Happy 40th birthday to The Professionals

30.12.2017/12.16

‘Anarchy, acts of terror, crimes against the public. To combat it I’ve got special men: experts from the army, the police, from every service. These are the professionals.’ Forty years ago, ITV began airing one of the UK’s most iconic TV series. There’s more at Dave Matthews’ The Authorised Guide to the Professionals, […]

YouTube under fire for child exploitation videos—with ‘three unpaid volunteers’ monitoring reports

28.11.2017/01.59

The Murdoch Press has rightly kept its pressure up on Google, with a cover story in The Times, ‘Adverts fund paedophile habits’ on November 24 (the online version, behind a paywall, is here). Say what you will about its proprietor, but Murdochs have been happy to go after the misdeeds of Google: the earlier […]

Consumer’s choice: how I bought a car from the UK over the ’net and shipped it home

01.10.2017/08.51

Originally published at Drivetribe, but as I own the copyright it only made sense to share it here for readers, too, especially those who might wish to buy a car from abroad and want to do the job themselves. It was originally written for a British audience. Above: The lengths I went to, to make […]

Fun for car anoraks—till you get to the factual errors

08.07.2017/10.26

I bought Steven Parissien’s The Life of the Automobile: a New History of the Motor Car, which started off as a good history. I’m 300-odd pages in now and the mistakes are really worrying. There’s also a shocking lack of editing (one part repeated, albeit in different language, and spelling and grammatical mistakes) in […]

Twenty years on, the Hong Kong handover reminds us how impotent Britain proved to be

01.07.2017/14.11

Hong Kong’s skyline in 2008, photographed by Scrolllock. Has it been 20 years since Dad and I sat in front of the telly to watch both Britannia sail out of the harbour and China set off a magnificent fireworks’ display to celebrate getting Hong Kong becoming one of her possessions again? Following some of […]

Fifty editors at Wikipedia ban Daily Mail based on some anecdotes

12.02.2017/00.47

How right Kalev Leetaru is on Wikipedia’s decision to ban The Daily Mail as a source. This decision, he concludes, was made by a cabal of 50 editors based on anecdotes. I’ve stated before on this blog how Wikipedia is broken, the abusive attitude of one of its editors, and how even luminaries like […]

A farewell to Tim Kitchin

19.01.2017/10.07

For the second time in two months, I found myself announcing to the members of Medinge Group another passing: that of my good friend Tim Kitchin. Tim passed away over the weekend, and leaves behind three kids. I always admired Tim’s point of view, his depth of thinking, and his generosity of spirit. […]

Online publishing: how the players we dealt with changed in 2016

12.01.2017/02.45

Above: Brave Bison’s predecessor, Rightster, left much to be desired in how it dealt with publishers, while investment commentators had concerns, too. Twenty-sixteen had some strange developments on the publishing front. First, we noticed Alexa rankings for a lot of sites changed. Facebook itself went from second to third, where it has stayed. […]

Drivetribe will be a mecca for motorheads—Autocade readers welcome

22.11.2016/13.38

Now that the first episode of The Grand Tour has aired, and we’re nearing the official launch of Drivetribe (November 28), we’re beginning to see just how good an investment £160 million was for Amazon when it picked up the cast of The Goodies, I mean, Top Gear (sorry, I get those BBC shows mixed […]

How my Dad called the primary and the election for Donald Trump ages ago

11.11.2016/13.33

FJM88NL, licensed under Creative Commons I’ve had a phone call and a lot of comments on this in the last couple of days: my Dad, who is 81 with early-stage Alzheimer’s, called the US presidential election for Donald Trump months ago. I posted it on my social networks the day he made his definitive call, […]