I’ve got a feature in The Guardian today about ENUM. What’s [tag]ENUM[/tag], you say? Well that was certainly one of the problems in writing the feature – no one’s ever bothered to write about it, and so no one outside of a few technical circles has heard of it.
ENUM is basically a way of connecting the old telecoms network with the Internet. And this is very good news for us all because it means a broad sweeping move to everything running on IP networks, and that not only makes everything work together faster and cheaper, but also opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
The difficulty in writing my article though was that I have to reduce down years of work and five good interviews into 1,000 words and also explain what ENUM was. I think I did a pretty good job, although I had to oversimplify and I had to miss out lots of interesting info, as well as what should really have a story on its own: why the UK ENUM roll-out has taken so long.
Actually, I barely even mentioned the UK ENUM limited company and the timeplan for bringing ENUM to the UK. And I missed out Lesley Cowley (Nominet CEO) altogether. Still I suppose if people get interested in ENUM, I already have the material to write a dozen more features having spoken to everyone of importance in the UK.
I also did a short pithy news summary of the .xxx saga. Basically pointing out that it was Dr Dobson and his Christian cohorts that forced the US government to force ICANN’s Twomey and Cerf to change their mind.
But the story’s not over yet. In fact, I’m working on a [tag].xxx[/tag] story as we speak that should prove very interesting.
And then I can get on with the [tag]Sex.com[/tag] book, which is increasingly becoming a troublesome enterprise because I am having to *not* do important things. Such as going to Geneva for the next meeting of the IGF preparations. I’d love to go and meet people and discuss where we’re up to with discussions over solving some of the Internet’s biggest problems, but I can’t, I have to get on with the book.
I suppose that’s an impetus into working harder.
I am also currently ignoring all the issues still surrounding this new blog (missing files etc) because I could easily spend a day just sorting them out. I did mock up some quick redirect HTML files so that old links to articles still work and automatically redirect to the new page that it’s on, but I’ve yet to find an automated tool for doing it, so it is a manual process.
I activated my stats engine this morning, so I should soon see what impact losing the blog for two days has had on people reading this blog.
