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Anti-spam on Elgg.net

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

The serendipity of knowledge and how we can capture it

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 BBC

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In California, the road ahead

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 I&

Elgg 0.672 released

We've just released Elgg 0.672 - as ever, go grab it from Elgg.org. Elgg is a free, open source social networking platform available for anyone to run on an Apache / PHP web server environment. (If you don't have one of those, you can also

Do ordinary users care about data portability?

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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Curverider status update

{{video:http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=3401620932746978816&hl=en-GB}}

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Follow-up on the state of e-learning

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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Elgg, funding, and the state of e-learning

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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Specialised sites and the problem of eyeballs

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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Elgg on BBC Click Online

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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Elgg support with Bitwine

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,

Elgg 0.67 has left the building

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