If you throw a rock in the air in London on any day of the working week, chances are it will land on a New Media conference. These are primarily social gatherings for the same group of academics and media hangers-on, and you can bet they'll be Twittering... Given seven minutes I opted to make four brief points. Firstly, I noted with dismay the tendancy to focus on the Web. The terms "Net" and "Web" had become interchangeable - but this is more than a semantic discussion. Pinching a phrase from our (first) Adam Curtis interview, I reckoned this was because the media preferred to fantasise about the world rather than report. And the politicians (and bogo-academics who advise them) simply followed suit. Secondly, it was really important to look at where money was being generated. It sure wasn't being generated in abundance on the web by anyone except Google, which now has 85 per cent of the web advertising business. Profitable sites like the one you're reading are exceptions, not the norm. And while "data doesn't pay" is an oversimplification, it's generally true - and we should face up to it. Which means that network operators needed to think about new services we actually want to pay for - or face up to a future where net services cross-subsidised by something (like TV or voice minutes) that is reliable. I noted two forms of escapism in this debate that I thought were just plain weird. There's Net Neutrality, which is an issue that's been described as "Intelligent Design for the Left", for one. It's basically legislation based on technical ignorance that requires people to be nice.

There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. And while individual scientists may embrace religious faith, the scientific enterprise looks to nature to answer questions about nature. As scientists at Iowa State University put it last year, supernatural explanations are “not within the scope or abilities of science.”

If you throw a rock in the air in London on any day of the working week, chances are it will land on a New Media conference. These are primarily social gatherings for the same group of academics and media hangers-on, and you can bet they'll be Twittering... Given seven minutes I opted to make four brief points. Firstly, I noted with dismay the tendancy to focus on the Web. The terms "Net" and "Web" had become interchangeable - but this is more than a semantic discussion. Pinching a phrase from our (first) Adam Curtis interview, I reckoned this was because the media preferred to fantasise about the world rather than report. And the politicians (and bogo-academics who advise them) simply followed suit. Secondly, it was really important to look at where money was being generated. It sure wasn't being generated in abundance on the web by anyone except Google, which now has 85 per cent of the web advertising business. Profitable sites like the one you're reading are exceptions, not the norm. And while "data doesn't pay" is an oversimplification, it's generally true - and we should face up to it. Which means that network operators needed to think about new services we actually want to pay for - or face up to a future where net services cross-subsidised by something (like TV or voice minutes) that is reliable. I noted two forms of escapism in this debate that I thought were just plain weird. There's Net Neutrality, which is an issue that's been described as "Intelligent Design for the Left", for one. It's basically legislation based on technical ignorance that requires people to be nice.