Astonishingly, today marks the tenth anniversary of this blog. I don’t post very often these days, partly as I only work part-time and also, perhaps, a sign of the times as so many of us are paying more attention to Facebook and Twitter. But, back in the day, there was a post a week, covering all sorts of technical stuff whipped in with some jokey items on the state of the ‘business lunch’ in modern times.
Looking back through the blog it is remarkable not only to see what sorts of technical debates were in the air, but also what a record there is of what I was up to in the years when I was running Intelligent Content Ltd and handling futurology for JISC. As I read through the old posts, events I had all but forgotten came back to me: Leeds University’s computer jubilee event (with free, hexadecimal beer), interviewing Richard Stallman, Oxford’s Open Source and XML workshops, Nottingham’s Festival of Words, and the EU’s ICT event in Lyon (there’ll be no more of that I guess for us Brits).
On the technical front, ten years ago it was Second Life (Reuters were advertising for a journalist to report from inside the virtual world that everyone was talking about), the sustainability of open source software, Microsoft launching a coffee table with a screen, XML, and 3-D web searching.
And of course Web 2.0. This is was being discussed everywhere in early 2007. Time magazine had just put a mirror on its front page and announced that their Person of the Year was ‘You’, the reader, acting together through the new forms of social media.
One of the first posts concerned the formal launch of a report I wrote for JISC on the subject. This proved to be a spectacular success, and to date has had over 100,000 downloads and 1,900 citations. It also led on to me being commissioned to write a book, “Web 2.0 and Beyond” – still available from all good bookshops as they say.
What will be the big techie story in ten years’ time? The increasing impact of AI and robotics on work I suspect, but who can say, ten years is a very, very long time in technology.
Tech Lunch 
This site is now an archive
March 18, 2019“The dogs bark but the caravan moves on”
André Gide (quoting an old proverb)
This site is now officially in archive mode.
I’ve not posted anything for over a year and have been working on non-technology writing projects in recent months.
It’s possible I will return at some point, but in the meantime, it represents a good summary of the technological mischief I was getting up to in the years 2007-2018. During that time I was a technology futurist for some major, national clients including JISC and a freelance technology writer. In 2012, my book, ‘Web 2.0 and beyond’ was published.
If you need to contact me, the details are in the ‘About the author’ page.
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