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Britain's First "Fibrecity" Announced - Bournemouth For reasons indicated in our 2007 blog-posts [below], wireless is being abandoned as the main delivery method for wiring up conurbations to high-speed internet access. The favoured new delivery medium is fibre-optic cable, run through the sewer ducts to save digging up roads. Bournemouth has now officially announced in their glossy monthly PR magazine BH Life issue of July 08 that the Borough is to be Britain's first such "fibrecity." It won out in January over Northampton and Dundee as the test-conurbation venue for the BT-backed enterprise, the 3 towns being front runners as they already have fibre-sewer connections to Council offices. High-speed broadband (up to 100Mbs) fibre-optic cables are now being snaked through the sewer pipes by service provider H2O Networks Ltd. H2O's system is called FOCUS: Fibre Optical Cable Underground Sewer.FOCUS is a simpler way of replacing BT's old buried copper wire cables, which have limited speed and bandwidth. (TV-style cable like Virgin-NTL's also has a built-in limitation in that the more people in a given street use the local mainline, the slower it gets - rather like a road being clogged by too much traffic.) The Bournemouth FOCUS project was first announced in March 07. Council offices and municipally-run centres like the Pavilion and the BIC were already wired up, providing a pilot-project system test. Until now, the main "focus" of local government in regard to the new electronic technologies has been cost-saving, "enhancing" revenue collections, and other economic benefits to itself. Press coverage over the past year has continued to be largely on the theme of "Council snoopers". For example, the press reported that 25,000 'bin-bugger' microchips had been removed by Bournemouth residents since they heard about them from press reports (both the public and Councillors had been kept in the dark) - too many to prosecute. But this new technology should be usable by the main downtown businesses for video-conferencing etc, and later should offer similar services to homes in the residential districts for home-based business purposes as well as leisure use. So far, so good ... |
| 2007 Year-End Roundup -A year on, where are we with all the government's plans about wired-up conurbations?  This site was launched in 2006 out of concern at the way officialdom had been pushing the idea that government services should be online. Public offices would be replaced with websites, email addresses, and (for those not yet online at home) public kiosks with interactive terminals. To do this, provision would be outsourced in the usual way - probably to a firm that is a major Party donor, and is thus beyond ordinary controls. Thus if you wanted to access a Whitehall or Council service, you would have to log on to a special portal run by this private firm, in order to access personal data, again held by a private company - possibly the same one, possibly a different one. The company or companies would be involved in data-sharing, and security would be in their hands. The main technology to be used would be a WiFi "cloud" saturating each major conurbation. The good news is that all these plans began to fall apart in 2007, and the enterprise locally has got almost nowhere. In America (where the idea came from), Muni-Wifi projects have either proven too expensive, failed to deliver in many areas, and/or sparked public controversy over health concerns similar to those over microwave towers. "They are the monorails of this decade: the wrong technology, totally overpromised and completely undelivered," commented the US think-tank Institute For The Future. In Britain, the loss of those 2 data CDRs with some 25 million taxpayers' personal details in November was the moment of public loss of innocence (or rather, ignorance) about the cavalier official attitude to security of public data. Since then, the press has been running similar exposes. Locally, I began this blog out of concern that the conurbation would inevitably soon be a 'wired' one, with a municipally-sponsored wireless-enabled network. This would mean that any resident could go online from anywhere in the conurbation, even outdoors if they have a WiFi-enabled laptop or phone. That is, it would soon have the same type of public WiFi internet-access network as cities like Bath, Brighton, Bristol and cities in the USA and on mainland Europe. The key word here, however, is 'cities'. Unlike the other three places in the south of England beginning with B, the Bournemouth conurbation isn't a city - yet. It is governed by multiple Local Authorities - Bournemouth, Poole, Christchurch, Ferndown. The first two are Unitary Authorities, while the other two are part of a multi-tier local-government setup. One is a Borough Council and the other is part of a District Council area, both of these being also part of Dorset County Council jurisdiction. Any prospective 'metro-net' provider like BT would have to negotiate with half a dozen entities. My guess is thus that local progress was held up by the fact there is no single local city council authority, or ad hoc central coordinating body, BT et al can contract with. By central coordinating body I mean something like the Greater London Authority established in 2000, which was itself a replacement for London's earlier (1960s-80s) Greater London Council, the GLC, where various London municipalities were represented by a central body to develop cross-conurbation services. We may see here such a 'city' setup here one day.  