The Rusty Wire Service

I’m old enough to fondly remember people telling me that CDs would never catch on; atmospheric, scratchy vinyl would always trump the soulless digital recording they said. We still have vinyl of course but nowadays, it is very much the preserve of DJs and collectors. Like its replacement the CD, it has ceased to be the utilitarian way of accessing recorded material. Fond as I am of books, I rather fear that they are going the same way as the LP and perhaps that might not be such a bad thing. Accessing the written word nowadays is increasingly done through the medium of a screen and the proliferation of devices like Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle in recent years suggest that the business of the written word has reached a crossroads. The news yesterday that Google had extended its 'eBookstore' service to users in the UK, following its launch in the US late in 2010, only underlines the growth potential of this market. As an unpublished novelist, I have been watching t...

Search engines like Google are failing users because they have still to tap into the full potential of users’ social networks, according to Facebook executive Ethan Beard. Beard, the director of the Facebook Platform, was in London this week to keep developers abreast of new enhancements  to the site’s Platform applications and he told The Daily Telegraph that search would need to go social if people were going to get the kind of product recommendations that they felt they could trust. His example of trying to buy a suitcase online gave some idea of the apparent disconnect between discovery and recommendation that search engines currently suffer from. “I tried everything and it just didn’t work. You can’t search for a piece of luggage just using search if you want the perfect one…I know I have a friend somewhere who does the same amount of travelling and knows the perfect bag for me… and that one recommendation is exactly the one that I want – but it doesn’t show up in sea...

It was, in the words of one Tory backbencher, the night Euroscepticism “went mainstream”. Monday night saw rebel backbenchers mount their most serious challenge yet to David Cameron’s leadership of this coalition government.  In open defiance of a three-line whip, 81 Conservative backbenchers supported a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU.  The motion was defeated by 483 votes to 111 in a late-night Commons vote with both Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs opposing it. With 15 Tory MPs abstaining, it would appear that Cameron’s writ does not run with up to half of all Conservatives outside the golden circle of ministers and their advisers.  Even more worryingly for the Prime Minister, these rebels are largely new blood, coming from the class of 2010. Not since John Major faced down a 41-MP rebellion over the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 has a Conservative Prime Minister faced such test of his authority. While Cameron may have ridden this storm out,...

Who among us hasn’t, at one time or another, tried to use our influence to help our friends? I’ll tell you who hasn’t; the people who don’t have any influence worth using. Be that as it may; for most of us, this rarely goes beyond getting someone tickets to a show or admitted to a lock-in. It’s just not within our gift, for example, to bring our Bessie-mates along to international conferences so they can sit with us in on cosy meetings with Iranian security experts. Probity has been sorely compromised by the Fox-Werritty affair; this has been found and conceded by all parties concerned at this stage. Prima facie, it’s just another textbook tale of governmental mendacity; another dirty brown envelope story, more or less. No kickbacks have been proven, but the stench of impropriety still lingers over the whole debacle like a fart in a phonebox. The real danger however with the Fox-Werritty affair is that coverage becomes fixated on the minutiae rather than trying to...

It's not very often that the words 'Europe', 'Greek', 'law' and 'Portsmouth' ever combine to make a good news story but here's an attempt, culled from today's headlines.  The European Court in Luxembourg, the highest judicial authority in the European Union, today “opened the way for sports fans to watch live matches through foreign TV services, throwing into doubt the value of highly sought-after and lucrative broadcast rights,” according Reuters . The court ruled in favour of Karen Murphy, the doughty landlady of Portsmouth’s The Red, White and Blue in her appeal over being prosecuted for using a Greek satellite decoder to show live matches on Saturday afternoons. Her argument was based on the European freedom to provide services throughout the EU. The court agreed that the sale of rights on a country-by-country basis breached EU law. The potential ramifications of this decision could be far-reaching indeed. According to V...

Theresa May’s pussy really got Ken Clarke’s blood up today at the Tory party conference in Manchester. "Sure I'll get you asylum, but what's in it for me and Officer Dibble?"   Once the Home Secretary let said feline out of her elegantly tooled hold-all as some kind of ham-fisted play to the cheap seats, she should have been on notice that her speech had raised the hackles of a big cantankerous beast.  Tales of scrounging illegal freeloaders being given leave to stay in the good old gullible UK on the improbable basis that cat ownership had somehow conferred upon them human rights (or something), were rightly derided by Clarke. Whatever the prosaic truth of Maya the cat (if indeed that is its real name) and its persuasive mitigation on its owner's behalf; its personification by May as a repository of human rights ridicule did little to advance the debate in any enlightened way.  And to be fair to old Hush Puppies, he gave one of the most eloqu...