kierenmccarthy.co.uk

I’m in North Carolina for my old friend Jonny Hennessey-Brown’s wedding. I arrived last night, the wedding is tomorrow and I’m best man.
Aside from the usual fear that American TV always gives me (CNN is on as I write this - it’s the least despairing option), I feel oddly relaxed. Must be the fact […]

ICANN Board member Susan Crawford has decried the organisation's “low point” in voting against .xxx on Wednesday night in a blog post.
Having been silenced by a motion taken at the same meeting that landed a 48-hour gagging order on all Board members in talking publicly about the decision, Crawford used her own website to […]

I've just seen this spoof of the .xxx registry process, ICANN, US interference and so on.
If you don't know know what all of the above means, or who Paul Twomey, Viviane Reding, Mike Palage etc are, you won't find it funny. If you do, you'll love it.

ICANN Approves Dot-Redneck Domain
The Internet […]

I've just got off the phone from an ICANN press conference with CEO Paul Twomey regarding the decision by ICANN to refuse the .xxx registry application.
And it has done little but confirm my already solid belief that the whole refusal was a poorly choreographed exit from a politically difficult situation.
Politically difficult for who? […]

The ICANN Board has voted to kill the .xxx registry.
It was inevitable I suppose. The political pressure was intense. Most of it coming from the US administration. You only have to look at the campaign in the US against it - ICANN's public comment board has been flooded with people saying it should not […]

I've just learnt that Tom Cruise - you know, the Scientologist nut what does movies - has gone to WIPO to win back TomCruise.com.
The complaint - D2006-0560 - was put in yesterday and is pending a compliance review. Tom Cruise - or more likely his minions - have been very, very slow in noticing […]

I have passed the deadline for my book on Sex.com and I estimate I am still three weeks to a month away from finishing.
How? How could I have miscalculated? And why is it taking so long? Well, there are several reasons:
1. A book contains a hell of a lot of words and it is […]

The main over-reaching job of the media is to review the huge amount of often complex information about what is happening in society at that moment and explain it quickly, simply and concisely to the man in the street.
It strikes me as peculiar then that a good percentage of the speakers at the We […]

There is an ongoing fuss about the flat-fee of iTunes. Apple dominance of the MP3 player market with the iPod and it's very close tie-in with iTunes has meant that the computer company has been able to tell the music industry what to do so far.
And in Steve Jobs' wisdom that has meant […]

There's some interesting things going on for the next few days I think in London at the BBC studios - the We Media Conference.
The BBC is heavily involved, as is The Guardian, Reuters and assorted others. Speakers come from Google, Technorati, Global Voice, Qualcomm etc etc. I note also that Nitin Desai will be […]