On one level, they’re just another cold call. Just another waste of time. Another reason to consider dumping your landline altogether (unless you’re like me, of course, and they have your mobile number too). Gah! I’m talking about the infamous Microsoft Call Centre Scam. It starts the same way each time: “Hello, sir, my name […]
Category: the Web
It’s time to ditch the idea that, when not paying for a service, we’re the product. Tim Cook (billionaire chief of Apple) brought it up again in September, and recently Mark Zuckerberg (billionaire chief of Facebook) got a little angry with the accusation. These billionaires are, unsurprisingly, out of touch with the rest of us. […]
Privacy in the digital age: We can argue whether or not we should be concerned, but there’s no question that the amount of private data that companies collect on us should be carefully thought about. The problem is the difficulty of knowing how much is collected. Would knowing more help us change our daily habits? […]
So, Google introduce Play. I first came across this when the Android Store updated itself out of existence, to be replaced with the nonsensically-titled ‘Play’, which wanted me to agree to it, and its Terms of Use. Eventually it turned out that this was Google’s own version of the full iTunes experience: books, movies and […]
Hey look, it’s no longer the browser you hate! We know it used to be! So here we have a little hilarious video for you showing how people used to hate it. We’re, like, so honest. But of course: So, you should all use this browser now, which has definitely changed and is worth it, […]
One thing the Internet is great for is helping you find stuff that you’ll like. You can get recommendations from the likes of Amazon based on what else you’ve bought, and there are countless tools out there for curating your own little drip-feed of information from the Web. Unfortunately, this reduces the likelihood of you […]
The Problem Digital works, completely divorced from a physical medium and transferable between devices, now lack one of the key ways we’ve given value to these cultural products in the past: their physical size. Another problem: in a hypothetical future where all music and books are available solely as digital downloads (and I hope that […]
Ebooks are not books. They’re not ‘electronic’ books. In the same way that MP3s are not vinyl and Second Life isn’t real life (who’da thunk?). The book industry is not moving to ebooks. The publishing industry is expanding from paper to electronic screens. The losers will be those who think they are moving to electronic […]
All this ‘shopping shifting’ – from physical goods to electronic goods, and shopping in physical spaces to shopping from ‘wherever you are’ (i.e. via mobile phone web/app) – will further reduce the quality of the stuff we can buy. Of course there are many advantages to replacing a bookcase with something equivalent and yet which […]
As with many things that I blog about here, a couple of articles and a podcast have come along at once to suggest a change in the air. This time it’s the end of the expectation of free stuff that we’ve come to love on the Net. OK, so it’s not the end of them […]