Mark Pack

The internet has changed in many ways over the last six years, broadening its international reach and with a far more diverse range of uses. That change is neatly illustrated by comparing the select list of sites that had a Google Pagerank* of 10 back in 2004 and those that do now. Here's the 2004 [...] »

The Liberal Democrats are setting up a policy working group looking at information technology and in particular its implication for intellectual property. There will be consultation sessions at the party's conferences this autumn and in spring 2011, followed then by a policy paper to be debated at the autumn 2011 conference. Here's the consultation paper [...] »

A useful set of statistics about how the pay wall around The Times and The Sunday Times is working out has been pulled together by one of my research whiz colleagues at work, Katrine Birk. Although the published data from News International has been fairly limited so far, there is data that can be extracted [...] »

Most of the punditry about the internet and the general election has focused on the impact of the internet, and social media in particular, on politics. Although journalists often get a mention, the basic frame of reference is “how is politics changing?” However, there was a hint of a different perspective at the launch at [...] »

Who can resist a blog post that starts this way? If you too can't, then read this piece from Charlie Beckett. »

A thought-provoking piece from Steven Pinker in the New York Times: NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search [...] »

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 [...] »

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 [...] »

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 [...] »