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Engineer internet ofcom social networking

The speed of obsolescence & the increase in the speed of light

pirate_flag_thumbWe do live in very interesting times. Last night the twitter stream told me that the internet in Syria had stopped working, or at least the traffic in and out of the country had died off which is the same thing. This morning it was included by the Guardian in their Boot Up links. I thought to myself last night that once it had hit twitter the news would be everywhere. I saw a couple more references to it on twitter this morning and thought to myself “they’re a bit behind the game – that was last night’s news”. I figured it was too old and publicly available to write a blog about it & I wouldn’t really have been able to add anything anyway.

Then this morning I saw someone retweet a link to a post by @TheRealRevK about how Ofcom was about to screw the voip market in the UK by, amongst other things (in it’s 500 page consultation). If you know Adrian (the reverend himself) you will know how passionate he is about these things.  I had thought about writing a post about this subject myself – it came up at dinner last week at Convergence Summit North. I didn’t have the time as I was out of the office for much of the week. I’m not going to do one now as I can’t add to Adrian’s post.

The world is changing so quickly. It’s daft that I don’t feel able to write about something that hit the headlines only a few hours ago and it certainly makes you think about what you do write. Google has been giving this a lot of thought with its Google Authorship Ranking (Google it). When I did the pigeon v rural broadband race a couple of years ago it was covered by the BBC and as far as  I could see scraped by approx 32,000 websites around the world. That’s them taking someone else’s news in the hope that it would make their own site interesting.

Google Authorship is designed to give credit to the originator of the news. I’ve added links to my Google+ profile from both trefor.net and philosopherontap.com and linked back from the profile to the sites. In theory over time my Google+ profile will be linked to my many sites as I write guest posts for them (ok maybe it won’t) and this will increase the level of credibility given to me as an author and originator of content.

This doesn’t take away the fact that I will still have to find original stuff to write about which ain’t necessarily easy in this world where the speed of light and information distribution is constantly increasing – you heard it first on trefor.net.

PS the speed of light bit is entirely made up as an attention grabbing bit of sensationalism – had I not made this admission I know many of you would otherwise take it as read from such a creditable source! 🙂

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

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