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Displaying posts tagged 'communities'. Show all posts
Believing the skype
Chris Norton, July 17th 2006, 5:36PM
Much to my relief and much like Pink, I'm not dead. Good day once more, UKFast blog fans.
Voice over IP, or VOIP, is quickly gaining popularity. I have my ridiculous Captain Scarlet-style headset waiting at home, in order to talk to people half the world away about our respective brands of reality TV and chocolate bars, and it seems that millions of other people are sailing with me in this good ship that we know as 'HMS Free Internet Phone Calls'.
As the technology develops, it's fairly certain a lot of telecommunication bods will be running a bit scared, or at least trying to hop onto the Skype bandwagon. I'm not worried about that - they'll be fine, modern life is all about telecommunication, these VOIP systems still use the same sets of wires and all that, and hey the people working at massive telecomms companies can probably look after themselves.
What does bother me about this, and sometimes about internet technology in general, is the inexorable increase of complexity that advances tend to entail. Where art is frequently driven by the pursuit of new levels of simplicity and elemental forces, technological advance piles on complexity after complexity. Put simply, we now have phones that can crash and leave us shouting into a useless black box, and I can't see the rise of VOIP making phonecalls any simpler.
It's the old trade-off, stability and simplicity versus extra features and the wow factor. Ultimately I always believe in progress, but I think I'll always feel unsettled that my phone conversation isn't just passing through a couple of phone company exchanges, but through tens, maybe hundreds of computers. Pass the paper cups and string!
Tags: communities, phones, skype, voip
# Comment (0 comments)
Internet World filling up
Jonathan Bowers, April 26th 2006, 9:58AM
It's fantastic news that the Internet World exhibition is filling up at a record rate. But it also means that if you haven't booked your place you really need to do it now. You can go direct to the Internet World site, or fill in a more basic form on the UKFast site that we will process for you in our capacity as a platinum sponsor.
There are going to be some incredible stands and key note speakers there. UKFast will be making our presence known, not only in the arena, but on the stage as well. We have elected to talk about the opportunities presented to businesses by the Internet's many new forms of communication. And of course, we are concentrating particularly on blogging and podcasting.
On that note, keep an eye out on ukfastblog over the next few weeks for our new Community section, which we are opening with an ambitious project entitled 'Word From the Street.'
The new blog and podcast aims to harness the incredible energy of 5 time Olympic Gold medallist, turned social broker Geoff Thompson. Geoff's campaign to inspire our country's youth to excel at sport by receiving the social infrastructure they need, began in the suburbs of Manchester and has taken him all over the world. He is currently working towards the 2012 Olympics and is a man worth listening to.
We're very excited about bringing him to a wider audience. He's the kind of person podcasting was made for. Look out for him on our blogging community within the week.
The Internet as a set of communities
Jonathan Bowers, April 20th 2006, 6:06PM
Just the like world, the Internet grows as a set of communities. Many of the largest, the big portals are like the countries of the net and in order to participate in them we have to play by their rules.
EBay has just announced that it has a community of 200m. MySpace also has a huge following, Yahoo! of course is one of the superpowers as is MSN. So should disputes online be dealt with by these communities or by our more earthly communities?
EBay is in the news today for allowing people to sell .eu domains that perhaps should not belong to them. Nestle and Disney are both considering suing the website for providing a marketplace for rowntrees.eu and euroDisneyParis.eu respectively.
However, the rules of the Internet allowed people to purchase the domain names without being affiliated to the companies in question - so shouldn't eBay be allowed to act as a provider in this way?
I suspect that in the end it may buckle in the same way that it did about Live8 tickets last year - but we shall see.