Mark Pack

For the third general election in a row, the run-up is seeing numerous meetings and articles asking whether this election will be the first internet general election. However, much – in fact, nearly all – of the discussion falls into two traps which are common across political journalism in the UK. First, an undue focus on [...] »

The BBC's website regularly feature in the lists of the ten most popular websites in the UK - and are usually the only ones in the top ten from a British organisation. So the BBC's plans to refocus and shrink its web presence are likely to be widely felt. The 79 page strategy document ranges over all [...] »

In the late 1980s and 1990s Clifford Stoll was a best-selling author, recounting tales of tracking down hackers and with an impressive technical knowledge of how to find out who was doing what online. As a pundit though he’s turned out to be rather less good and in particular a 1995 piece of his often [...] »

Cross-posted from the Mandate blog: For a long time both Google and Twitter have provided information on the currently hot terms - those words people are using to search (Google) or in tweets (Twitter). The data has been global totals, which in practice means the data tells you what is currently hot with Americans, with the rest [...] »

The outlines of a serious challenge to Google's domination have started to take shape in the last few weeks and, rather than being based on someone doing a better search engine (as per many of the previous ones), it is based on fragmenting data on the internet. We've already seen Rupert Murdoch's desire to take most [...] »

URL shortners are all the rage these days. If one of most popular ones was to suddenly stop working, a huge number of links and services across the internet would break. So you'd hope that the main ones are all robust, reliable services, wouldn't you? So just thought I'd mention what the .ly in bit.ly stands for. That's [...] »

First and foremost, the news that YouTube is rolling out automatic subtitling is good news for the hard of hearing: The machine-generated captions will initially be generated in English. At first they will only be found on 13 channels. These include National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels... Currently YouTube offers a manual captioning [...] »

There are several free services which let you know if a website is up or down. This can be particularly useful if you're involved with more than one site but don't look that frequently at them all. My own favourite of these services at the moment is BinaryCanary. It lets you track up to five sites [...] »

Today is the internet's 40th birthday* and, in a sign of things to come, its first few steps saw things crashing for no obvious reason: At 2100, on 29 October 1969, engineers 400 miles apart at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) prepared to send data between the first [...] »

Cross-posted from Dave Press, where I did a guest slot last week: Why do so many councils have such a poor online presence? I’ve written before about some of the missed opportunities, such as here, but for me the puzzle is as much “what should a council do?” as “why don’t more of them do it?” Part [...] »