One of the most tiresome group of people you encounter when you write a weekly column is the "suggesters".
Throughout the week, my inbox receives a steady flow of emails; from friends, from colleagues, but mostly from total strangers - all containing useful links to stories they "assume I've seen". And always with the same suggestion: "you should write about this in your column!".
Worse than the suggesters are the "trusters". They're even more irritating because of their belief that they wield
I'm tired. Very tired. It's a little after 4am San Francisco time - noon GMT - and I'm sitting in the arrivals lounge Heathrow airport, thanking the lord for Boingo hotspots and trying to commit these few hundred words to cyberspace before the daylight finally penetrates my brain and my whole body goes into jet-lag meltdown.
And to think I was so organised 24 hours ago. My column was written - 1000 words on a big subject of the week; a big subject that I now can't talk about, for reasons I also
The only good thing about the deadline for this week's TechCrunch round-up falling on Christmas Day is the absolute certain fact that you won't be reading the results. After all, with the holiday season in full swing, no one in their right mind will be reading TechCrunch. I certainly won't.
Safe in that knowledge, I can pretty claim anything I like. That this week's top story was Mark Zuckerberg being eaten by zebras, for example, or Al Qaeda investing in Twitter. Hell, I could probably claim t
When I first heard about this "Thanksgiving" thing, I thought it sounded like a great idea.
We Brits spend a ridiculous amount of time each day giving thanks to strangers - we say thanks to people who hold doors for us, thanks to people who stop their cars to let us cross the road, thanks to waitresses when they give us our bill; even thanks again when we hand over the money to pay. But apparently you Americans - innovative people that you are - had found a way to streamline the process.
Rathe
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the DMCA.
On the one hand, as an author, I like that it gives me a way to stop illegal copies of my work being distributed in the US, so ensuring that I can continue to make a living without having to get a proper job. On the other hand, as an occasional journalist, I hate that it can also be used by trigger-happy lawyers to prevent certain embarrassing documents entering the public domain.
Thus conflicted, it was with some trepidation that I received n
Every entrepreneur is familiar with the moment. The moment when you stumble across an annoying problem – a problem that you’d pay money to solve – and suddenly a synapse fires in your brain.
“Holy crap, if I’d pay money to solve this, so would other people. There’s a business here!”.
It’s the moment that has kick started a million businesses and generated billions of dollars over the decades. And on Sunday evening, not for the first time in what I
A little before 9pm on Wednesday night and I'm standing on the 'VIP' balcony of San Francisco's Regency Ballroom, holding a can of something called 'MySpace Buzz' and waiting for Weezer to take to the stage. It's a weird scene, all told, and not just because I thought Weezer was dead.
The bulk of the weirdness stems from the make-up of the crowd: a dozen feet below me in the main auditorium there are maybe a couple of thousand writhing teenagers - Weezer fans to a (wo)man, cheering and shouting
Frankly, since I started writing my weekly column for TechCrunch a few months back, I've been growing increasingly worried about the sanity of our readers. And not just for the reasons you might think.
Under a growing list of bylines, more than 200 posts are published on TechCrunch.com each week - with countless more on the various spin-off Crunch sites. Even allowing for MG Siegler's eight personalities, and the fact he hasn't slept since the day Twitter launched, that's still an enormous amou
I'd probably feel slightly smug, if I didn't feel so sick.
Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.
Unfortunately it's hard to feel smug - hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea - when thirteen innocent people are dead.
So Belle de Jour was real after all. The Internet's most famous anonymous sex blogger - turned best-selling author - turned internationally successful TV series - has finally outed herself in the UK's Sunday Times. And it turns out she's a character straight from the pages of XKCD.
From her interview with the Times' India Knight, we learn that Belle is in fact Dr Brooke Magnanti a specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology who ran out of money during the final stages of
Yesterday I spent the day at TechCrunch's 'Real Time Crunch-up'. This despite having no idea what a 'Crunch-up' actually is.
The important thing is that Erick had asked me to help moderate his panel about marketing within 'real-time streams', which is a subject close to my heart. So close in fact, that had he asked me to help moderate a panel about child rape and it's place in the public school system I couldn't have been keener to weigh in.
I'll get back to my own contribution in a moment, bu
I don't want to write about Le Web this year. Really I don't.
This time last year, while I was still at the Guardian, I stumbled back to my Parisian hotel room at the end of the first day of the conference and fired off a thousand words rounding up the highs and not-insignificant lows of the event. Those words, along with the title my editor added to them - Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it's a French web 2.0 conference! - have followed me around ever since.
The truth is, I'm bored with
