Media reviews
Milk (Directed by Gus Van Sant) After the Open Stack meeting at the Digg offices the other week, I turned down a kind offer from Tony to allow me to invade his dinner date and walked back to my hotel. The route took me up Sixteenth St, through the Mission,
General
This lecture by Obama transition team member Greg Simon is worth a watch (click the Flash icon in the top right). While ostensibly about advocacy strategies for lobbyists, the fundamentals of what he talks about are applicable to marketing of ideas much more generally - commercial marketing, creative writing, and so
General
A very happy new year to everyone reading this (assuming you follow the Gregorian calendar, obviously). One of my new year's resolutions, alongside the annual stalwarts like "lose weight", "eat better" and "go to bed before midnight once in a while", is
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
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
Web
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
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
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,
Web
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