Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
I will develop this into a post later, but I have an unfinished thought about semantic discussion vs real world system building. I'm sat here at the DataSharingSummit, using the free wifi kindly provided by Innovis, eavesdropping on a couple of different concurrent sessions. Yesterday's discussions
General
Thoughts from the summit are over here; I'm typing this from the second day, and will summarise that tomorrow.
At an event a couple of years ago, I made the mistake of claiming to an elearning manager that people would one day search for information through social networks rather than flat text search engines like Google. That was pretty much the end of the conversation; he couldn't
General
This just goes to show: you can add all the features and complexity you want, but they won't necessarily make the user experience better.
So, 24 hours without Skype access later, and I still can't get on (although apparently some can). This has been an important lesson in single point of failure (which is one of the core reasons I'm always harping on about decentralised services). We use Skype pretty
To everything, at least. OpenID is a fantastic little protocol that lets a user log in with their username from another service. It means you can log into Explode with your AIM screen name; you can also log into Livejournal with your Explode profile URL. The OpenID client site shoots
General
Dave Winer gushes about Facebook adding a handful of RSS feeds. I'm less enthralled, which is underlined by some of the quotes from commenters he points out: Jeff Sandquist says, "I suspect this will allow me to send my Facebook status updates to Twitter." Seriously, I
General
Misja has posted about the Elgg language contributions, which are impressive: 49 languages and counting! A big thank you goes to the Elgg open source community. I've also been remiss in not giving him a full welcome: Misja Hoebe was the latest addition to the full-time Curverider staff.
General
When Dave and I set up Curverider a couple of years ago, the response was lukewarm. Elgg, as an open source product, was supposed to be free, wasn't it? What was a commercial company doing with it? Did that mean it wasn't going to be open
General
Over on the DataSharingSummit board on Facebook, which I ironically can't show you because Facebook doesn't allow for public data sharing, Marc Canter asked what rights we think end users should have. I replied as follows: I think there's a serious danger of overthinking
General
Computer Science Reconsidered: The Invocation Model of Process Expression is a very long title for a book that apparently argues that computer science is a discipline separate from mathematics, that requires its own theory of process expression. Although I haven't read the book, I agree; there are certainly
General
I had an interesting call with Simon Grant earlier about the developing LEAP 2.0 specification for representation of ePortfolio data. An ePortfolio is an electronic portfolio of evidence and reflections that collectively represents your skills, accomplishments, and sometimes learning process. Elgg, when coupled with its presentation tool, is a