How not to handle a PR debacle, Part 767:
Avast, the free antivirus I’ve been using, and recommending, for while, has lost my confidence by a double whammy: mis-identifying pretty much every executable on my computer as a Trojan, and then not [...]
Is Wikipedia dying, or just growing up? A weekly column I recorded for the BBC World Service Business Daily (the Business Daily podcast is here.)
To listen to the podcast, click on the button below. To subscribe, click here.
To listen to Business Daily on [...]I’m responsible again this year to try to track down Asia-based journalists interested in a fellowship, funded by The Wall Street Journal Asia in association with New York University, for the three-semester masters program in business and economic reporting at the NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
[...]This week's podcast is from my weekly slot on Radio Australia Today with Phil Kafcaloudes and Adelaine Ng:
Reports of Wikipedia's demise: Premature?To listen to the podcast, click [...]
This week's podcast is from my weekly slot on Radio Australia Today with Phil Kafcaloudes and Adelaine Ng:
Google gives more details about its planned operationg system. Important, or a waste of time?Who's responsible for all the security holes in the software and websites we use? A weekly column I recorded for the BBC World Service Business Daily (the Business Daily podcast is here.)
To listen to the podcast, click on the button below. To subscribe, click here.
[...]Technorati Japan home page, Nov 2009
Technorati used to be one of the sites to see and be seen at. Your ranking there was highly prized; you’d add technorati tags to your blog posts and their State of the Blogosphere was a highly valued [...]
This week's podcast is from my weekly slot on Radio Australia Today with Phil Kafcaloudes and Adelaine Ng:
Research company proposes coughing into your mobile phone for instant diagnosis Really? Men don't read manuals, men take less time on helplines than women but have to call back more [...]How Microsoft loses my trust over Windows Seven, and how it can get it back. A weekly column I recorded for the BBC World Service Business Daily.
To listen to the podcast, click on the button below. To subscribe, click here.
To listen to Business Daily [...]
(Update UTC 2100: I’ve received a reply from Erik Hjort af Ornäs, the registrar of the site itself, and have included his statement below and in the comments, as well as that of Facebook. Both deny any hacking took place)
A hacker, or group [...]
(Update UTC 2100: I’ve received a reply from Erik Hjort af Ornäs, the registrar of the site itself, and have included his statement below and in the comments, as well as that of Facebook. Both deny any hacking took place)
A hacker, or [...]
A piece in today’s Guardian attracted my attention--“SideWiki Changes Everything”—as I thought, perhaps, it might shed new light on Google’s browser sidebar that allows anyone to add comments to a website whether or not the website owner wants them to. The piece calls the evolution of SideWiki a “seminal [...]
A piece in today’s Guardian attracted my attention--“SideWiki Changes Everything”—as I thought, perhaps, it might shed new light on Google’s browser sidebar that allows anyone to add comments to a website whether or not the website owner wants them to. The piece calls the evolution of SideWiki a “seminal [...]
Intrigued to see that Microsoft has turned a page of its website over to “What people are saying about Windows 7”:
The page is designed a bit like twittefall: a cascade of seeminlgy “live” tweets (their dates and [...]
Intrigued to see that Microsoft has turned a page of its website over to “What people are saying about Windows 7”:
The page is designed a bit like twittefall: a cascade of seeminlgy “live” tweets (their [...]
Does what we search for online reflect our fears?
There’s a growing obsession in the UK, it would seem, with ‘hoodies’—young people who wear sports clothing with hoods who maraud in gangs. Michael Caine has just starred in a movie about [...]
Does what we search for online reflect our fears?
There’s a growing obsession in the UK, it would seem, with ‘hoodies’—young people who wear sports clothing with hoods who maraud in gangs. Michael Caine has just starred in a movie [...]
Pop up window of the day. You kind of know what they’re trying to say, and you have to admire their diligence with commas, but it might confuse the casual user:
When you install this product, please perform, once uninstalling.
[...]Pop up window of the day. You kind of know what they’re trying to say, and you have to admire their diligence with commas, but it might confuse the casual user:
When you install this product, please perform, once uninstalling.
I’m fully awake now, and doing some digging on who is behind the Driver Robot “driver phish.” The digging has introduced me to a whole level to the software scam industry.
The company that sells it is Victoria, BC, Canada-based Blitware (“or Blitware Technology Inc., to be precise,” as [...]
I’m fully awake now, and doing some digging on who is behind the Driver Robot “driver phish.” The digging has introduced me to a whole level to the software scam industry.
The company that sells it is Victoria, BC, Canada-based Blitware (“or Blitware Technology Inc., to be precise,” as [...]
Maybe because it’s early in the morning, but I fell for this little scam pretty easily. I’m going to call it “driver phishing” because it has all the hallmarks of a phishing attack, although it’s probably legal.
I’m looking for the latest drivers for my Logitech webcam, so I [...]
Maybe because it’s early in the morning, but I fell for this little scam pretty easily. I’m going to call it “driver phishing” because it has all the hallmarks of a phishing attack, although it’s probably legal.
I’m looking for the latest drivers for my Logitech webcam, so I [...]
I’m sure they’re not the first to do this, but I really hate it: referral marketing.
SingTel, Singapore’s main phone operator, is encouraging Singaporeans to spam their friends via email, twitter, Facebook and SMS.
The sad thing is they’ll have to do this a lot to get [...]
I’m sure they’re not the first to do this, but I really hate it: referral marketing.
SingTel, Singapore’s main phone operator, is encouraging Singaporeans to spam their friends via email, twitter, Facebook and SMS.
The sad thing is they’ll have to do this a lot to get [...]
This week's podcast is from my weekly slot on Radio Australia Today with Phil Kafcaloudes and Adelaine Ng:
UK firm launches game where people spot real crimes on CCTV The rise of the Photoshop Disaster: Ralph Lauren gets upset when it's caught shrinking a model's waist to zero Waiter tweets, [...]This is a guest post by my old friend and collaborator, Robin Lubbock
I'm still waiting for this hole in the market to fill in. It's the tablet hole. The space for a viewer/reader/player about the size of a novel. It's easy to type on, it runs apps like an iPhone' [...]
Before I leave the poor folks at Nokia alone, I must take issue with one more thing about their promotional videos for their new Booklet.
Touchpads are mostly poorly used; I’ve only seen a handful of people who can use them well (I’m not [...]
With traditional media on the rocks, there are lots of opportunities for companies and organisations to disintermediate: to project themselves directly to the public. Indeed, in some ways, this is the future.
But here’s how not to do it: to put a [...]
Here’s another appearance on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Club, now called something else, which after a hiatus is back on every Friday—around 1.15 GMT.
Here’s the audio of the segment (about 10 minutes’ worth).
Here’s what I talked about:
My own experiences at the hands [...]Today’s twin bombings in Jakarta—their implications for Indonesia aside—should bring home to conventional media that social media is a multifaceted force, one that is evolving so quickly it’s fast becoming the primary channel that users tune in to for urgent news.
Some conclusions to draw from Jakarta (or are [...]
Google, apparently prodded by the ground covered by twitter news, has introduced a feature on its Google News search results that indicates what one might call the ‘heat’ of a story—how many sources are covering it over time:
As with Google Search Trends, the [...]
Reuters has just published its handbook online. A smart move (declaration of interest: I’ve done some training work for Reuters. I’ve got my old dog-eared copy on a shelf nearby.)
I posted (approvingly, but without comment) a retweet from Nieman pointing out that Reuters generally forbids quoting [...]
July 2009 Update: added BlogDesk. So far I've not been able to find anything apart from Windows Live Writer that works with WordPress page for Windows. (Ecto's latest release apparently does support it.)
Blogging clients allow you to prepare posts and then upload them directly. Useful for
composing [...]I had gotten excited about Google’s timeline search before, but hadn’t seen this: Google is mining not just text for the dates of more recent stuff, but everything, stretching back into the mists of time, culled from Google Books:
The result is an odd [...]
Here’s another appearance on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Club which is pretty much every Friday—around 1.15 GMT—and here are some links to the things I talked about this week.
Here’s the audio of the segment (about 10 minutes’ worth).
