General

Ding dong, DOPA

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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A new way to use video blogs

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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Whatever happened to learning objects?

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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JSON vs SOAP vs XML-RPC

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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OLPC social networking interface

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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Student artists

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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MySpace, Facebook, proxy sites and a little determination

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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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 list

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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

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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

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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 get

General

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