The Future of Reading

Bill Hill’s Blog

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THE DIGITAL DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
We hold this truth to be self-evident: That every human has an equal and unalienable right to the means to create, distribute and consume information to realize their full potential for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness - regardless of the country they live in, their gender, beliefs, racial origin, language or any impairments they may have.

(FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) And that’s why I love blogging. I write the posts, proof-read and correct them a few times, but still I often fail to catch the mistakes. It’s not so easy when you’re typing them in a fairly primitive edit window.

So I’ll publish the post, and read it. And almost always spot something that slipped through. Go back, fix that, publish again, read it again, maybe find something else (repeat until it’s right).

If you do spot a typo on this blog, please tell me about it. I’ll always go back and fix it. Sometimes you just get a subconscious block, and fail to see an error someone else spots immediately.

Isn’t blogging great?

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Scotland:
Flowering again? by Bill Hill JULY 10 2008

I was at an interesting event last night in Seattle’s Rainier Club – the kick-off reception for Scotland Week, organized by Scottish Development International.

I don’t have much time for politicians; when I was a newspaperman back in Scotland I saw way too much of most of them. It didn’t seem like any of them really had the ideas – or even the will – to solve the problems of high unemployment, and everything else that goes with it, which is especially bad in the West of Scotland. When I visited Scotland briefly a few years ago, it seemed as if the Edinburgh area was prospering, but Glasgow and the West was still locked into a cycle of deprivation.

But last night I got a surprise. The main speaker was Jim Mather, the new Minister for Enterprise, Energy and

Tourism in the Scottish Government. In a real voting upset, the Scottish National Party achieved a one-vote majority a few months ago.

Jim sounded not only like he really knew what he was doing, but he also clearly had a lot of business and industry experience before becoming a politician. Political theories sound great, but unless ideas are founded on real-world knowledge IMO they're doomed to failure.

The Scottish Government has only limited power, of course. The UK Government in London still holds the purse-strings.

But there’s no reason Scotland can’t be as prosperous as Ireland, which has undergone a transformation over the past decade. Or even more prosperous. It has a great education system, and many smart people with real drive.

I liked what I heard. Got a chance to speak to Jim later. Liked him even more.

I think there’s a good chance the Scots may actually pull this off.

I’ll be watching with interest over the next few years.

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The Future of the Book:
The Amazon Kindle or the cellphone? by Bill Hill JULY 15 2008

 

T his weekend I took part in a discussion panel on “The Future of the Book” at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Except that I wasn’t in Virginia. Everyone else was – the other panelists, moderator Kathleen Fowler of ODU, and the audience.

Instead I was sat in front of a PC at the Old Dominion University campus in Bremerton, Washington, taking part

My New Surbahar
My new surbahar - bought on the Web.

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in the discussion by Webcam. It’s amazing to think that a piece of equipment costing only a couple of hundred dollars can make possible videoconferencing which used to require tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

With the ubiquity of broadband, this kind of interaction is commonplace.

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