I've loaded up the articles that I wrote in my 'seeing digital'
column between 1996 and 1998. At the time they were published on my own web
site
[ Stones ]
and also on a national business news site
[ Woza ].Links
to the pages as they were back then provided courtesy of the Internet
Archive's Wayback Machine .

Some of the items are now dated and interesting for the historical value but
others are are relevant today as they were back then.

The piece on Internet Communities is even
more pertinent today as the businesses that survived the boom of the late 90's
have spawned into really meaningful communities. eBay
is one such company where a recent stat place 3% of wage earners in the UK
making a living from eBay. The tools that the online auction site provides to
allow people to rate the credibility of the people who you trade with provide
a continuing growing community which is becoming more and more connected.

My notes on " the end of Microsoft were clearly
premature with the company as strong as ever despite attracting record anti-
trust fines in Europe. Talking about large companies and how they are
perceived from the outside links into my story about the McLibel
case where an unemployed postman and his friend challenged
MacDonalds. Even though they lost the case they smashed the multi-national on
the PR front and have spawned a whole community around their experience. You
can follow the fascinating story of Britain's longest ever High Court trial at
the McSpotlight web site .

In between 1998 and now, we've of course had a few changes in the world around
us. Specifically the Internet peaked and burned out, Napster came and went
along with the advent of peer to peer, cool new technologies like Skype
emerged from the same technology and Apple reinvented itself as a really cool
company with a viable future [I switched back to a
Mac in the process having previously worked on
Macs in 1987].

With so many things going on around us, there is never a dull moment and the
real challenge is deciding on what's interesting.

Hope you have a great 2006 and it's your best year yet.