Tag Archives: lord carter

CMS2009: @DigitalBritain on Twitter but you won’t find @LordCarter

As MediaGuardian’s MediaMonkey has already noted and @journalism_live tweeted, the UK minister for communications, technology and broadcasting, Lord Carter, does not Twitter, and he has ‘no real desire’ to be on Twitter.

“I couldn’t compete,” he says – apparently in reference to the Guardian management addicted to the service (@arusbridger is also on Twitter these days, by the way).

So Lord Carter may not be, but @digitalbritain is on board, if you fancy following the UK government’s digital team.

Perhaps more controversial were Lord Carter’s comments about the importance of UK media, which didn’t make the next session’s panel host, Janneke Niessen, (the Dutch) co-founder of Improve Digital, too happy.

UK content is very different from that of other countries, Carter had said. “English media spreads,” Carter said.

He said that UK media output spreads more widely and crosses boundaries in different ways from the content of other countries – for example, from the Netherlands and Italy.

That’s a result of the widespread and global use of the English language, he was quick to add, sensing the sharp sucking in of breath around the room.

Digital Britain: this time you can comment

Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report last month was debated, discussed and pondered far and wide in media land. Now (HT @tom_watson) there’s an open version of the document with a commenting feature built in.

Writetoreply.org has the report in sections and any comments left are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.

The authors of the report are encouraged to subscribe to the comments RSS…

Digital Britain – a round-up in 10 bullet points

Today’s the UK government’s ‘Digital Britain’ interim report provided quite a lot to digest, so here’s a ten point link round-up of the most important parts:

  • A BBC News video of the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, outlining the report.
  • Lord Carter called for broadband in every UK house by 2012, probably at a speed of 2Mb/second (Guardian.co.uk)
  • It’s hard to resist a good old Wordle (we’re as guilty as everyone else) and here is the Guardian’s depiction of the report, along with an explanation of how Lord Carter vows to force ISPs to crack down on piracy.

and an eleventh: