April 2010 Archives

Last night, at the Convergence Conversation (Digital Economy Bill, Swan or Albatross) there was surprisingly unanimity across Telcos, ISPs and even Content producers that the agreement of the LibDems and Conservatives to the rushed compromise over the Bill had been a mistake. Their aim had been to get the Act out of the way so that the new government could concentrate on sorting out Public Finances before the IMF did it for them - but it was likely to backfire on all concerned. 

When a Roman Legion was "decimated" it suffered a literal 10% head-count cut. The UK public sector is about to be more than decimated by the IMF, unless the post-election National Government takes rapid and credible action in its first hundred days. Action to cut the cost of broadband roll-out by 50% (or more) and to use universal access to cut the cost of on-line service delivery by 50% and more should part of that hundred days.

I have watched attempts to produce automated means of tracking and tracing the provenance of on-line data for well over a decade - as a succession of snake-oil salesmen have tried to persuade naive users and politicians that their mash-up tools will turn an "on-line waste tip of unvalidated government data files" into something more than e-slurry.

I had hoped to have a speaker on progress with the Semantic Web at the recent "Uncovering the truth" workshop on data quality organised by the Information Society Alliance (EURIM) and the Audit Commission because I had long thought it provides part of the "answer". 

However Sean Barker has suggested that it is the little more than latest excuse for not applying traditional data standards: an expensive academic exercise that will led no-where. I therefore asked him to do a "guest blog". I will not comment further and await your comments.

The Convergence Conversation has just sent me a splendid clip in which the Mayors of the communities that have come together in the UTOPIA consortium (in Utah) ask Google to use them for one of its pilots. There is actually a pair of clips. The second summarises what the communities have already done to clear the obstacles to roll out. 

Peter Scargill, National IT Chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses has said that members providing wifi in pubs, restaurants, guesthouses and hotels have already started switching off their facilities.  Zdnet warned this would happen. Silicon.com commented on Government's "Digital Schizophrenia". Others expressed similar concerns.  It looks as though they were all too right.