I find myself increasingly irritated by the Grauniad’s propensity to accord substantial amounts of coverage to technology innovations which are anything but. The latest one causing me to sharpen my quill was in today’s financial pages, which announced BT’s decision to offer “an online ‘vault’ for digital valuables.”
“Analysts” apparently told the Grauniad’s scribe that “the new service signalled a further development in the digital age, whereby consumers store more and more of their virtual valuables online, and less and less on their PC.”
Of course, it does nothing of the sort. What it means is that BT – rather belatedly - is entering an already well-established market for online storage. There are already thousands of such secure online back-up solutions available to consumers (try Googling 'online backup'), and they began to take off at the same time as broadband did.
I’ve been using one myself for several years now, and, yes, just like the BT one, it carries out my backups automatically using a (gosh!) “back-up manager.”
If there is anything new in this story, it is that BT appears to have substantially undercut everyone else in this market, by offering 20GBytes for just under a fiver a month.
The BT story followed another one last week (to which most of a page was devoted) about a band deciding to release a single on “a computer memory stick the size of a cigarette lighter”. The new “gizmo” (“You just plug it into your PC or Mac and that's it," one over-excited music industry executive was reported as saying), turned out to be an ordinary USB key.
Forgive me for being underwhelmed by a ‘new’ music transport device which has been in common use among teenagers for over five years.
On the same day, and in much the same vein, another Guardian reporter breathlessly reported that “Now you can go shopping with your mobile phone. Forget about the Oyster card - soon you'll be able to travel on the Tube using your phone as a ticket.”
Sorry guys, that’s not news, either. Like most mobile handset innovations, this one began out East. When I visited Tokyo in Spring 2004, mobile phones were already routinely being used to shop with there (using their infra-red interface), and NTT Docomo and Sony began embedding contactless IC technology in mobile phones that same summer.
Two things are happening here, I think. First, Grauniad hacks are too often taking a cleverly-written press release as their cue for coverage. They are, in effect, acting as passive rather than active news-gatherers, and not bothering to look too deeply at the PR line they are being sold.
Second (and rather worse, in my view), they are being appallingly parochial, behaving as if any technology development new to the UK is new to the world. The sad truth is that new technology trends tend to hit us long after they’ve emerged either in the US or the Far East. We are, on the whole, a bunch of technological Johnny-come-latelies.