Facebook’s move to be more [...]This is a piece for my weekly Loose Wire Service column. I’m posting it here because it’s timely. That’s why there are no internal links in it.
Michael Jackson is dead. You’ve probably heard that already. But where did you hear it?
Chances are you read about it [...]
I don’t really know what to make of this, but I occasionally trawl Google Search Trends/Insights to see what people are looking for, and whether they’re changing much over the past few years.
This seems to me to be as good an indicator of [...]
I have actually been appearing on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Club pretty much every Friday—around 1.15 GMT--for the past year or so, but don’t always remember to post the links to the things I talk about (or intend to; there’s not always time).
Here’s [...]
I’m a big fan of The Guardian, but their auto-linking software needs some tweaking. It’s a classic example of trying to provide that extra value to data on the cheap.
My argument for a while has been that the only lasting way for traditional [...]
Paul Lamb over at MediaShift asks:
Is there still a need for vetting and fact checking of stories. Absolutely. But isn't that something a machine, building off our collective intelligence, could be trained to do far better than any one human or editorial staff? Of course this ignores' [...]
Interesting piece by Rafat Ali on paidContent.org quoting Michael Hirschorn of The Atlantic as to why The Economist is doing OK, while Newsweek and TIME are in free-fall:
“By repositioning themselves as repositories of commentary and long-form reporting—much like this magazine, it’s worth noting, which has never [...]
I noticed that the BBC website, one of the most trafficked news websites on the planet, is abandoning customization due to an apparent lack of interest. Instead of being able to choose between a UK version and an international version, all visitors will get the same homepage.
I was reading The Wall Street Journal in a cab on a BlackBerry just now and I realised what’s wrong with print media. It still hasn’t got that not everything is going to be read in a newspaper.
I’m not overwhelmed by Nokia’s new appstore, Ovi, but using it does help remind one of what the real revolution in computing is (I have been talking a lot about revolutions lately, but there are basically three: the information revolution, the computing revolution, and the mobile revolution, which [...]
Part of my job is explaining the world of new/social media to old media veterans. It’s not easy, either because they’re very resistant to change, or because they tend to see the changes being wrought on their industry as somehow different to the much bigger changes taking place. [...]
The bitter end of the Tamil Tigers has been fought away from the news crews, but not the satellites.
But did we make the most of this technology to tell the story of [...]
You may be forgiven for thinking I’m a fan of social media, and, in particular, Twitter.
Headlines like “Twitter: the future of news” and “Twitter, the best thing since the invention of the thong” may have given the misleading impression I thought Twitter was a good thing.
In [...]
I’ve written before about how traditional media appears to be debasing itself in a desperate bid for eyeballs. That example was the IHT. This time it’s the WSJ (I declare an interest: I’m a former staffer and still undertake projects for them.)
Yesterday’s online Journal has a [...]
Newspapers have been scrambling to keep up with the world of blogs. In the process they’re actually destroying what sets them apart.
Take this piece from the International Herald Tribune. It’s in this morning’s revamped paper, under the byline of John Doyle—without further affiliation. It’s a good piece, [...]
I’m always amazed at how much money companies sink into sparkling advertising and PR, but so little into ensuring the emails their staff send and receive reflect the same sheen.
Especially when they call themselves the “world’s local bank”.
Take this recent email exchange with HSBC. I’m a [...]
Hang on, let me check my iPod first
Technology, however small, can be the difference between winning a cup final and losing it.
Manchester United faced Tottenham Hotspur in the Carling Cup Final on Sunday, and it’s instructive how video technology was, in a [...]
Here’s what I’m talking about on today’s Breakfast Club:
Mac PowerBook explodes: the dangers of laptops. Here’s what it might look like. Nettops: the new new thing? Jack Straw, MP, gets hacked by scammers. German villagers turn on street lights with a phone [...]Here’s what I’m talking about on today’s (shortened) Breakfast Club:
Facebook backtracks on privacy policy after user uproar. I’m not convinced users really understand the bigger picture Hurray. Mobile phone makers agree to make a single charger. [...]Here’s more evidence of how vulnerable armed forces are to software attacks, intended or not. The French navy’s fighter jets “were unable to download their flight plans after databases were infected by a Microsoft virus they had already been warned about several months beforehand,” according to the Telegraph:
[...]This is up there among the lamest products of the year: a scanner that will convert a book to speech.
