This week I drove into and out of central London, into the congestion charging zone, in my self-charging hybrid car for the first time this year. It’s about a 60-mile trip each way for me on the A4 and M4 motorway. Much of the journey on the M4 is under 50mph or 60mph speed limits due to the huge smart motorway project to widen that whole stretch to four lanes each way between J12 at Theale and J3 at Hayes.…
Updated on January 9, 2022 Twitter reminded me the other day that it was fifteen years ago when I signed up for a Twitter account. December 7, 2006, was that day and the message I posted was like many you saw at the time when people started signing up – pithy and full of insight :) Indeed, it was so unremarkable that it didn’t get a mention in my blog at a time when I was paying a lot of…
Updated on January 9, 2022 At the dawn of the social media age fifteen and more years ago, everything was about blogs. This was the time just before Facebook, before Twitter, even before YouTube, when blogs started to gain momentum from the early-to-mid 2000s when businesses began exploring this new media model and considered the opportunities and risks it presented as an additional communication channel. Take IBM, for example – a true early pioneer in encouraging employees to embrace a…
Updated on January 9, 2022 Facebook’s rebranding as Meta has been seen by many as the company’s latest attempt at corporate crisis control. The social media giant has been publicly attacked for creating an environment that fosters far-right extremism and violating individuals’ data privacy. Yet it also represents an attempt to rebrand the growing power of tech monopolies to shape all areas of our lives through social expansion. It points to a troubling new era of “metacapitalism” – or “capitalism…
Updated on January 9, 2022 Today, October 5, Microsoft makes Windows 11, a new version of Windows, publicly available. Over the coming nine months or so, it will be available as a free update in Windows Update on computers everywhere running Windows 10. Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows 11 has taken only three months to go from first public announcement about a new version coming today to public availability and access to it. In those intervening three months, Microsoft…
