General
If these products existed, they'd make it onto my Christmas list for me and my loved ones: The open ebook reader * Electronic paper screen * A DRM-free format (in a perfect world) or at the very least a format that allows borrowing (from libraries and friends), lending and passing
Web
The Open Stack is a term coined by Joseph Smarr to represent the core set of open technologies that web application developers are converging on: I spent Friday evening at the Digg offices in San Francisco for the first ever Open Stack meetup. Organised by David Recordon (who continues to
General
I just finished watching Pirate Radio USA, a great little independent documentary about pirate radio and free speech over the airwaves. It makes one major, fundamental point: although freedom of expression is guaranteed by the US constitution (and by similar laws in many countries worldwide), because the medium of that
Elgg
The following post is a fleshed-out version of my notes for my talk at the Elgg International Conference on Monday, December 1st, wherein I discussed my attitude to social networks and how they should be built. My slides are available in Powerpoint or OpenDocument Presentation format. Let's take
Chris Sessums has written about the educational WordPress Multi-User hosting provider Edublogs' switch to inline context ads. These turn words within each blog post into ads, without the original author's knowledge or permission. This is annoying in the wild, but takes on another meaning entirely when the
Web
OpenID is becoming the open single logon standard, and all kinds of websites and web-based software are using it to allow people to use a single username and identity across all their services. A while back, Yahoo! did some research on OpenID usability (PDF link) that a lot of people
Enterprise
The purpose of social media is to augment your real life: connect with people, discover new links and resources through them and potentially discuss and collaborate on ideas. It's sometimes easy to forget that the Internet is just people connected by wires, uplinks, frequencies and protocols. They aren&
Politics
Barack Obama is the next President of the United States, and received the largest share of the vote by any Democratic candidate in 44 years. That's an impressive statistic, and one that Wired put down in part to his Internet strategy: "It was a peer-to-peer, bottom-up, open-source
Attribute Exchange is a lovely idea. It happens like this: when you log in, the application you're logging into asks the application that holds your account whether it knows about certain pieces of arbitrary data about you. Things like your website address, Twitter account, and so on. The
By far the most popular photo on my Flickr photo stream is this one: It's a picture of my sister in Cornwall, where she was a warden on Looe Island for a summer. It's had somewhere in the region of 6300 views, accounting for over a
As has been reported by everyone and his dog in the tech echo chamber, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey have swapped roles at Twitter. I really like the Twitter guys; I've met Ev and Biz in different contexts, and they're both extremely open and generous with
Last Thursday I found myself in Brighton, which is a revelation - a concentrated community of tech entrepreneurs who get to live by the sea, drink at awesome cafés and have the kind of social values I love. As well as some consultancy at the University of Brighton, we were