Kester Brewin

  Thanks to @designbygecko for putting me on to this extraordinary talk by Jim Gilliam at a web conference recently. Jim was brought up a fervent evanglical – and remains so, except that his faith is now truly in the Internet. He has his reasons for his conversion: he’s suffered multiple cancers and had to [...]

I have been thinking quite a bit about eMagazines recently. I don’t own a Kindle, but have played around with one, and I’m not quite ready to go there yet. But having seen some mock-ups of e-readers that we might be using in the future, I’m excited. Not about books, mind, but about magazines. I’m [...]

Very interesting programme on Radio 4 today about the carbon cost of our digital lives. Increased use of digital technology can have green benefits with reduced travel etc., but we what the piece uncovered so well was the huge energy draw that data centres create. Each time we upload a picture to Facebook, or request [...]

This is Onion genius. Read it and weep, Web 2.0. Technorati: Frrvrr | Onion | Web 2.0

I, for one, won’t be buying an Amazon ‘Kindle’, at least for some time yet. I think the prediction of this being ‘iPod for books’ is way off for the simple reason that the media are totally different. Music is not physical. Sure, you could thumb through the album artwork, and that was a great [...]

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by the news today that Virgin Atlantic are soon to announce a free trans-atlantic service. On each flight, a small number of fee-free passengers will simply have to put up with being pinned into their seats having commercials fired at them for the entire trip…

It’ll be pretty plain to see that I haven’t been posting that much recently. Stuff happens, and, on top of that, I’ve been feeling a little faded/bored with it. By it, I mean blogging. And by blogging I mean, in this context, stuff connected with the ‘emerging conversation’. Perhaps it’s just me. I’ve just written [...]

It’s obviously rich of me talking about this, flying as I am to LA on Monday, but it’s an often over-looked fact that the net runs on servers, and servers draw power. Nic mentioned the other day that a simple calculation of the server power-draw for Second Life, divided by the average number of users [...]

I guess sometimes you can’t see the woods for the trees. I recently posted a piece about René Girard’s thoughts on the essentiality of the sacred to human experience – something Dawkins et al ignore in their anti-religion positions – and I also posted something on Facebook and friendship. But it took a beer with [...]

Having seen Ben and some others resign themselves to Facebook, I asked them why I should bother… do I really want another digital dimension to have to check/keep up? And with being a teacher, all social networking sites are slightly fraught with potential pitfalls. (Unlike an ex colleague, who I think is very unwise, I [...]