereum Blockchain...
Microsoft Windows Sets – A Browser Revolution?
Game Set And Match For Windows 10 With Windows Sets? When Windows 10 arrived, one of the best things about it was Edge, their new browser. After some of the terrible clunkiness of Windows 7 and 8, it really looked like Microsoft had started to listen to the people...
Government Social Media Programs
China Wants To Rate How Good It’s Citizens Are When it comes to dystopian futures I love a lot of them (the depiction I mean, not the notion of living in one), but I tend to think that Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where incompetence, and not some vast shadowy...
Twitter Expanding To 280
Will 280 Words Allow For More Nuanced Tweets? 280 words instead of 140. Does it mean anything? I have read that it may be intended to increase the signal to noise ratio – upping the complexity of what can be communicated, bringing more nuance to the table, but I...
Another Blip On The Wall – Facebook Snooze
Facebook Is A Black Box I read about this today on Tech Crunch, and supposedly it is supposed to give me more control over my Facebook feed. The thing is I keep trying to set the damned thing to most recent rather than Top Stories, so that I get more than the same ten...
What Does GAFA Mean For Everyone?
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – they tower over civilization like the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this concerns some people. The European Union doesn’t like the control that these companies are exerting on the market, but they are fast...
Step In The Ring – The Circle Arrives
Social Media Is Already Exploiting Some Of What We See In The Circle The Circle, the movie starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson, showed a feature called Soul Search, where the network used its extensive resources, in terms of the people that were part of the community,...
Letterman On Netflix
Letterman – longest running chat show host back in the game with Netflix! I am not sure why, but the idea of Letterman on Netflix excites me more than The Letterman Show ever did. I know it is a totally personal thing, but I seem to remember reading some...
Advertising Better Security: WannaCry’s Harsh Lesson
Advertising Protection For Computers Is A Big Business: But Not Big Enough Apparently The “WannaCry” virus’s name is apt for the reaction it’s likely to cause in its victims. As I keep saying, all the time really—like a looping song—the world runs on technology, and...