Well actually, it sounds quite good. I’d imagined a device that could flip the pages over while you sit back nursing a Scotch. When [...]
It’s great that Apple has created a new platform with the iPhone and the App Store. But it’s also a ripping indictment of the personal computer industry—and cellphone industry—thus far. And not to be too nice to Apple: The beautiful stuff we’re seeing with the iPhone is mainly about pastime—not [...]
What I talked about on the Radio Australia Breakfast Club today:
Everyone, it seems, is writing an iPhone app. Including a Singaporean 9-year old. Not surprising since half a billion apps have been downloaded since the app store went live six months ago. iPhone apps get security [...]An Indian phone company is warning users against a variation on the premium rate phone scam, whereby users are contacted by email or mail and asked to call a number to confirm winning a prize. The number is a premium number—either local or international—and the user has to sit through [...]
More on the Italian traffic light scam. I wrote to Mr. Arrighetti asking for comment, and received this from Silvia Guelpa, who says she is a consultant to the company. In summary, she’s arguing that the company, and its founder Stefano Arrighetti, haven’t done anything wrong and that if [...]
If true, this is a scam that is going to fuel the conspiracy theories of every driver who feels they were fined unfairly for crossing a red light. Police in Italy have arrested the inventor of a smart traffic light system, and are investigating another [...]
I did a piece for the BBC World Service on the Reply All button the other day (MP3 to follow). I’m not saying there’s a causal link, but now Nielsen have issued a memo:
We have noticed that the “Reply to All” functionality results in unnecessary inbox clutter. Beginning [...]
Think twice before you agree to recommend someone on LinkedIn. They may be a logic bomber.
You may have already read about the fired Fannie Mae sysadmin who allegedly placed a virus in the mortgage giant’s software. The virus was a bad one: [...]
… is that you forget you have them in your pocket. According to Credant Technologies, a Texas-based security company, about 9,000 USB sticks have been left in people’s pockets in the UK when they take their clothes to the dry cleaners.
This is [...]
For those listening to my slot on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Show, here’s what I was talking about:
Inauguration fever: How it may have tipped the way we use the Net, just like the election did. (People who weren't there weren't googling, they were twittering and facebooking.) [...]This gives you an idea of how bad malware is getting, and how much we’re underestimating it: a U.S.. company that processes credit card transactions has just revealed that malware inside its computers may have stolen the details of more than 100 million credit card [...]
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how KL’s airport information system had been infected by a virus. I shouldn’t have gotten so het up. Turns out that the UK’s air force and navy have bigger problems.
Here’s what we talked about today:
Steve Jobs: how bad is it for him and for Apple? The future of games: the opertoon ? French parking meters snitch on overstayers. [...]So is Google, like, the new Yahoo?
Google is closing some of its services, or at least no longer supporting them. Which for me is a tad sad, since I’ve always loved prodding around inside the Googleplex, convinced that one day all these disparate services would come together [...]
A working list of tools to reduce writers’ distraction. I’ve been using some of them for a while; I was inspired by Cory Doctorow’s latest post on the matter to collect what I could together. All are free unless otherwise stated.
Multiplatform
(Update: corrected a few things. You can’t see the person’s bank account number. But you can see anyone’s phone bill, whether or not they’re a customer of that bank.)
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Here’s a hole in Internet banking that allows anyone with an account at a [...]
Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling [...]
For those listening to my slot on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Show, here’s what I was talking about:
Great interview in the International Herald Tribune/NYT with Clint Eastwood, but once again, it’s old media slagging off new media and ending up looking the worse for it.
The interviewer, presumably, asks Clint to confirm that he’s a vegan. Turns out he’s not. Apparently the writer did his [...]
The Internet is fast becoming a sort of gossip chamber where the real merges with the fantasy, leaving ordinary people overwhelmed. I’m not sure it’s a good thing.
