Conflicts of Interest, And The Search for Truth

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has an interesting post about conflicts of interest, bounced off a comment by Jason Calacanis who quoted a rumor he had heard that it was possible to “buy a review at TechCrunch”. (In other words, pay money to get a positive review on the website). There are some good points in… Read More »

Blogs and Diaries from the War

I’ve been writing in my WSJ.com column recently about the loss of tangible history, where our move to digital artefacts — letters replaced by emails, snapshots by digital pictures, SMS messages by postcards — is depriving of us of things we can touch to reconnect us to the past. A wonderful piece by the NYT’s… Read More »

A Patch in Time?

Further to my earlier post about what I felt was Symantec’s somewhat tardy and insubstantial public response to the discovery of a serious vulnerability in its own Antivirus software, I don’t feel much more at ease after an email exchange with their PR folk. First off, Symantec has, by midday in the Asian day, come… Read More »

The Presence Problem

Steve Smith of Lavalife makes a good point about the surge of new products which extend the use of Skype beyond the desktop. Great for mobility and wider access, bad for one of the key benefits that IM-related programs like Skype bring us: presence. (Presence merely means being able to signal whether you’re online, whether… Read More »