Online shopping takes off in the UK

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Online shopping takes off in the UK

According to this BBC Online story, UK online shoppers went on a record spree last month. The data comes from a survey by a market research firm which found that “sales broke through the �1bn mark last month, and have nearly doubled over the past year.

The growth in internet shopping is running about 15 times faster than that of general retail sales, the survey found.

IMRG also said that online shopping in the UK was growing three times faster than in the US.

“This high growth confirms that UK consumers at large are getting very confident with online purchasing,” said Jaap Favier, research director at Forrester Research, which carried out the survey.”

The Gutnick decision

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The Gutnick decision

Thoughtful essay by Glenn Harlan Reynolds of the University of Tennessee on the Australian High Court decision to allow an Australian citizen to sue Dow Jones for defamation — in Victoria (where he lives) rather than in New Jersey (where the Dow Jones servers are located). Reynolds starts with a lovely historical analogy:

“IN the 1950s, before space travel was a reality, scholars worried about whether orbiting the Earth would even be legal. Under the law as it existed at that time, each nation’s sovereignty extended usque ad coelum – literally “to the heavens”.

Each nation’s territory thus consisted of a wedge beginning at the Earth’s core and continuing infinitely upward and outward.

This posed a number of absurdities, but the greatest difficulty was to orbiting spacecraft. Flying over a nation’s territory without permission was illegal, perhaps even an act of war. But although aircraft could change course to avoid passing over countries who desired to bar their way, spacecraft – their orbital paths fixed by the laws of physics – could not. If any country beneath them (which might mean any country in the world, depending on the inclination of their orbit) objected, it didn’t matter that everyone else agreed.

People worried about this at some length, but after the launch of Sputnik the Soviets and the US, soon followed by the other nations of the world, agreed that parochial concerns should not stand in the way of a promised worldwide communications revolution. Spacecraft in orbit were thus regarded as beyond the reach of earthbound law, and subject only to international space law and the law of the launching state, not that of the nations that they happened to pass over. The benefit, of course, was an explosion of satellite-based communications that was a boon for the entire world, and especially for previously isolated nations.

Now another new technology – the internet – faces a similar problem. In the case of Dow Jones and Company v. Gutnick, the High Court of Australia, yesterday ruled that anyone who publishes on the internet should be liable to be sued in any country in which an individual believes that he or she has been defamed by that publication. This is so, even though the High Court admits that, much as spacecraft cannot control their orbits: “The nature of the web makes it impossible to ensure with complete effectiveness the isolation of any geographic area on the Earth’s surface from access to a particular website.”…

More on this here and here.

A new phenomenon — weblogs by major politicians

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A new phenomenon — weblogs by major politicians

My friend and colleague, Gerard de Vries, mentions in an email that two prominent dutch politicians are now running weblogs. And so it proves. Klees de Vries (no relation of Gerard’s) of the PVDA (Dutch Labour party) has one; Gerrit Zalm, of the VVD (Conservative party) runs the other.

This is fascinating, on several levels. For one thing, these are among the most important politicians in Holland and I find it impossible to imagine any comparable British politician being able to do this. For another, although I read Dutch with difficulty (and a lot of help from Gerard over the phone) both seem to be authentic weblogs. Zalm’s in particular has the authentic mix of personal, intellectual, trivial and self-indulgent content that characterises the techie weblogs I usually read (not to mention the one I write!)

Other thoughts: from a cynical point of view, weblogging could be a Very Smart Move for politicians (a) by enabling them to acquire street cred with a generation which thinks of established politicos as Boring and Sad; (b) by enabling them to project an image without having it diffracted through the distorting lens of steam media.

Zalm (a former Finance Minister) seemed such an unlikely Blogger that Dutch journalists began inquiring whether he had a ‘ghost Blogger’ who did it for him. He indignantly produced (and published in GIF form on his Blog) a scribbled note of the previous day’s entries to make the point that while he may not actually type the stuff (that’s done by a secretary), he does compose it.

And it’s working: according to the NRC-Handelsblad (Monday, Dec 2) the Gerrit Zalm weblog attracts between 5000 and 10.000 hits each day. From its inception it’s had 100.000 page-views in total. Not bad, given that Holland is a small country.

Thinks: there’s an interesting career opening for us Bloggers — becoming ghost bloggers to the rich and famous. Bags I do Dubya — unless Michael Moore hasn’t got there first.

WiFi hits the big time in the US?

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WiFi hits the big time in the US?
“NYT” story by John Markoff.

“The wireless technology known as WiFi, which allows users of personal and hand-held computers to connect to the Internet at high speed without cables, got a significant stamp of approval today when AT&T, I.B.M. and Intel announced a new company to create a nationwide network….”