John Connell: The Blog

.…the fact is Google is an adver­tis­ing com­pany. This is where 96% of its rev­enue came from in 2010. It’s not a com­puter ser­vices com­pany, so the resources it devotes to serv­ing gov­ern­ments and school dis­tricts are small and the errors Google will con­tinue to make will be huge.…

Does the Los Ange­les expe­ri­ence with Google Apps offer any lessons for those pro­mot­ing the same as a replace­ment for Glow?

Tech­no­rati Tags: glow, google apps, los ange­les, con­sumer watchdog

“I don’t think we are,” says Derek Robert­son in a talk given to the Tay­side branch of the British Com­puter Soci­ety.

I know we are not.

Derek was talk­ing here about ICT in gen­eral, but used the recent Glow con­sul­ta­tion as an exam­ple of how hard it is to get the mes­sage across.

I would add another ques­tion with regard to Glow specifically:

“Do the crowd­sourcers actu­ally care?”

Tech­no­rati Tags: derek robert­son, glow, bcs tay­side, con­sul­ta­tion

John Naughton, who enjoys the mar­velous title of Pro­fes­sor of the Pub­lic Under­stand­ing of Tech­nol­ogy at the Open Uni­ver­sity, will be pub­lish­ing a book in Jan­u­ary that deals with 9 basic mis­con­cep­tions that peo­ple have about the Inter­net — From Guten­berg to Zucker­berg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet

John, who also writes for The Observer, wrote A Brief His­tory of the Future, which for me is the defin­i­tive account of the ori­gins of the Internet.

In the video above John is inter­viewed about the book by his OU col­league, Mon­ica Shel­ley, and cov­ers five of the nine misconceptions.

You can even pre-order the book from Amazon.

Post­script — If you haven’t already played with YouTube’s auto­matic tran­scrip­tion func­tion, just click the lit­tle red ‘cc’ but­ton at the foot of the video and click Tran­scribe Audio. It is still in BETA, and it shows!

Tech­no­rati Tags: john naughton, inter­net, mis­con­cep­tion

Steve Jobs was praised for his cre­ative genius, and rightly so. But cre­ativ­ity and great design need not be restricted to the bleed­ing edge of shiny tech­nol­ogy; some­times the very sim­plest and crud­est and cheap­est of mate­ri­als can be utilised in mak­ing life bet­ter for peo­ple, and can be every bit as shiny as the shini­est Mac­Book Pro or iPad 2.

Meet Mr ‘Solar Demi’ in the Phillipines.

Thanks to Ron Bur­nett for the link.

Tech­no­rati Tags: cre­ativ­ity, design, philip­pines, light