At present, if anyone were to suggest a 'Greater Bournemouth Council' arrangement for the provision of conurbation-wide communication and transport services, exponents of home rule for the other areas would surely rise up and object in the strongest possible terms, whatever the name. The reaction would be similar to the short-lived 1990s proposal to amalgamate the three towns as "Wessex City". However with Whitehall's determination to end duplication of services in multi-tier local-government setups, and their introduction of a regional governments system, it may become possible to set up a conurbation-wide 'economic development' area, with existing local councils being bypassed. The present government has a tendency to plunge regardless into large IT projects and appoint managers from other sectors to develop and run it (e.g. the NHS is now largely run by those with no medical background). One purpose of this site was to make sure there was democratic participation in the process of establishing any 'wired-up conurbation', and that it was not just a matter of a local council quietly making a deal with BT and giving them access to residents' personal data, as has happened in other arenas. I say BT because they still own much of the telephone backbone system, are developing 'wi-fi' add-on services, and are actively pitching proposals to local councils. Locally, there was indeed a pilot project set up in summer 2007 to bring Muni-WiFi to Boscombe with a kiosk in the pedestrian precinct, but when I looked at recently [Dec], it had gone dead. Wi-Fi of course has become notorious for being even more insecure than the "ordinary" cabled or land-line internet. In March, the news Bournemouth was utilising a FOCUS system - Fibre Optical Cable Underground Sewer - to install cabling for without digging up the roads got it headlines like 'Bournemouth Broadband In The Sh*t' and comments like that of Silicon.com, "if performance is slow, would it be due to excessive traffic or a log jam somewhere down below?" The bad publicity over the hospitals using PatientLine (a bedside phone-radio-TV-internet console for hospital patients) also showed how people might be captive to paying premium rates for access to services after privatisation, as did the attempt by some GP firms to switch to 0870 'premium' numbers as a "service." The privacy risk in the trend to put personal info on "Web 2.0" social-networking sites like Facebook (which we covered earlier on an article about a local man who found 15 minutes of fame there), was driven home in November when millions found their purchases tracked on other sites using Beacon web-bug technology, and then publicized onsite, often spoiling Xmas surprises. The most newsworthy development in Council electronic activity this past year was the 'bin bugger' row. Bournemouth, like other councils elsewhere, had been acquiring new wheelie bins with 'spy' bugs (wireless-enabled microchips) built in, so in future they can eavesdrop electronically on the amount of rubbish households throw out - with an eye to surtaxing this. That Bournemouth Council managers did not think it necessary to tell even their elected local Councillors they were doing this does not exactly inspire confidence for the future. In the meantime, I'm focussing the site's coverage on DIY to encourage others besides government to get involved in publishing online, via a series on how to create your own webspace. This will also tie in with the Bournemouth 2010 Bicentenary, with which I'm already involved. I'll top-post links as I put together each how-to DIY guide. It will follow on to the basic organizational ten-step orientation outline already onsite here. If you want more info on local and regional governments, go to our local "e-gov" webpage here, our "Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The CyberCity- Local Public Services Websites," which has links to both official websites and contact details. -DS |
Of Course, We're All Bohemians Now UK "eGov" Turns Ten This month is reportedly the 10th anniversary of "the birth of e-government." Whatever that actually means, it's worth reflecting on what things were like in 1996, when Whitehall first began to grapple with this new-fangled internet thingy everyone was talking about. … Back in 1996, there was a snobbish disdain in the media for the new medium. As Brain Of Britain chairman Robert Robinson told his listeners, "You can find out that sort of information on the internet, but first you'll have to buy an anorak." At the BBC, the first programme to have an online tie-in was the children's show Blue Peter, which got in the news by starting to include an email address in its contact information. The BBC began getting letters "sent by email" to the contact email address they published for its complaints process. This nonplussed some presenters at first, since they couldn't follow the usual convention of pigeonholing the sender by geographic location (humorous if distant from London - "from a Mrs Trellis of North Wales"), but encouraged the  BBC
to print their own programme email addresses in Radio Times. The BBC
