The UK’s Top 40 tech celebs – and why Stephen Fry isn’t number 1

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

When I volunteered to write a feature about the most techie celebrities from these fair British Isles, I hadn’t anticipated the amount of work involved. I figured there would be around 15 celebs, maybe 20, who had been enticed into the wonderful world of Twitter, Facebook and blogging, but the list just kept on growing. I eventually settled on 40 as my cut-off point. Now to work out how to score it.

Fortunately my years working in the PC Pro Labs came to the rescue, and before I knew it I’d worked out a scoring system based on Twitter followers, interactivity, quality and quantity of blogs, techie knowledge and sheer amount of fame. Add it all up and out would pop a lovely number, somewhere between 1 and 100.

Naturally, the phrase “out would pop” is entirely untrue. I had to spend a good two weeks following each celebrity, checking for hints of their geekiness, before I could rate them with any authority. Then there was the small matter of trawling through blogs, Facebook accounts and even long-abandoned MySpace pages.

By the end, four men were vying for top position: TV and radio presenter Richard Bacon, comedian Dave Gorman, novelist Neil Gaiman and the inimitable Stephen Fry.

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20 good and 20 bad things about Twitter

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

PC Pro’s great Twitter adventure is barely a fortnight old (sign up for our Twitter feed here) but already we’ve found a great number of things that both amaze and annoy us about the micro-blogging site.

Here, in no particular order, are things we like, and can’t stand, about Twitter. Ideas suggested by others on the PC Pro Twitter feed and elsewhere are duly credited in brackets.

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Comedian solves BT’s broadband problems

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Dave Gorman is a very funny man. However, he’s lost his sense of humour over his faltering BT broadband connection, which disappeared down a black hole three days ago.

“I’m not a violent man but right now I would cheerfully hurt someone from BT,” Gorman writes on his blog. “In fact my sense of proportion has diminished to the point where I can’t work out if it would be in particularly bad taste to suggest that running Kris Marshall over again would be, well, satisfying. Probably.
Still, if he will advertise BT’s services…”

However, what piqued my interest was his superb suggestion of ISPs providing mobile broadband dongles to people whose landlines have given up the ghost: a courtesy connection in the same way garages provide a courtesy car when your runaround is being repaired.

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