Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
I was interviewed for an article by Steve O'Hear with Marc Canter (PeopleAggregator), Andrew Anker (Six Apart) and Tim Spalding (LibraryThing) about data ownership. This is something I care deeply about, and have written about before. It's excellent that the big web players are beginning to
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It's worth checking out the comments to my last post, which include contributions from Martin Dougiamas and Christopher Mackie from the Mellon Foundation. Thanks to everyone who commented on what was a deliberately contentious post.
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Alas, Elgg was unsuccessful in its bid to the Andrew W Mellon Foundation Awards for Technology Collaboration, which awarded $650,000 in prizes on Monday. I've got to confess that I'm a little disappointed that some of the awards included things like a $50,000 prize
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http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/12/04/specialised-sites-and-the-problem-of-eyeballs/ One of the issues with the web’s prevailing business model is that it’s eyeball-led: sites make money largely by getting users to watch advertisements. Each advertisement view, or impression, makes a very small amount of money, so the only way to
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BBC Click Online features Atif Sattar, a Bangladeshi student, talking about Elgg.net. (Click on the article and then 'view the whole interview'.) We're all really impressed here at the Curverider offices, and thank both Atif and the BBC for the exposure!
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Experimentally, I've made myself available for support calls via the Bitwine service. If this is successful, I'll keep it up; it seems like a good way to provide live help with Elgg to people that need it while leaving time for developments and other commitments. Incidentally,
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I'm pleased to announce that we've let loose a new release: Elgg 0.67 is available, as always, to download from Elgg.org. There's a lot in this new release, and particularly if you're running on 0.65 or below, we strongly
http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/12/01/youtubes-year/ I love Youtube. The site has become more and more integrated into our culture over the past year. Here are some important moments that might not have reached the international consciousness had the site not existed: Iraqi kid runs for water. Soldiers giving
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http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/12/01/facebook-abuse/ A little while ago I discovered that my Facebook account had been disabled. Logging in with my email address revealed the stark message: Your account has been disabled by an administrator. Please contact info@facebook.com for more information. So far, so unfriendly.
For the last couple of days I've been playing with two things: * An API to allow you to use external file services with your Elgg site * Amazon's Simple Storage Service Amazon S3 is a simple grid storage service with REST and SOAP interfaces. Essentially it means
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http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/11/29/audition-for-big-brother-via-a-social-network/ Channel 4’s digital entertainment channel E4 will shortly have its website revamped as a social network. Rather than sift through audition tapes, submissions for the next freakfest series of Big Brother will be via a Youtube-style community video service; presumably they will