Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
Elgg
Congratulations are in order for the Curverider folks: over on the Elgg blog, Dave's announced a new round of funding for the company. Additionally, Leonard Lin is working with the team on a consultancy basis. Although I left to pursue other projects last month, Elgg is close to
General
North Oxford is the wealthiest part of a wealthy city, where BMWs sit in gravel driveways and wine bars nestle amongst delicatessens and stylish cafes; a part of the city I always yearned to belong to as a kid, but never quite did. It was where I went to school,
Web
Twitter is the darling of the tech scene, much as Facebook was a couple of years ago and Flickr and MySpace before that. Many would probably argue that it’s had more attention than it deserves: all it does is let you post, share and read 140-character messages. Despite
Consultancy
I've been off the radar for the past two weeks, taking some time out to develop some ideas (as well as take a week's holiday in Rome, which is a beautiful city that I highly recommend visiting). Now, though, I'm back to work, and
Elgg
Update: Interested in what I'm doing now? Check out my about page. I have a major announcement to make: I co-founded Elgg with Dave Tosh five years ago, and it's been a heck of a ride. I've been immensely proud of what we&
Politics
OpenStreetMap is a project whose aim is to make a free map of the world. It's extremely impressive: as well as searching the map in a normal way, the data is exportable via XML, PNG, JPEG, SVG and more, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. But
Politics
One of the outcomes of BarCamp Oxford has been the organisation of a new BarCamp about transparency and ethics - a mix of social media, open government and cyber-activism. It's in its early planning stages, but it'll take place sometime over the summer here in Oxford.
Data control
Niall Kennedy has written an interesting post about Facebook's data storage. They've written a proprietary filesystem to store photos in order to cut costs (up to now they've apparently been adding a $2 million NetApp storage system every week). It turns out they'
Web
I'm exhausted, but I wanted to get some thoughts down about today's BarCamp in Oxford before I crash. This was proof that there is an intelligent, proactive geek community in England, and that, with the right stimulus, is capable of some incredible stuff. That said, I
General
I took some time out this afternoon to hang out in Oxford University Parks with Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which I'd been given for Christmas but hadn't a chance to read yet. It's a children's book, and
Elgg
Elgg 1.5 was released today. There's an official post over at news.elgg.org, but I wanted to make a note of it here too. This is the longest we've taken over a release since 1.0, and there are almost eight hundred significant engine
Politics
It's a commonly accepted fact that computing is a male-dominated industry, but I was shocked by the scale of the inequality. Okay, this is kind of unscientific, but take a look at these statistics: * Female population of the world: 49.8% * Female population of Facebook: 55% * Female