Bill Thompson, new media pioneer, has been working in, on and around the Internet since 1984. Formerly head of new media at the Guardian newspapers, he writes a weekly column, the BillBlog, for BBC News online and a monthly feature for new users for BBC Webwise. He makes occasional contributions to other publications both on and off- line including the Register, the New Statesman and the Guardian. He appears weekly on 'Go Digital' on the BBC World Service and occasionally on other BBC radio and television programmes.

Bill is a visiting lecturer at City University where he teaches Online Journalism in the Journalism Department. He is a member of the steering group for the ippr's work on Intellectual Property and the Public Sphere and a research associate on the Work Foundation's iSociety project.

You can find him online at www.andfinally.com or working in one of Cambridge's many cafés.

Recent articles

The UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society makes an easy target for critics. Behind the headlines is a different story, says Bill Thompson.

The age of the internet has brought with it exciting, fresh ideas about the disintermediation of power and peer accountability. But who is responsible for the standards and functions of the network itself? Bill Thompson charts the history of internet governance, reflects on what has been lost as accountability passes from the hands of the geeks to those of the politicians and lawyers, and offers his proposal for redressing the democratic deficit.

Bill Thompson studied computer science, built his first site in 1994, attended the first international web conference later that year with Tim Berners-Lee, created the Guardian’s first website and has worked with openDemocracy since its first version. But he has a deep, dark secret. He thinks the web sucks. Not just individual sites, but the whole web edifice. He explains why he wants to cure the addiction to HTML and do online publishing properly.

Computer programmers aren’t quite a different species – many of them breed successfully – but they do speak a different language, one which overlaps only contingently with English.

Indymedia was taken offline on 7 October when an unnamed United States government agency went to court on behalf of an unnamed foreign power and seized two computers from the United Kingdom. If this is possible, can independent media survive?