would become Britain's biggest online content provider. In 1996, the Conservatives were still in power after many years, headed by a fomer bank manager who had failed to learn to drive a car or type (his wife Norma later had to type out his memoirs). New Labour were working up their programme that would sweep them to power, with Tony Blair already making his speech saying their priorities in office would be "education, education, education". Soon, he would be getting himself photographed sitting in school classrooms apparently learning to use a computer to promote the latest buzz-word, 'e-learning.' (I've since read he's actually still learning how to use a PC.) America was re-electing the first President who would use the internet. The White House had its own website, where you could not only see pictures of Socks the White House Cat, but could actually hear him meow. (I did this in 1996, from Bournemouth University, part of a test demonstration of the new medium.) Though he only ever sent a couple of emails while in office, Clinton did pass the first internet-oriented public-interest legislation, The Electronic Freedom of Information Act. In Britain, Whitehall did began to put copies of government reports online. Internet technology was generally in its infancy. The first interactive, cross-platform technology, Sun's Java, was just making its debut. Windows 95 had just appeared, with Windows NT ("New Technology") as its corporate cousin, designed for networked office machines. At the same time, Microsoft embarked on its notorious 'browser war', where it attempted to destroy Netscape Navigator's market dominance by pre-installing its own browser, Internet Explorer, on all new PCs as part of the operating system. Few people had home internet connections, and despite the existence of fibre optic cable, these were all slow 56Kb, 28.8Kb or even 14.4Kb dialup connections provided in Britain by BT, then a disinterested monopoly. For the public, there were no 'free' ISPs (FreeServe was first, in '98), as these would have to make their money via a revenue-sharing arrangement with BT. There weren't that many websites out there either, though the first search engines had just appeared (not Google), being cited as "technology of the year." There was one major web directory, produced by a company with the strange name of Yahoo. The first type of non-military agency to use the web as major content providers were universities (who had worked with the US military to develop the internet as a 'fail-safe' distributed emergency communications system).  Email
had been around for twenty years (the Queen had sent the first email
in Britain in 1976, from a defence research facility). But it was
limited to corporate setups which used the electronic mailbox system,
akin to a company's telephone switchboard, known as POP (Post Office
Protocol) to redirect emails to the relevant employee based on his
company login username. Company firewalls stopped employees receiving
emails from 'unauthorised' addresses, or sending them from work. There
were no web-based email services, free or paid, available to the public
- though prototype Hotmail had just launched in the USA, Microsoft
didn't buy and market it for over a year. (Designed in response to
company-firewall restrictions, it was called "HoTMaiL,"
to emphasize the letters HTML as webmail could be read in any web
browser, without the special software like Eudora or Pegasus you needed
to use POP-mail.)There were no web-based message boards either, though the non-Web Usenet had existed for over a decade for the benefit of savvy users who had corporate accounts - usually via universities or IT companies. (Anyone wanting an insight into the reality of life online back then should read astronomer Dr Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, his account of his year-long quest to track and catch a German hacker gang using his California university servers to break into US military establishments.) Nevertheless, within a year or so, now-familiar aspects of web life would start to appear - the first free ISPs with free email accounts, including the web-based Yahoo! Mail, and a proliferation of government as well as commercial websites. The Prime Minister's office however would soon remove its own "Number Ten" website's public-participation "comments" function, citing as the reason too many negative comments which failed to recognise how New Labour was transforming Britain. (I mean, really, guys.) Rapid Web growth would soon mean search-engine indexing coverage would fall by '99 to below 16% of the Web. Enter Google, with the google.com domain (it was actually a misspelling of 'googol' = a large number) registered in '97. It would quickly rise to global dominance in the all-important web search market, using powerful secret algorithms and a network of ordinary PCs distributed around the country to act as servers. (The image above is of their rather basic setup back in '99). The rest, as they say, is internet history. |
| "Fortunately,
We Have Blogs" - continued
He
also reiterated the idea that the answer to 'junk on the web' was
link-based ranking - as ultimately a sort of social-Darwinist process,
and he cited the blogosphere as an instance of this effect working
well. (Earlier this summer, he had in fact issued a more serious
warning, on the dangers of the US abandoning network neutrality
[ Web
Inventor Warns Of 'Dark' Net], but this seems to have passed
over the head of most journalists.)
