He would plug his foolscap-sized newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth.

He then continues to describe the ‘newspad’ and its impact on the printed newspaper.

One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen, and he could read it with comfort.

Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word ‘newspaper’, of course, was an anachronistic hang-over into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorb the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.

An incredible visionary.

There is one striking omission for me; that of my favourite author William Gibson who wrote the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer on an manual typer writer of 1930s vintage. Of this typewriter William Gibson said:

Neuromancer was written on a “clockwork typewriter,” the very one you may recall glimpsing in Julie Deane’s office in Chiba City.

This machine, a Hermes 2000 manual portable, dates from somewhere in the 1930′s. It’s a very tough and elegant piece of work. Cased, it weighs slightly less than the Macintosh SE/30 I now write on, and is finished in a curious green- and-black “crackle” paint-job, perhaps meant to suggest the covers of an accountant’s ledger.

Its keys are green as well, of celluloid, and the letters and symbols on them are canary yellow. (I once happened to brush the shift-key with the tip of a lit cigarette, dramatically confirming the extreme flammability of this early plastic.)

It amuses me that such a prescient story was written on a typewriter so old it could not be repaired when it broke a short time after Neuromancer was published.

It amuses me even more that I wrote this post using an app that in essence recreates a typewriter on shiny new technology.

I agree with Chris when he attributes the demise of blogging to the rise of Twitter. Personally I know there are many things I tweet that would have been the basis of a blog post in the past. You’d be forgiven for thinking that by Twitter allowing us all to easily, and quickly gets things of our chest Twitter would work to separate the wheat from the chaff; leaving us with perhaps less frequent but higher quality blog posts. Instead Twitter just seems to have robbed many of us of impetus to publish.

In Elliott Jay Stock’s Ideas of March post he talks of not having posted for over three months, and here my blog has become little more than a repository for videos I like.

I’m hoping that Ideas of March combined with my new blog design (don’t ask) will give me the impetus to start writing proper blog posts again.

Chris proposes we write about what we like about blog posts – so what do I like?

Over the years I’ve been reading blogs it has changed as blogging, and blogs have changed. I’ve enjoyed learning from blog posts with subjects ranging from the Hipster PDA to the existence of Chap Hop. These days what I enjoy are blogs that are a closer to journals and show more of the writers personality, interests and opinions. I tend to stay away from the more ‘technical’ blog posts I once read.

Blogs and blogging happened at a key time for me. A time when my love of the web had been sorely tested by working for too many years in large Corporations that continued to not understand the web or only wanted to ‘monetize’ it – of how I hate that word but oh how I enjoy spelling the American way.

But I digress.

I’ve said before that the rise of the blog, and the first @Media conference in 2005 were the events that rekindled my love of the web. Blogging was to me a realisation of what the web had been envisioned as by it’s creators: a read/write environment. After years of read the ease of blogging, via services such as Blogger where I started my first blog, brought write to the majority of web users. Anybody with access to the web could share their thoughts and ideas with the whole world in a matter of moments. It is for this reason I love the blog, and it is for this reason that I hope that not only do we manage to stop the slow decline of the blog but perhaps spark a blogging renaissance.

Here’s to the Ideas of March.

In Paris, I always imagine living in a doghouse-sized all-Muji garret. Tiny corrugated cardboard speakers. Plastic the color of Vaseline.

— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) July 14, 2010

Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

The paper at which a young Ernest Hemingway started his career.

What I hadn’t allowed for when I signed up was starting a new job which I did just before Christmas. I’m once again commuting to London, which I have in the past mused about being a muse, but this time my days are longer and my job more demanding. Sadly London Midland now use cattle trucks rather than carriages so there is no opportunity to write on the train, and for the first time in recent memory I have no interest in sitting in front of my computer when I get home.

Sadly I fear that I may be falling at the first hurdle for Project52 which for me might just be Project1.

A personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!

Why have I decided to join Project52? For fun and for the challenge as much as anything, but also because I feel blogs and blogging have become slightly neglected in our new online world of micro-blogging.

So a new blog post, each week, every week for 2010 – should be fun.

The programme is available on iPlayer for another 6 days and is worth a listen; although I could have quite happily gone without ever hearing the King Singers sung version.

From the Guardian:

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

Reading The Spectator and The Third Estate it seems this is the question that The Guardian is being prevented from reporting:

61 N: Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

This would seem to be the report that Carter-Ruck are trying to supress.

It’s hard to belive that we, in the UK, still live in a democracy and not some kind of Orwellian state controlled not by Big Brother, but by Big Business.

But it’s also pleasing to see how quickly and widely this story has spread through the ‘blogosphere’, and that as of writing the top trends on Twitter currently include: Guardian, Cart-Ruck, Trafigura and #carterruck.

Maybe Carter-Ruck will think twice before slinging injunctions around next time…