On the 6th of January 1995, viewers of BBC Two were treated to a new series of Waiting for Godot Bottom. Stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel, Vyvyan and the People's Poet Eddie and Ritchie wait to see what the cruel hand of fate has dealt them in this week's episode "Hole". At one point, Captain Edrison Peavey Edward Elizabeth Hitler pulls out a newspaper to read. It may surprise you to know…
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I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true. There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and…
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The Guardian launched its online adventures back in 1999. At some point, they started using the name "Guardian Unlimited". Hey, the dot com boom made us all do crazy things! As part of that branding, they proudly used the domain GU.com Over time, the branding faded and GU.com became a URL shortening service. Tiny URls like gu.com/abc could be printed in papers, sent via SMS, or posted on…
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Some days, I think it must be fantastic to work for an organisation which just doesn't care any more. The sort of place which thinks, "sod it, it's not like we need more readers or more money." That is, I imagine, what it's like to work for The Times. For the last 3 years, The Times' articles have been (mostly) behind a paywall. People have been predicting its demise for just as long, but it…
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I have twice been subject to some very inept blackmail over a posts I had made on twitter. The first time was after I called a particularly nasty company "twunts" over a dispute I'd had with them. I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't a particularly mature reaction - but I'm not sure it warranted taking a screenshot of the tweet, threatening to show it to the CEO of the company I worked…
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I've written before about how newspapers are reacting to the changing media landscape. Every so often, I spy something that reminds me just how far they need to go in order to fully "get" the web. This latest example is from the Financial Times. I have huge admiration for the FT. Their reporting is usually spot on, their website is mostly excellent and their mobile site is very credible. But …
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