Where's Wil?

I went on a stag weekend to Riga, Latvia for my best friend from college, and managed to come home alive. The highlight of the trip was definitely getting to shoot some fantastic guns at a local range.

The Winchester auto-shotgun is one of my favourite guns in Counter-Strike, so it was a neat experience to actually pull the trigger and feel the kickback. If only the shotties in CS had a laser sight like this one, I have a feeling my score would be a little better!

Flock is a really neat little browser that allows you to blog and to manage flickr and delicious accounts straight from within the app. Will it work? This will allow me to see...

If you've ever wondered what the bit-tech / TrustedReviews office looks like, then here's your answer. It's a nice place to work - bunnies on the grass outside!

So yesterday, I happened to rock up at the Porcupine pub in London, well known tech hack haunt. Imagine my surprise when, having organised lunch with the legendary Mike Magee, who should happen to stroll along but newly-minted business-blogger Om Malik.

Meeting the Giga-Om was a rather intriguing experience, and we had a good chat about the state of blogging, the web, journalism and net business in general. A thoroughly nice chap who I hope to talk to further in the future.

Blog on!

Valleywag covers the latest TWiT episode, which is causing some ruckus amongst forum-active listeners. The 'Wag is always entertaining if you follow the personalities in Silicon Valley. Check it out.

Wow, having fun with Flickr. I managed to get a bunch of photos uploaded and sorted - have to say, I'm seriously impressed with the code that those boys have put together, even if the site does run dog slow at times. Use the little mini-gallery down there on the right to check out my photos - I've put together some from the Gumball Rally and my trip to Legoland, as well as some of my favourite random shots from my nice Nikon D50.

My name is Wil Harris, and I’m a writer and entrepreneur from Oxford, England. I graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Law. Then I jacked in the legal trade to work in digital media.

As of August 2007, I am pleased to be Founder and Managing Director of ChannelFlip Media, a company producing specific-interest online TV. You can catch us online at ChannelFlip.com.

I am a regular panellist on This Week In Tech, the number one technology podcast on iTunes. You can catch me there most weeks, giving my British take on the week's tech headlines, along with the rest of the TWiT gang. I also enjoy doing guest-spots for other podcasts, so keep an eye on the blog to find out what I've been doing.

Depending on who you are and what you want, I do a limited amount of 'new media' design and strategy consultancy, as well as 'marketing 2.0' stuff - the intersection of business and blogs, etc. Having been in the online media world for seven or eight years now, I'd like to think I've learned quite a lot about what works and what doesn't. I've consulted for a number of large magazine publishers as well as other, more niche digital media owners.

Before creating ChannelFlip, I was the Founder and Editor in Chief of bit-tech.net, the UK's leading online destination for computer geeks. When I left in March '07, the site had an average of almost 1 million readers every month. I also worked at a high-level on bit-tech's subsequent sister title, Trusted Reviews, helping it grow to over 6m impressions per month, from 1.5m, in 18 months.

I have written for popular websites including The Inquirer and The Register as well as BBC News Online. I have also researched articles for The Guardian and The Sunday Telegraph newspapers. You can see my writing portfolio here.

You will also catch me fatblogging here regularly about my weight loss and exercise. I have lost 47lbs and counting since February 2007, making me rather more handsome than I used to be.

Although running ChannelFlip is a full-time++ job, I enjoy writing here and there for other publications where there are good-fit opportunities, as well as attending conferences and web-focused events around the world.

This is my blog, where I write about interesting industry trends, my perspective on the tech world, my work, my weight loss and my travels, both physical and digital.

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.""

If you want to get in touch with me, here's how to do it.


Drop me an email on wilharris@mac.com.

If you want to grab me on AIM, my handle is the same - wilharris@mac.com.

If you really need to get hold of me quickly, phone or SMS me on +44 (0) 7919 524390.

Please use these sensibly. Thanks.