New stuff I learnt from this piece:

• IBM and Microsoft are collaborating on a rival low-cost child’s computer, called “The Classmate”, which will come in at “up to” $400
• The first laptops left a factory in Shanghai last week, to be road-tested for final changes.
• The first five countries to order a million laptops will most likely be Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand

Obviously, loads of people are bitching about them already. They’re late. They’re too expensive. They don’t have that cool wind up thing you showed us at WSIS.

“The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk … and with a tiny little screen” says Bill Gate, apparently. Hilarious. Even on this issue the man does FUD. It’s one laptop per child, Bill, ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD. Not worried those five million little blighters might grow up liking Linux, are you?

It’s not just techies having a go – the development community is questioning “whether it is worth spending $100 on a laptop, when so many schools don’t even have enough books.” I got a preview of some of the stuff they’re going to want to ask at an event at the LSE a couple of weeks ago. I’d worry too if a load of Silicon Valley tech evangelists started saying they could solve the problems you’ve been working on your whole life. We’ll just have to see.

But surely you can deliver a whole load more books over wireless than on a dead tree?

UPDATE: A nice gallery of XO-1 pics here.

“Those who have not yet heard about Second Life, the online virtual world, can’t have read a newspaper for the past six months. Since May, when Business Week splashed the story of Anshe Chung, an in-world entrepreneur who dominates Second Life’s virtual real-estate market, all branches of the UK media have featured specials outlining the machinations of this playground of the imagination. Now Reuters has set up its own Second Life bureau, promising to break stories from the virtual frontiers.

“The media orgy was predictable. Here is a world that exists only on a rack of web servers in California. Yet more than half a million people (a population that’s growing furiously) log on for more than a week per month, on average. Could anything do more to confirm our fears of technology disconnecting us from reality?”

Read the rest here. One small note: it appears the subs at the New Statesman make no distinction between a “working week” (35-40 hours) and a “working week” (168 hours), rendering a reference in the article wildly inaccurate. The rest of us get to go home after dark, but poor sods, John Kampfner must have his subs on the “stay awake” pills, turning round copy through the night in anticipation of the launch of their new website. For reference, then, the Wired travel guide to Second Life has excellent figures.

A trip to Brussels earlier this week served to do the same. We were there to discuss citizens access to information, and Shamit Saggar, professor of political science at the University of Sussex, said something that’s been ringing in my ears ever since: “The logical conclusion on the Gutenberg Press was compulsory schooling”. There’s a theory that bears exploring.

Anyway, for those that can bear a stretched metaphor or two, here’s the column (and before you ask, why the headline has referenced phishing is beyond me):

“Batten down the firewalls, release the anti-spyware hounds, and up the spam alert to red status: 21 per cent of us are now more worried about online crime than about being burgled. According to a survey for the UK’s Get Safe Online campaign, fear of being duped by hackers is enough to put some of us off going online altogether.

“And we’re right to be concerned. In the week the survey was released, coinciding with the national internet safety roadshow, Microsoft issued a record number of security patches for its software, and the online virtual world Second Life was attacked by a code storm of self-replicating grey goo…”

Read the rest here.

The site was built on a Ruby on Rails platform by Hamza Khan-Cheema, and designed by Fernanda Ferretti. Lots of people offered friendly advice during the build, including Francis Irving and Chris Lightfoot from MySociety, Tom Armitage over at Infovore, and Nart Villeneuve at Toronto’s CitizenLab.

It was a really proud moment for me, when Bill Thompson, who helped build the Guardian’s first website, gave ChinaDialogue his seal of approval in his launch speech. He counselled that, despite what techno-utopians might say, the internet was no longer a place without borders, and that our site was a perfect gateway across one of the most important borders in cyberspace.

Much of the book has me shouting for joy that someone is discussing these issues: the surrender of almost all public space to shopping and advertising; the fact that all public spaces (think airports, stations, etc) aspire to the mall; the monoculture of womens and mens magazines (I often find myself stood in a newsagents wondering what to pick up. Thank heavens for private eye.); the co-opting of art into advertising. He is pretty ruthless and readable on all these themes. He also touches much more meaty issues about how designers can respond effectively to them.

Even though I have only read a handful of the essays it has convinced me of two things: design is much more important (and necessarily political) than I ever thought; and secondly, I will go and see Rick Poynor’s talk at the arnolfini on the 31st of october.