Bryan Peterson

It was with a wry smile that I read BT’s junk mail circular stuck through my letterbox last week, emblazoned with the question, “Does your broadband provider stand up to the test?” Well, no actually; I’m with BT broadband. According to pledges from our government, the UK will have the Continue Reading

Generally, the term decentralisation refers to dispersing political decision making away from centralised government and into the hands of local authorities and communities. The current UK government have embraced the concept – Greg Clark, the Minister of Decentralisation, is committed to devolving power from “Whitehall to town hall” and, thereafter, Continue Reading

The Internet is the ideal way for the moaners of the world to get together and have a good old girn about whatever takes their non-fancy, comfortable in the knowledge that they won’t have to justify their opinions or provide the evidence or context that they would in a ‘real Continue Reading

Twitter? Tweeting? Unless you’ve used Twitter, they’re probably a phrases you’re sick of hearing. The best description of Twitter I can think of is that sending a ‘tweet’, a short text message, via Twitter is like sending a text message via your mobile phone – the difference is that on Continue Reading

Whilst I believe that the SIC’s recent decision to instigate charges for music instrument tuition in school’s needs to be reconsidered for a variety of reasons (a subject I shall return to another day), I have been heartened by how our young musicians have pulled together to exercise their democratic Continue Reading

Not so long ago, the worst invasion you could expect of your privacy was a mildly embarrassing photo appearing in the Shetland Times on your birthday, supplemented with a cheeky poem that rhymed “thirty” with “shirty”, “forty” with “dorty” or “nifty” with “fifty”. The mischievous yet well meaning friends and Continue Reading

This month, instead of writing my Shetland Life article as I should have been, I once again found myself rumbling around the Internet convincing myself that I was undertaking some sort of informal ‘research’. But while looking for info on Shetland’s CCTV obsession and related invasion of privacy issues (a Continue Reading

As a young ‘un, I erroneously believed that one of my elderly relatives suffered from “Auld Timers Disease”; they were indeed old and I believed “Auld Timers” to be the official designation for the affliction more commonly referred to as “doiting”. When I disappointingly discovered the correct term was “Alzheimer’s” Continue Reading

My interest, nay passion for copyright is one of my guilty pleasures and was piqued after being ripped off by a record company as a teenage band member, which in turn compelled me to study Intellectual Property rights at university. Copyright is a slippery beast to define. Essentially, in the UK and most of Continue Reading

As I toyed with whether to write about blogs, podcasts or netiquette this month I noted that each subject is a portmanteau: a compound word combining two or more words and their meanings. “Blog” is a portmanteau of “web” and “log”, “podcast” is a portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast” and Continue Reading