Web
A couple of years ago, I was heavily involved in the e-learning world, and spent a lot of time advocating the use of Elgg (naturally) and similar social media tools to that community. Two worrying trends became apparent: the use of mass-media hosted networks like Facebook and Flickr to host
Politics
Worldmapper's statistically adjusted maps provide some food for thought. Check out worldwide personal computer ownership, as of 2002, or Internet users from the same year (they're very similar). I spend a lot of my time thinking about how Internet technology can promote information flow, and through
General
http://benwerd.com/2007/09/13/the-mobile-web-needs-new-hardware/ One interesting thing about my recent trip to Silicon Valley was the sheer number of iPhones being waved about. Given the price tag (even with the recent drop), I’m genuinely surprised by their popularity - the US doesn’t even have 3G
General
I had a great meeting over at the SixApart offices yesterday; there are a couple of interesting conversations growing out of the data sharing summit, and this was one. I'm flying back out to Britain tonight, energised and really glad of the time I've spent out
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.