Take an email my wife forwarded me this morning. It’s from a newsgroup comprising Indonesian expat mothers [...]
If there’s one place you hope you won’t get infected by a computer virus, it’s an airport.
It’s not just that the virus may fiddle with your departure times; it’s the wider possibility that the virus may have infected more sensitive parts of the airport: [...]
(Updated Dec 8 with comment from IKEA)
I’m always amazed at how companies work really, really hard on their brand, and then blow it all on the periphery.
The pictures here are taken from the Milton Keynes branch of IKEA, an otherwise wonderful store [...]
Turns out it is possible to make money from having your products pirated. You put them out there yourself, and then sue anyone who takes them.
This is what, allegedly, is happening between a U.S. pornographer, a German anti-piracy organisation, and a firm of [...]
Facebook may have just won a theoretical warchest from a spammer, but it’s not put its house in order when it comes to scams. Indeed, I suspect they’re getting worse. Now you can get infected without even having to visit your Facebook account.
What happens is that, if [...]
I’m intrigued, and slightly depressed, at how social networking sites deteriorate so quickly into what are little more than scams. I think it started about a year ago, when a number of sites started pulling the stops out to build up membership.
Now, it seems, it’s all about the [...]
A case in Connecticut has exposed the legal dangers of not protecting your computer against spyware, as well as our vulnerability at the hands of incompetent law-enforcement officers.
Teacher Julie Amero found herself in a nightmare after spyware on her school computer popped up pornographic images in front of [...]
I make an appearance on the excellent Breakfast Club show on Radio Australia each Friday at about 01:15 GMT and some listeners have asked me post links to the stuff I talk about, so here they are.
Love on the netThis piece was written for a commentary on the BBC World Service Business Daily about Jerry Yang’s decision to resign as CEO.
Back in the early days of the World Wide Web there was really only one name. Yahoo. You could tell it was big because it was what [...]
Advances in technology—specifically, in blood spatter analysis and crash test dummies—have been harnessed to prove that it was, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald who killed JFK.
Blood spatter analysis has, apparently, been around for a while, but only recently has it gotten good enough [...]
I make an appearance on the excellent Breakfast Club show on Radio Australia each Friday at about 01:15 GMT and some listeners have asked me post links to the stuff I talk about, so here they are.
Texting reduces obesityIf your kids are getting a little [...]
It’s not for me, but there’s a certain unerring logic about SocialMinder: instead of leaving your social and business relationships to be tended by natural forces, why not automate them?
SocialMinder offers just that, by mining your LinkedIn and Gmail address [...]
Is it just me, or are software developers beginning to get their users? For a long time I’ve felt the only real innovation in software has been in online applications, Web 2.0 non-apps—simple services that exist in your browser—but now it seems that ordinary apps are getting better too.
[...]I make an appearance on the excellent Breakfast Club show on Radio Australia each Friday at 01:15 GMT and some listeners have asked me post links to the stuff I talk about, so here they are.
Follow football on your cellphone through vibrations: [...]
WiFi has become a commodity, something we expect to be able to find, but marketers are slowly waking up to its potential to get the message out—by renaming the service. But is it such a good idea?
A Dutch company, according to Adrants, has [...]
Screenshot from Search Engine Journal.
Using free email accounts like Gmail is commonplace, but not without risk. As Loren Baker, an editor at SearchEngine Journal, found to his cost, when Google disabled his account without warning. (At the time of writing [...]
A tricky one, this, and easy to get on one’s high horse but not analyse one’s own self interest.
Robert Boynton here does a good job of exploring this in more detail, concluding:
As professional skeptics, though, we should be suspicious of the knee-jerk way [...]
I’ve been mulling the issue of registering and activating software of late, and while I feel users generally are less averse to the process of having to enter a serial number or activating a program before they can use it than before, I think there’s [...]
Thought I’d offer a brief history of the financial crisis as seen through Google Insights, which measures the popularity of a search term over time.
Interest in the word subprime spiked a couple of times in 2007 (above) before we figured out it [...]
podcast@jeremywagstaff.com (Jeremy Wagstaff), jeremy.wagstaff@gmail.com (Jeremy Wagstaff)
