I’ve been intrigued by the sudden flurry of news stories this week on the future of the OeE. There hasn’t been much on this for a few months, but it all seems to have got exciting again. The Register talks about a “Strategic IT executive” coming in post Andrew Pinder, although I’m sure Andrew will be disappointed not to have made the Guardian’s Top 10. Computing talks about radical IT overhaul coming next, just like has been done in the private sector (!?), led (perhaps they say) by a CIO. Silicon also covered it. Mike Cross kicked in over at the Guardian on the CIO theme (not that I can find that online – I think they only put one in every three of Mike’s articles online for some strange reason). Fascinating how everyone’s put their mark in the sand so that, maybe, another time they can say “see, told you so”.
It’s only the folks over at Privacy International who think differently – being on the far end of any swingometer, they think it’s a good thing that OeE not be there at all. Ever. Just wind back time – no electronic widgets and everyone could have privacy, save for the neighbours twitching their net curtains to keep an eye on what you are up to.
It’s funny how search is so inconsistent from site to site (I’ve just checked all the main newspapers for “e-envoy”): some treat the string as “e” minus “envoy” and bring up a lot of results, some seem to focus on either “e” or “envoy” which brings up pretty much just as many, mostly about the Middle East right now, others don’t get it at all and come up with nothing even though you know the article was there (the Guardian seems to do this most often, perhaps they mis-spell e-envoy in their version?). Interestingly, typing “andrew pinder” into the Times’ search box gave me entries on the “Zurich Premiership”, “Sir Paul Getty”, “Newcastle” and “Scotland”, with the latter being a list of restaurants in Scotland none of which seemed to be related to AP (and, the article was dated “20 September 2003” – early publishing?). Still, I’m sure that will give Andrew comfort as he sleeps rough for this year’s Byte Night on the 19th September.
All the speculation is interesting anyway, will be a while I guess before we see how it turns out.