The blogs are all the twitter today about the new bit of the European e-Privacy directive coming into force soon. Much fuss, it seems, has been stirred up by the BBC story which seems to imply that cookies will get banned on 25th May.
Delve a bit deeper though, and you’ll see that whilst there’s something to keep an eye on here, you aren’t going to be forced to disable cookies from your website (probably)…
A couple of weeks ago I got the bike out of the store and started to get in a few off-road commutes. I’m using a new iphone app to keep track of how I’m doing – it tracks routes and times and all that stuff.
One of the most striking features that it has is to track all the times you use a particular route, and it can then keep track of the worst, best, average etc times that you’ve put in on that route. All very interesting if you’re a stats head.
We assume a lot – in our sophisticated world and our busy lives. We assume the car will start, the computer will log on, the traffic will flow like it usually does, the coffee machine will work (oh please…). In digital communications we assume a lot too, we assume a user will be able to access our website, will have a credit card, will be compelled by our compelling images because they’re compelling, and will donate to our cause because they’re moved to.
On 14th Feb Baigent Digital wished “happy birthday” to Pete Payne. He’s 10 years old.
What’s remarkable about this is that Pete Payne is a website.
My local muddy bike playground and scenic commute route “Wendover Woods” made it into The Economist this week, in an interesting article about “Big Society”.
Since our change of government and the increasing reach of cuts, there’s been much talk of the Big Society which has been variously hailed as a welcome handover in the ownership of local socially important services to the local people who use them but also derided as a government cop-out cost-cutting exercise. In Wendover, just a few miles from Baigent Digital’s 16th Century Chiltern home, the local forestry commission runs a busy cafe, a popular car park serving trails and barbecue areas, a Christmas Tree business (whose satisfied customers include yours truly) and though a partnership with a commercial operator, a ropes-in-the-trees adventure playground called Go Ape. With all of this activity in the woods there’s plenty of money flowing in and the area is well manned and well maintained through forestry commission staff and volunteers, and manages to turn a small profit for the local operation, which is fed back into the forestry commission’s coffers.
