In a week when Microsoft unveils its new Bing search engine and Google announced Google Wave, online document company Zoho has weighed in with its own analysis. Zoho argues that even when Microsoft develops superior technology the developer community and independent companies such as Zoho will not put their efforts behind it because of suspicion […]

I’ve just been reading a great post from Tom Steinberg on mysociety.org outlining his views on what would constitute an internet manifesto for Government. His basic premise is that the arrival of the internet is as important as (but crucially different from) electrification and the invention of shipping containerisation. Citing a recent speech by Gordon […]

I’ve just watched a great presentation by the economist Umair Haque which outlined his principles for economic renewal (thanks to Paul Bradshaw for the link). His argument is that the bull run which followed the industrial revolution is drawing to a close and the next wave of growth will be powered by an “institutional revolution”. […]

“Journalists deserve low pay”. That is the incendiary assertion by Robert Picard, professor of media economics at Sweden’s Jonkoping University, made at a lecture at Oxford. The statement is bound to get the hackles of journalists everywhere up, but reading the argument carefully he makes some intelligent points about the future of the profession that […]

In a thought-provoking blog post Robert Scoble, once the famed “Microsoft blogger” and now working on a new project for Rackspace called Building 43, tries to look forward to what the web will be like next year. He says he has some thoughts on its characteristics: 1. It’s real time. (“Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed are […]

Tim O’Reilly writes persuasively about the virtues of allowing people to follow you without you being required to follow them back. He calls this “asymmetric follow” or “Twitter-mode”. This ability is one of the key advantages that Twitter has over other networks like Facebook and Dopplr which require you to response to friend requests in […]

The blog Xark has come up with a list of reasons that comments don’t work on newspaper sites (for which you can also read “magazine community sites”) and some suggestions on how to fix the problem. The main reason for failure is lack of engagement/understanding from the journalists, it seems, and the main way to […]

It’s Sergey Brin’s turn to write the annual Google Founders Letter, a traditional part of Google’s annual report. If you have some spare time it makes a great read, reflecting on the past decade and looking forward to some of the developments which Google believes will come in the next 10 years. These include AI, […]

The Root of the Matter posts a very lucid account of a lecture on the future of journalism given by Emily Bell, head of digital content at the Guardian. Emily, who is now also a visiting professor at University College Falmouth, said there were clear pointers to the future: Journalism will go where the audience […]