The wind of change blowing through my London living room

I was only 5 years old when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. So I have no recollection of that day. I once had to interview my parents about it for a school assignment and they said we spent the night together watching it on TV, not believing (them) or not understanding (me) what we were witnessing. I should see if I can still find that essay somewhere in our attic back home. 20 years later, I’m living in London, following the celebrations through the eyes of the British media.

250 words on spelling conventions in texting and twittering

A few weeks ago, I came across a few intriguing questions in a job application form. Not just the usual inquiries about motivations, strengths and career plans, but questions that you could argue about in a pub or write books about. Below is my answer to the following question: “How much does it matter, if at all, that texting and twittering treat spelling convention with little respect? Please limit your answer to 250 words”. At the end of the post, you’ll find more food for thought.

Illegal file sharing in the UK – Three strikes and you’re out

The Phillies have just won the fifth game of this year’s World Series against the Yankees and people in the UK couldn’t care less. They prefer the more gentlemanly version of the game called cricket. Only when it comes to combating illegal file sharing do UK lawmakers borrow a bit of baseball terminology (the author apologizes for such a sleazy introduction). A “three-strike” policy will soon be rolled out, which may lead to offenders’ Internet connections being cut in 2011. But is that gonna help?

Crawling the news

A few weeks ago, I had to read through a bunch of blogs and websites covering the UK newspaper industry. It made me feel very sorry for those guys. Basically, articles and posts on those websites fall into one of two categories. The first is “disastrous revenue reports/circulation figures” – any sign that the decline in these numbers is slowing is taken as a sign of hope these days. The second category may be called “where are you, new business model?”. One of the hot topics at the moment: news aggregators, in particular Google News. Newspaper websites like those links to their articles but they grow increasingly uncomfortable over Google taking their content for free. And Google has responded…

Friendship based on algorithms

What’s this now? A “News Feed” and a “Live Feed”? Facebook has changed its interface again. I didn’t immediately understand. Apparently, the Live Feed includes everything that’s currently going on in my social online world, and the News Feed just features some highlights. In other words, Facebook believes that a lot of the stuff my friends are up to is simply not relevant. Fair enough, I heard a lot of people say that the previous News Feed had become slightly overwhelming. But how does Facebook know what the interesting stuff is?