latakoo
Sending files
If you need to send, store or share videos privately, there's always latakoo.
Ben Werdmuller
Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
Politics
Open source politics?
Today's debate between Republican Presidential hopefuls underlined how broken the current accepted political systems are. Real change, real hope, is very hard to find. I shared the following thought in a few places: What might an Internet-informed political framework look like? How would it interact with legacy parties
Elgg
Elgg 1.8 has left the building
Congratulations to Brett, Cash, Evan and the Elgg community on the release of Elgg 1.8.0. I know that a lot of hard work has gone into this release, and it's the first major departure from the architecture that was set out in Elgg 1.0 almost
General
Spire Magazine: a teenage (mis)adventure
I wrote a piece over on Google+ about Spire Magazine, my first real Internet project: [...] One piece we ran several times was called "What do you do on the Internet?" Nowadays the answer would be "everything", but back then usage was still emerging. So people like
Politics
Citizen lawmakers: is Iceland the future of politics?
Note: it's been pointed out in the comments (and elsewhere) that the source article is full of inaccuracies. Here's the rebuttal. Nonetheless, I think there's strong interest in a new kind of democracy that takes its inspiration from the hierarchy flattening we've
Software development
Bonita: a PHP template manager with lofty ambitions
I'm fed up of using the same PHP template pattern over and over in my web apps, so I decided to write it from scratch and iterate on some core ideas. And then open source it under an Apache 2.0 license. The result is Bonita: a simple
General
Learn to program the Codecademy away
I'm really taken with Codecademy, a series of free tutorials on learning to code. It's incredibly simple, and you can take the first exercise without signing in. I know quite a few people whose portfolio of skills could be enhanced with a little bit of coding;
General
Decentralized social networking using web intents
I believe that web intents are the last missing piece for decentralized social networking. (Previously I've talked about creating a social web architecture using Activity Streams and OAuth; this builds on that idea.) Picture this chain of events: 1. I visit your website, and see that you have
General
Your website is not the destination
I wrote a piece for the Australia Council of the Arts: The web wasn’t designed to be made of pristine brochure pages. If you’ve ever tried to manage a web project, you’ll know that each version of each web browser displays pages just a little bit differently,
General
Uncreative thinking for such a creative industry
I wrote a post - okay, a rant - over on Google+ about sexism in the software industry: Tim O'Reilly had to post a code of conduct for his conferences, which made immediate waves. (Quite a few of the women I know who aren't in the
General
Could Lion Server herald a new breed of enterprise apps?
Together with today's Mac OS X Lion release, Apple also released a set of server extensions in the App Store for $49. To run Lion Server on your machine, you make sure you're running Lion (available from the App Store for $29), and then buy the
General
Patronism and monetizing the social web
This post is adapted from something I wrote on Google+. There are more comments over there; also see Evan Promodou's riff on the same idea. Google+'s combination of streams and circles works. So here's something I've been mulling over for a while: