Tag Archives: Hypertext

Why Won’t Computers Do What We Want Them To?

(Post updated 2020-07-15 07:37 to include postscript on JK Rowling’s planning technique.)  Computers and the software that runs them have long denied us the basic right of dictating to them — not letters and grocery lists, but of what they should actually do for us – most importantly in the first step of thinking: the… Read More »

The Big Boys’ Mea Culpas

I find it interesting that companies can get things so wrong. News Corp just sold off Myspace for a fraction of its original price today, effectively admitting it didn’t get social media. Microsoft famously came late to the table with the Internet, and then has been late to more or less every party since. It’s… Read More »

Getting Paid for Doing Bad Things

I have recently received half a dozen offers of placing links in my blogs to reputable companies’ websites. Think of it as product placement for the Internet. It’s been around a while, but I just figured out how it’s done, and it made me realise that the early dreams of a blogging utopia on the… Read More »

2011: Year of The Media App

This is my weekly Loose Wire Service column. By Jeremy Wagstaff I predict this year that we’ll settle on a way to make people pay for stuff they so far have proven reluctant to pay for—namely information. This won’t be done by pay walls, exactly, but by what we’re now calling apps. Apps are applications… Read More »