John Naughton



Profile:


Full name: John Naughton

Area of interest: Internet and computers

Journals: The Observer

Email: [mailto:j.j.naughton@open.ac.uk j.j.naughton@open.ac.uk]

Website: John Naughton | Guardian.co / John Naughton

Blogs: Memex 1.1

Agent:

Networks:



Biography:
Education: University College, Cork; Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Career: biography (Open University)

Profession: Control engineer with a strong interest in systems analysis and computer networks

Academia:
 * Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University
 * Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge and Director of the Wolfson Press Fellowship Programme

Industry:
 * Previous non-exec Chairman of One World International
 * Non-executive Chairman of RAB-eye, a think tank set up by the Radio Advertising Bureau to help the advertising and radio industries think through the implications of digital technology
 * Founding partner of Ellipsian, a Cambridge-based ideas factory
 * Founding partner of Ndiyo project for sustainable and affordable IT

Journalistic career: The Observer: Television Critic, Internet columnist

Current position/role: Columnist


 * also writes/has written for:

Other interests: photography - flickr.com

Disclosures:

Viewpoints/Insight:
 * About me - Occasionally Asked Questions
 * O.U. inaugural lecture: Naughton tells it like it is (audio/video/PDF)
 * Quote: "HL Mencken once said that the function of journalism was 'to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable'. I like to see both done well."

TV/Radio:

Controversy/Criticism:

Awards/Honours: voted TV Critic of the Year three times

Other:



Books & Debate:

 * A brief history of the future: the origins of the internet (1999) OCLC 185678312 (A Brief History homepage)
 * Authored Open University unit: Understanding systems: making sense of complexity

Latest work:

Speaking/Appearances: gives keynote addresses to industry conferences

Current debate: 

The Observer: 'The Networker'
Column remit: The Internet

Section: Business News & Features

Role: Columnist

Pen-name:

Email: [mailto:john.naughton@observer.co.uk john.naughton@observer.co.uk]

Website: Guardian.co / John Naughton

Commissioning editor:

Day published: Sunday

Regularity: Weekly

Column format:

Average length:



Articles: 2009

 * Battle lines are drawn for the war of web search dominance - 16th August 2009
 * So did Apple and AT&T gang up to gag Google Voice? - 9th August 2009
 * Apple hands Palm a problem and gets slapped by Microsoft - Microsoft's next offensive suggests that the company still has a thing or two to learn about strategy - 19th July 2009
 * Why the world's most powerful computer may be useless - We may be moving to a world powered by a small number of megacomputers - 15th March 2009
 * How Amazon's Kindle brought technology to book - Kindle technology looks set to become popular in the UK - 8th March 2009
 * There's a silver lining to Google's cloud computing glitch - Europeans have been made rudely aware of the term 'outage' - courtesy of Gmail - 1st March 2009
 * Of course worms can enter the net, that's the whole point - John Naughton on the Stanford project and network security - 22nd February 2009
 * Need to read between the lines? Microsoft Word can help - At the core of the venture capital business is an exceedingly difficult problem - 15th February 2009
 * The iPhone Ocarina is the sound of serious money - John Naughton on the rise and rise of iPhone Ocarina - 8th February 2009
 * Digital rights management isn't music to everyone's ears - Rule number one in ideological warfare is to capture the terms in which the debate is conducted - 1st February 2009
 * Apple's holier-than-thou attitude may be its salvation - The Obama team are web-savvy, social-networking, Mac-using digital natives - 25th January 2009
 * Spreadsheets serve as weapons of mass cost destruction - To those who spent their MBAs grinding through manual calculations, VisiCalc offered a glimpse of paradise - 18th January 2009
 * By reading this, you agree to stop adding useless disclaimers - The practice of appending disclaimers is now so widespread that most of us have become inured to it - 11th January 2009
 * Slimming down in 2009: laptops, software and upgrades - John Naughton predicts what the year holds for the world of technology, from netbooks to Windows 7 - 4th January 2009



Links:

 * Writings (John Naughton's website)
 * The Observer 'Footnotes' column archive 1999 / 2004
 * Wikipedia bio