The
last time Sir Tim did a BBC
interview, he was asked if he didn't feel any guilt or blame
for having invented the Web, because it helped people to commit
crimes. The BBC didn't apologise for ambushing him like this, though
he has said since he received hundreds of emails apologising for
the interviewer's smug and boorish attitude. This time Sir
Tim complained, first by phone, about the way the Guardian
was following the BBC's distorted line. The Guardian's
Technology writer-editor noted in their own blog section that he
responded that TBL should complain (by email) to their press ombudsman,
on the way his comments had been stripped of their context: "…
some of his quotes did unfortunately lose their context - particularly
the ones about blogging. In the process of reaching the dead-tree
version of the Guardian, they lost their grounding and certain aspects
were then amplified down the chain." I should add that if you go the Comments section now, it’s been cleaned up a bit, and more relevant comments put in place... Well, that’s the web for you. Links: |
| Britain’s
Mass-Blogging Experiment In Britain, the last two weeks of October commemorate "History Matters Day" whereby, before the end of the month, as many people as possible contribute a blog entry about what they did on October 17th. (Echo story here.) Running two weeks, this is supposed to be the biggest mass blog event in history. One day on, the press seem to have marked yesterday’s “Make Your Mark On History” Day a success in terms of national participation. But it has been criticised for failure to emphasise its original rationale of writing history as it happens, or at least blogging about matters with a sense of historical perspective. The event had heritage-minded sponsors in the National Trust, one of whose staff proposed it, and was backed by other heritage organisations (English Heritage, the Historic Houses Association, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Civic Trust). It was promoted  by
media figures like TV historian Dr David Starkey, Stephen Fry (whose
earlier speech
in defence of history was published by the Observer, and
American travel-writer (and former Bournemouth Echo reporter)
turned English Heritage ambassador Bill Bryson. The public data input
was via a page
on the History Matters website, which promotes the “History
Matters - Pass It On” campaign, “a campaign to raise
public awareness of the huge contribution that history, heritage and
the built environment make to our quality of life.” The public input is to be archived 'in perpetuity' at the British Library, “as a historical record of our national life.” (The October 17th date, incidentally, was chosen as it was not an otherwise significant date historically, so that it would not be eclipsed by coverage of some anniversary.) But in terms of what it recorded, newspaper coverage seems to indicate it was basically a collective blog of workaday routine by the participants, recording their day – children going to school, office workers suffering boredom, with little sense of living a moment of history. This focus on the everyday was compared to the Mass Observation movement of the 1930s when volunteer observers went out to public venues and recorded behaviour and comments to get a sense of 'ordinary', typical everyday life. This seems a rationalisation as the people being observed then were unaware of being recorded (and generally were not as self-aware as they are today, in our media-conscious age). The observers back then sought to remain anonymous, to avoid interfering with the experiment. The 'Past Thinking' website has argued the public brief should have been more clearly about "how the past has affected you on that day", and the word ‘blog’ should not have been used. A typical publicity article was headed “Make history with us on 17 October by taking part in the biggest blog in history." The instructions were “Write your diary here reflecting on how history itself impacted on your day” - which seems too abstract for most people caught up in a daily routine. It did add the examples “whether it just commuting through an historic environment, discussing family history or watching repeats on TV,” or “how history itself impacted on them—whether it be simply commuting through an historic environment, or how business history influenced their decision-making, or merely that they looked up some old sports statistics or listened to some pop music from the 1960s.”  Family
history, popularised by shows like Who Do You Think You Are,
is at least one growing interest area which gives people a sense of
the past (and from there, an understanding of the pressent). Stephen
Fry, who wrote the ‘History Matters’ themed essay [link
above], says his appearance exploring his own tragic (Jewish) family
history on this BBC-TV series got him more letters than anything else
he has ever done. Interested participants have till the end of the
month to email in or upload a contribution, from 100 to 1,000 words
long, to the History Matters website.
The event may also of course encourage people to start their own blogs. |
| Is
There A Local 'Blog Jam'? - continued |
| Know-It-All
… Know IT At All? -
continued |
| Exit
Highbury, Exit Paragon, Exit Future, Enter Imagine -continued
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The term has been hijacked by the student party set in names like Tramp's Nightclub and Brit progressive rock band Supertramp (one of whose founders, Richard Palmer - Palmer-James actually - is from Bournemouth). Tramps in the traditional sense were homeless men also known in America as hobos or bums. There, calling a female a tramp meant something else entirely - a Mickey Spillane style derogatory term for a type of woman, as in the song The Lady Is A Tramp. Disney adapted this title for their 1955 animated feature, where Tramp is the streetwise male mongrel. This US provenance may be the source of the nightclub name - there is a Tramp's in NYC as well as London. 
Google
Etc Search Results: A search on Google etc turns up, first,
Sugar launched Amstrad in the 1970s with the Amstrad
PCW, his attempt to take on the first US companies producing IBM-clone
desktop computers, producing a cheaper version for the consumer
(versus B2B) market. Lack of competition gave him early success,
but the PCW format proved incompatible. (It even used differently-shaped
- oblong - diskettes). Sugar next developed the compatible Amstrad
PC, which accepted standard diskettes, but it was too little, too
late.
Future’s magazine-publishing empire launched with Amstrad
Action. The Amstrad PCW gave way to the IBM-clone PC, but Future
covered other early home-PC formats (Amiga Format and Commodore
Format, Your Sinclair/ Your Spectrum) and then the
two now-dominant operating systems with MacPublishing (supplanted
by MacFormat in ‘93) and for Windows users, PC
Answers, PC Format, PC Gamer etc. They then diversified into
lifestyle magazines like Classic CD and Mountain Biking
UK, and added a book-publishing arm. In the dot-com crash,
is shares fell, but its classier magazines such as Computer
Arts and .net were able to carry on. Now, if you google
'Highbury Publishing' the first result up is www.highburyleisure.co.uk
- actually now the website of a division of Future Publishing.
Future
was founded by Chris Anderson, one of those New-Age entrepreneurs
who combines capitalist ventures with a high-tech vision of humanitarian
progress. (The son of a missionary eye surgeon, he was raised in
the Himalayas.) He sold Future to Pearson New Entertainment Europe
for $80m, and in 1994 moved from Somerset to the US to co-found
Imagine Media - which then re-acquired Future as a merged PLC in
1999, just in time to get caught in the dot-com bust. Anderson then
switched his focus to a personal project, The Sapling Foundation,
which owns the still-thriving TED (Technology, Entertainment and
Design) corporation, whose first event publicly unveiled the Macintosh
and Sony CD. The ‘Imagine’ banner however would return
to our local story in another guise. (Bear with me here.)
Future
wanted to take over Bournemouth-based Highbury’s 38 titles,
but the sale was blocked in mid-2005 by the Office of Fair Trading
as potentially anti-competitive. A final attempted rescue package
brokered by ex-Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie – then
chairman of Highbury - also fell through. Highbury thus went into
receivership around New Year’s, owing its banks £30
million, many its 160 staff discovering this when they found the
doors at its St. Peter's Road HQ locked. 
from
the receivers by ... Imagine Publishing. This Imagine seems to be
completely separate from Chris Anderson’s. As it was set up
by Paragon executives, this handover of Highbury magazine titles
is, in the words of one trade-press report, merely “returning
many of them to the original management team that sold them to Highbury
in 2003.” Imagine also has its own similar in-house magazine
portfolio.