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< Archive / 2014

August, 2014

Reflecting on @fredwilson's swing back to personal sites, which is what @withknown is all about

Fred Wilson is seeing a swing back towards personal blogging:There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in ...
August 27, 2014

Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - very cool to see @davewiner joining in

It's been fun to see Dave Winer's experiments in content syndication with Little Facebook Editor, a proof of concept that allows you to write a post in a minimalist text box (which I love), cross-post to Facebook, and update the Facebook version when updates are made.We've had content syndication in ...
August 26, 2014

PHP's cURL implementation makes Squid return a 417 error: how to fix it

This is a more technical post than usual, but this has been driving me nuts, and I wanted to document it in case others run into the same issue.PHP's cURL implementation sends an Expect: 100-continue header when you use it to send a POST call over a certain size.Squid, ever ...
August 20, 2014

Why I'm okay with Twitter going beyond the social graph

I've been glued to the Ferguson coverage for the last week. Like many people, I've been wondering how this could be happening in a supposedly democratic, developed nation - and I've been getting all of my news via Twitter. No matter what they try and do, the traditional news media ...
August 19, 2014

The ROI of building open source software

Eran Hammer discusses justifying the return on investment for open source development at Walmart Labs:If this all sounds very cold and calculated, it’s because it is. Looking for clear ROI isn’t anti-community but pro-sustainability. It’s easy to get your boss to sponsor a community event or a conference, to ...
August 17, 2014

Known and education: a love story

I started my career in education, writing e-learning tools for the University of Edinburgh. It was there that I met my Elgg co-founder, Dave Tosh (because they placed us together in an ex-broom closet with a window that didn't shut; a kind of gallows bonding experience). Elgg was designed as ...
August 11, 2014

Drawing a line from @elgg to @withknown: an adventure in #edtech and #indieweb

1. Elgg: a social networking engine for education.In November, 2004, we released the first version of Elgg to the world. We originally called it a learning landscape: an educational software platform that took its cues from the emerging social web rather than rigid classroom structures. In many ways, it was ...
August 5, 2014

The problem with OKCupid is not a problem with the social web.

Guest-posting on Jason Kottke's blog, Tim Carmody argues that the problems with Facebook and OKCupid's involuntary human testing are problems with the social web at large:Still, for as long as the web does work this way, we are never only these companies' "products," but their producers, too. And to the ...
August 1, 2014