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The most ambitious search engine since Google

Next month, British mathematician Stephen Wolfram launches the internet's most ambitious search engine since Google. It might not be blessed with the catchiest name in tech-biz, but according to believers WolframAlpha will change the very game of Internet search. Cynics, however, are calling it a colossal act of scientific hubris, a stunt that could still end in disaster.

For The First Post.

The Wire creater David Simon, on the state of the media

Simon, cultivating a style as gritty as his characters, takes it personally: he claims that the motivation for everything he writes is "revenge". His shows are revenge against those he holds responsible for the suffering and dysfunction of Baltimore, and revenge against the owners and craven editors who pulled the teeth of the watchdog.

An ex-journalist who's fallen way out of love with newspapers describes why it's too late for the industry, in an interesting piece in The First Post.

A Google profile

Don’t be evil. According to Google Inc lore, it was a programmer who, in the summer of 2001, coined what would become the company’s corporate motto. Cool and casual, it encapsulated Silicon Valley’s unbuttoned, post-hippie business culture. But five years later, at buttoned-up Davos, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, was explaining how his company had been forced to invent a more pragmatic “evil scale”.

For The National, an interesting Abu Dhabi-based English language newspaper.

Got kids? Do they watch TV?

Try Paradise Café, a new series for CBBC, created by Paul Gerstenberger, and shot on the Cook Islands. An edgy, supernatural comedy for the family, it's going out on CBBC, at 5.15pm on Tuesdays, and it's available online via the usual BBC iPlayer channels. I wrote the fourth fifth episode - due out in about ten 17 days - and the whole experience of working on the show was a real pleasure... everybody involved developed a real affection for what turned out to be an ambitious and original drama.

The first Muslim virtual world

Data relating to Muslim take-up of digital alternative worlds is scant, and anybody who doesn't identify themselves primarily by their religion won't easily be distinguishable by casual observation. Clearly there are Muslim communities in Second Life, arguably the internet's best-known virtual world; but they seem out of place. Then again, in Second Life, doesn't everything seem out of place?

What began as an experiment in the socialising potential of an immersive experience in cutting-edge technology has degenerated into an ethically ambiguous playground devoted to random sexual encounter, violence and the behavioural excesses largely denied in "first life".

Within this context, Muslim communities aren't offered the opportunity to express anything like a normal, multi-faceted lifestyle; and to encounter religious Muslims there feels like stumbling across an Amish village in Tokyo. They build virtual mosques, visit a virtual Mecca and distract themselves with an intense focus on religion.

In Muxlim Pal, the focus will be elsewhere.

For the Guardian's technology pages.

Searching for Maradona

Diego Maradona, diminutive football star, manager of Argentina's national team and a man with a gift for spawning acres of news print wherever he goes has suddenly turned publicity-shy. Following a leading lawyer's intervention on his behalf, Yahoo! Argentina has effectively removed him from its search results.

For The First Post.

So when will it be first-time buyer time?

So this is the moment a generation of accidental tenants have been waiting for. The lone voices that called unsustainable on a housing market that rose 213% in less than six years, outstripping salaries, outstripping sense, were telling first-time buyers to bide their time. Soon, over-geared property investors and the generation who had arrived at the estate agents’ offices just in time to buy at the bottom and enjoy a decade of bragging rights would sooner or later be eating first-time buyers’ cake. A giant power shift from the vendor to the buyer, from the landlord to the tenant, would herald a new era of gazundering… a redistribution of bricks and mortar. Just hold in there; have faith. Except, of course, it hasn’t happened that way.

For Citywire.

China hacked off at Microsoft anti-piracy drive

Just days after announcing a self-styled 'Global Anti-Piracy Day', Microsoft has been forced onto the defensive by computer users in the world's most populous nation, furious at the company's latest clampdown on unlicensed copies of Windows.

For The First Post.

In defense of sensible pessimism

According to the Spectator... there's a thin line between optimism and stupidity. Suck it up and learn, say the experts.

On the return of the incentive

If cash-backs don’t make lenders uncomfortable, they should. A house sold for £500,000 including a cash-back of £50,000 isn’t worth £500,000. It’s worth £450,000. Private cash back arrangements, especially during a period of such low volume, have the potential to distort local Land Registry figures and skew valuations.

For Citywire.