Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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If you've ever mistyped a Google search request, you've probably seen the "did you mean?" prompt - a really useful touch that most of us use all the time, usually without thinking about it. It would take Google a very long time indeed to process
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{{video:http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-3318912723598074205&hl=en}} This video is kind of quaint now (it dates from 1992), but I was delighted to discover that Tim Hunkin's Secret Life of Machines TV series is now completely available on Google Video. It's
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http://theinternetispeople.com/2007/01/05/ding-dong-dopas-dead/ As reported over at the Social Web, the Deleting Online Predators Act has died. It was passed by the House of Representatives last year, but still needed to be passed by the Senate - and wasn’t. Now, because Congress has
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Via my cousin Sarah, I stumbled across this video blog experiment on the writer John Green's blog. John and his brother have decided that, for the next year, they won't write to each other; instead they will communicate solely through the medium of videos on the
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I've been in California for almost a month, staying with my parents. My mother is a K-12 science teacher, who is getting to grips with the new technology available at her school: rather than write notes on an overhead projector, she creates Powerpoint presentations (and moans about
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There's an interesting discussion happening over on Dave Winer's blog about JSON, a format for storing objects using a Javascript-like syntax. The idea is that parsing a JSON object is far less intensive than parsing XML (whose parsers still have pretty big footprints). It'
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http://theinternetispeople.com/2007/01/01/olpc-social-networking-interface/ This social networking UI for the One Laptop Per Child ($100 laptop) project is amazing: This functionality is great for a whole bunch of applications. I can see the laptop transforming communities based on it, let alone the other more
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http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/12/19/student-artists/ Stuart is a social networking site for student artists, sponsored by the Saatchi Gallery. This has the potential to be very interesting - I wonder what other social networking sites there are for young people to put out their art? DeviantArt immediately comes
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It's perhaps telling that the two most commented-on posts on my weblog since we launched Elgg.net in November 2004 are one on MySpace proxies (sites that allow them to use MySpace on their school networks even when it's been banned), and one about Facebook
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Elgg.net is now running Akismet for anti-spam protection. Hopefully this will be an effective solution for an annoying problem - however, note that this is experimental. If you experience any problems with comments, please let us know. (Note that this is a GPL plugin - see the development mailing list
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One of the things I really like about America is C-SPAN. If you've never sat around and watched TV here, you might not be aware of it: the cable TV operators in the United States got together and created public service channels that operate a bit like
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I'm in glorious Turlock, California right now, spending time with the family and winding down a little after a particularly high-octane year. There's Elgg stuff going on (in fact, I'm going to make another microrelease tonight), but less extensively than it does when