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August, 2013

One more note on surveillance

My dad always used to complain that he was being followed, and I never used to believe him. Honestly, I thought he was paranoid and a little crazy. But then, one day, I saw it; a man following and recording us. It was unmistakeable. Blatant even. How had I missed this ...
August 20, 2013

Government - the last great gatekeeper - is ripe for disruption.

You know, on one level, I just want to say "fuck everything", hold up my hands and walk away. This closing piece on Groklaw is well-thought-out, considered, and gut-wrenching. "But for me, the Internet is over," Pamela Jones writes. Perhaps it should be over for many of us; as she points ...
August 20, 2013

"Britain": a pitch for a sitcom. (cc @aiannucci)

One-liner: a gaggle of inept public servants attempt to maintain a fully-functioning Orwellian dystopia. Or, Yes, Minister meets 1984. Or, Little Britain meets Brazil. It's the near future, or an alternate present, or our present, or even the recent past - we're never quite sure. The government is doing everything in ...
August 19, 2013

What's the best way to give developers space?

Software developers are not technicians. Whereas technicians are employed to do practical work involving technical equipment, the development process is more akin to writing. Paul Graham was absolutely right when he pointed out that: [...] Of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most ...
August 13, 2013

Idno and the #indieweb at the W3C Workshop on Social Standards #osfw3c

It was an honor to present Idno to the W3C Workshop on Social Standards: The Future of Business in San Francisco last week. My position paper, The Indieweb as a Minimally Viable Platform, was previously posted on this site. It speaks for itself: the decentralized social networking technologies evolving as part ...
August 12, 2013

Working from home: how not to get distracted

In 2004, I quit my job and spent six months working on Elgg full time, burning through my savings. My living room became my office, and I quickly learned I had to find a way to stay motivated and un-distracted. I'd worked from home once before, of course, when I was ...
August 11, 2013

Outmap: a collaborative geodata platform I couldn't release.

When I left Elgg in 2009, I immediately started working on Outmap, a social geodata platform that you could use with any web browser. It never saw the light of day. Outmap allowed you to collaboratively create map layers, either privately in a group, or in public. Here's two use cases ...
August 3, 2013