A few weeks ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee made the case for free data access for all, promoting the libertarian ideals of the early Web pioneers. As I remarked in my response, this is a wonderful idea, but it’s unrealistic: technologically, a free and open platform could generate a knowledge-sharing revolution reminiscent of the printing press, the telegraph and the television; socially, once you add the fallible human beings into the mix, such phenomenal freedom would be co-opted and corrupted, twisted by the various -isms that we project into virtuality. And unfortunately, this is where issues of data control gets messy and a little bit personal.
media
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[Games Theory] Look to the web to save British games studios
Thursday July 23, 2009 @ 07:58 AM (UTC)Aleks Krotoski
The Guardian
Wednesday 22 July 2009Last week, the city where I live was overrun by the British games industry. To be fair, the per capita population of Brighton is disproportionately digital; Black Rock Studio, Zoë Mode, Relentless, Littleloud and many other top-quality development studios are located there, plus several games news sources have set up shop within spitting distance of the pier. But when the Develop Conference plops itself into the city centre in the middle of July, things get a bit silly. Yet this year there were definitely fewer geeks in the bars and clubs of West Street talking about their latest AAA game projects; it seems the crunch is finally taking its toll.
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[Digital Revolution] Liberty, Wikipedia and a voice for all
Tuesday July 21, 2009 @ 01:26 PM (UTC)The web is a levelling ground, founded on libertarian ideals of openness, freedom and a democratisation of information and knowledge. This has been replicated again and again, throughout the web’s history, in projects like the WELL, the WikiWikiWeb and, now, Wikipedia.
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[Digital Revolution] DigRev launch
Monday July 20, 2009 @ 06:17 PM (UTC)Check out the video of the Digital Revolution launch: Tim Berners-Lee, Susan Greenfield, Bill Thompson (who offers his mobile number) and yours truly on policing, privacy and potential.
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[Digital Revolution] What's become of the blogosphere?
Wednesday July 15, 2009 @ 10:06 AM (UTC)The blogsophere is dying, apparently. The long tail of user-generated content, brimming with idiosyncrasy and experimentation – the great hope of the libertarian levelling ground promoted by the Web’s founding fathers – is petering out. The anecdotal 1% of content creators (versus the 99% of content consumers) is moving away from the more formal end of story-telling/reporting (a process that takes time to craft, link, illustrate and post) because they prefer to keep in touch using quick-fire, low-cost tools like Twitter and Facebook. The result is a ghost town – nay, a ghost metropolis – of blogs that are, well, dead.
Oh the fickle, fickle Web. Oh the Ridalin-smoking, post-MTV, fast-edit generation. What have you done to our new media revolution? Don’t you realise that in your absence, the new media mega corps are stepping in to perpetuate the old media models, to establish Old Boy hierarchies and to open and close the gates of information at their whims and inclinations? -
[Digital Revolution] The Web is... too good for us?
Saturday July 11, 2009 @ 05:30 PM (UTC)See the original post on the Digital Revolution blog
To free data or not to free data: that is quite a big question. The cases for opening up data are revolutionary: data freedom would utterly transform what we could do for ourselves, for each other, for the world. The cases against are usually wrapped up in the context of commercial ownership, intellectual property and national security.
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[Games Theory] Retro classics may save Hollywood
Wednesday July 08, 2009 @ 11:27 PM (UTC)
Aleks Krotoski
The Guardian
8 July 2009
It’s the news we’ve all been waiting for: Universal Pictures has secured the film rights to the 80s vector-based space shooter Asteroids. Yes, that Asteroids – the white-on-black arcade classic. The news arrived via the pen of fellow Game Theorist Keith Stuart and the phrase “scraping the barrel” comes to mind. But rather than mock, I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a moment and propose that getting into a bidding war for an outdated, nostalgia-laden computer game is a good thing for the film studios to do. No, a great thing. Believe it or not, I have three reasons. Hear me out.
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[Tech Weekly] Chris Anderson on 'Freemium'
Tuesday July 07, 2009 @ 12:43 AM (UTC)In this week’s Tech Weekly, Charles Arthur meets Chris Anderson. His day job is the editor of the US version of Wired, but is famous for his internet theory in his book The Long Tail. His latest book Free discusses the notion of content being freely available online, and how that business model works for the content creators.
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