The dream is fading fast
John Naughton: Because we’ve all bought into the techno-utopianism of the early Internet, we tend to assume that it’s always going to be open to everyone. But as more and more of the world goes online, it’s clear that we’re…
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Some recent dead tree reading
Now and again I find time to read books about work-related stuff. Here are three I have been tucking into recently. John Naughton is a hero of mine. His weekly column in The Observer is required reading, and A Brief History…
What you really need to know about the internet
Lovely interview with John Naughton about the themes of his upcoming book. Worth getting everyone you know to watch this!
“Kids today need a licence to tinker”
Nice article by John Naughton on the state of IT education in schools: What is happening is that the national curriculum’s worthy aspirations to educate pupils about ICT are transmuted at the chalkface into teaching kids to use Microsoft software.…
Electric wok syndrome
In an acerbic review of Google+, John Naughton explains electric wok syndrome, which is always worth having in the back of your mind: A spectre is haunting the technology industry. It is called “electric wok syndrome” and it mainly afflicts…
Everything you ever need to know about the internet
John Naughton is consistently one of the – if not the – best writers we have about technology. His A Brief History Of The Future is a simply fantastic introduction to the internet: why and how it came about, from…
John Naughton on the iPad
John Naughton‘s Observer piece on the iPad is well worth reading in full: It’s when one tries to use the iPad for generating content that its deficiencies become obvious. The biggest flaw is the absence of multitasking, so you have to…
Internet megalomania
John Naughton is spot on about the recent Facebook announcements in his Observer column: What’s comical about this stuff is not so much its implicit arrogance – the assumption that we all want to share using Facebook – as its…
Cultural agoraphobia
John Naughton’s Observer piece this morning is a good one: The cultural agoraphobia from which most of us suffer leads us always to overemphasise the downsides of openness and lack of central control, and to overvalue the virtues of order…
Rewriting the rules
John Naughton‘s Observer column on ten years of blogging is a delightful read: This openness to immediate criticism and/or rebuttal is another revolutionary aspect of blogging. What we are seeing, wrote Clay Shirky some years ago (available online at ),…