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< Archive / 2014

November, 2014

Flickr selling its CC photos shows: users don't just need control, they need to understand it, too

Dazed reports that Flickr is going to start selling off your Creative Commons licensed photographs:The site plans to handpick a few select photographers who will get 51% of the sales, but the vast majority of people will see their images printed onto canvas and sold for up to $49 a pop. The only ...
November 30, 2014

Surely we can do better than this

On my way home tonight, an elderly homeless man stopped me in the street and asked if he could sleep on my floor  because it was cold and rainy. To my shame, I said I couldn't help him, although I could offer him some money, which he declined.He told me ...
November 20, 2014

Opinions are a feature

Lately I've been thinking about the differences between entertainment and technology:entertainment n. the action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment.technology n. the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.I've heard a lot about "delighting the user" lately. This is a good thing: a satisfying product does delight ...
November 19, 2014

8 tips for writing open source web apps that anyone can use

I’ve spent my career writing open source web applications that are designed to be used by non-technical users. Elgg was a social networking platform that was described at the time as “MySpace in a box”. Known is a web platform that allows you to share and communicate from your own ...
November 14, 2014

Open-sourcing .NET is the best thing Microsoft could have done.

Microsoft open sourced their .NET platform today.Superficially, this is a huge deal: a proprietary platform at the heart of their development offerings is now available under an MIT license. Fantastic! This has been a long time coming and illustrates that Microsoft has turned a corner.I think this is undeniably a ...
November 12, 2014

Everything big started small: next steps on a grand adventure.

Imagine a global social network that nobody owns, where your profile can be uniquely your own, and you have full control of your identity.In May, Erin Jo Richey and I started work on Known as a full-time startup business. Our mission is to empower everyone to communicate from their own ...
November 7, 2014