2008

I’ve been covering IT, and its newer acronym, ICT, for nearly ten years. In that time I’ve had the joy of watching the trends go around, and around. I’ve watched hype become reality, usually in a far longer time period than the vendors would like, and I’ve watched marketing fizz become dot–com failure, or Y2K […]

A few events have got me thinking about the direction of the Web over the next twenty years or so. The first was a conversation I had with Matthew Buckland about whether Facebook, or something like it, would become a type of operating system in the future, and the second was Google’s announcement of OpenSocial […]

In my profession I have to analyse a lot of websites on a daily basis. And what I just don’t ever get is the fact that there are still so many badly created websites out there? Not necessarily just from design point of view, but functionality too! And it’s not just the latent–old–school–frames–embedded websites, what’s […]

I’ve been fascinated by the term Web 2.0 since the phrase was coined. So were a lot of people from all different camps. Is it a design style? Is it development methodologies? Is it the way users interact with platforms as a service? The democratization of data? API’s? Social Networking? Eeeeeek…! Where does it begin […]

Google Friend, launched on Monday evening, brings to a close the era of social networking sites, and makes “social” a standard part of using the Web. This trend has been clear for a while: the OpenSocial initiative has effectively allowed you to share your networks of contacts across them. I doubt this was first prize […]

Is it only me, or has the media’s leverage of technology allowed its coverage of economic news to stagnate? The technology is now available to plug so many automated feeds into tracking of daily market indicators that the people responsible for economic coverage no longer think about what they are reporting. Usually, a sure sign […]