Ian Delaney | delaney.ian@gmail.com | 565 posts
My name is Ian Delaney. I’m a technology journalist based in London. I also organise events and training; make, market and maintain websites; and like a nice cup of tea.
The Digital Economy Bill – a noxious concoction of entertainment industry fear and our government’s desire to license and monitor everything – is likely to be passed imminently. Under the guise of protecting copyright holders, the Bill seeks to monitor your internet use, close down your ability to use popular services and restrict access. Your internet [...]
March 18, 2010
So thanks again to Pearson Education for sending me books to review. This time it’s Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro by Canadian blogger Tris Hussey. It’s currently £10.26 on Amazon UK and has 272 pages. Since, as you’ll have noticed, I’ve already created my own blog, I’m [...]
March 17, 2010
Your old stuff – the stuff you wrote before, even your best stuff – mostly turns bad. It always did, but the Internet remembers. The churl. Most people don’t bother about it. I, however, am foolish. I’ve recently started using the Broken Links Checker plugin on this site. It finds the articles and sites you’ve linked to [...]
March 9, 2010
I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting. The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly [...]
March 9, 2010
Two more downloadable social media guides that caught my eye over the last couple of weeks. UGC and The Law Published by moderation company Tempero, this guide helps site owners get to grips with how their social media ventures might fall foul of the law and how to avoid that happening. Relying on former audience members [...]
March 4, 2010
The video is Carnegie Mellon University Professor, games developer and former Disney imagineer Jesse Schell on the surprise success of the likes of Farmville, Webkinz, Club Penguin, Wii Fit and X-Box Achievements. All of these are concepts that must have sounded insane on paper when they were proposed three-or-four years ago and then went on [...]
March 3, 2010
Many thanks to mobile guru Tomi Ahonen, who was kind enough to forward me some extracts from his Almanac 2010. The Almanac collects together data about the mobile industry worldwide. If you aren’t already switched on to Tomi, I’d very much recommend anyone interested in this field to check out his publications and also the [...]
March 1, 2010
Twitter users come in two colours according to recent reports: over-sharing or silent. Last week, audience research company Nielsen released figures suggesting an enormous polarity between active and inactive members in the UK. The graph shows that 79% of time spent on the site comes from just 7% of its members: Only poor MySpace has a [...]
February 23, 2010
Finding this video so quickly after yesterday’s post proves something. More on making money from media content, even though people can get it for free. Mike Masnick of Techdirt describes the ways Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have created a profitable business from their music, after they sacked their record label in 2007. In [...]
February 22, 2010
I wrote yesterday about the difficulties of selling media content when people can get something more-or-less identical without paying. It looked a bit bleak. In this – more positive – post, I’m going to look at some of the ways media owners might persuade people to pay for their content, focusing on the good, bad [...]
February 21, 2010
Like many of you, I expect, I watched the latest instalment of the BBC’s Virtual Revolution on Saturday. The theme this week was the ways in which the Web is changing the ways we think. As has often been observed, people who use the Web on a regular basis are more apt to skim, read [...]
February 19, 2010
New data from Pingdom on the age of social network users confirms the rumours. They are mostly quite old, or they lie a lot about their age. The smallest group of people using social networks is the 18-24 age group, which rather confounds the idea that these sites are for young people. Across the board, only [...]
March 18, 2010