Where's Wil?

I was recently asked to put together a clips section of my best work. Here's some of the stuff I'm most proud of.


This Week In Tech Episode 55 with Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, Robert Heron, Steve Gibson and myself.

Why Cell will get the hard sell at BBC News Online.
"The backers of the processor are big names in the computer industry. IBM is one of the largest and most respected chip-makers in the world, providing cutting edge technology to large businesses. Sony will be using the chip inside its PlayStation 3 console, and its dominance of the games market means that it now has a lot of power to dictate the future of computer and gaming platforms. The technology inside the Cell is being heralded as revolutionary, from a technical standpoint."


'The Escapist' book review at The Register.
"It's difficult to explain the plot without giving too much of it away, but here's a stab. Bentley starts the book discovering that his lucrative line in illegal hacking must go on ice for a while. He takes up a detective job with a private police force, COSI, which assigns him to find out why prominent scientists are turning up with their brains erased. The investigation leads him to a supercomputer called the Pure Light Abacus, a machine more powerful than any other in the galaxy. There are multiple factions vying for control of the Abacus for their own nefarious ends, and Bentley finds himself being manoeuvred, nay, positively jostled by the interested parties into doing their bidding inadvertently. All Bentley wants to do, it seems, is make a few bob."


Every city ponce+dog is well teched up at The Inquirer.
Allow me to cite, as an example, technology close to my heart. Literally. My blessed iPod travels in my jacket pocket wherever I go, with its tell-tale earphones a distinctive marker in my carefully-chosen suburban-chic outfit. They scream to all lookers - 'Look at me! I have an iPod!' Except that that once unsurmountable cachet has been substantially eroded as of late.

When I bought my first baby-white-wonder, the original 5GB model, it was a trophy of sheer decadence. It's Mac-exclusive eloquence won my heart, and it became the illustrious love-child of my illicit union with a PowerBook; the sleek-lined, slender beauty that won me away from my dependable, yet boring, work-bitch, the XP desktop. My friends and colleagues gawped at its storage capacity, it's unsurpassed industrial design and the sheer perfection of its conception; the perfect union of Mac and gadget."


Imitation is no match for innovation at bit-tech.
"Apple was showing the world how it was done over at Macworld the following week. Apple unveiled a new desktop and a new notebook, both sporting Intel Core Duo processors. Intel has really been on the ball when it comes to Apple, dedicating over a thousand engineers to the MacTel project. A lot of people were questioning why Apple went to Intel rather than AMD for its x86 processors, and the answer is simple - Core Duo. For all AMD's desktop leadership, it hasn't been able to make a dual core mobile chip yet, and this mobile space is where Intel continues to have the drop on them."


Why Web 2.0 will end your privacy at bit-tech.
"And why not? The more this 'movement' grows, the more the web evolves, the better for the end user, right? Already, Digg has taken a hatchet to traditional publishing, with users proving pretty good at finding stories that satisfy their own demographic - and its popularity is a testament to that. MySpace has enabled teenagers everywhere to escape the dastardly clutches of their parents and do what teenagers do best - namely, skulk around, making awkward social contact with the opposite sex and opining over the latest bands and fads."

Intel Core Challenge guest blog post.
"This shift, monumental in hindsight, was really only appreciated by those for whom PCs and gaming and hardware modification was a passion, the ‘modders movement’. These were the guys who spent 20 hours a day at their machine, and felt that their PC was a natural extension of them. Their reasoning was simple - you design your house to reflect your tastes and your lifestyle, so when you spend as much time in your PC space as your living room, why not design your PC that way too?"

On Ethics, journalism, blogging and a brave world of new media for my blog.
"Transparency and ethical reporting have always been issues in the world of mainstream journalism, to a greater or lesser extent. Most established publications have rules on what is and isn't allowed in terms of journalist's activities.

But the world is changing. Journalists are becoming bloggers, bloggers are becoming journalists, and blogs are becoming brands. The internet is bringing people into the world of written reporting who have had no training, have no one to learn from, no sense of their place in the reporting ecosystem. This causes issues all over the place."

Slimebuckets, pollution and web conservation Calacanis-style for the Inquirer.
"His attempt to fix what is wrong with search and the amount of 'pollution' on the internet led Jason to create Mahalo, launched last month, a human powered search engine whose tagline is - "We're here to help." His enthusiasm for search advertising points towards where he expects to make money - and serious amounts of it, too. Forty full time Editors are hand-writing 500 search engine results pages a week, with the aim of indexing the top 25% of English language searches, an area that Calacanis estimates makes up 80-90 per cent of the search advertising market (a market that, itself, could eclipse TV advertising in size before the year is out, says citizen media guru Dan Gillmor). That a human-powered search engine is superior to a machine algorithm is self-evident to him - "Of the seven top results for the Paris Hotels page on Mahalo, just one of them appears in the top forty Google results for the same term. Why? Because slimebucket SEOs have polluted our web.""