General
After an easy upgrade process, Elgg.net is back online. We've recoded the way the front page works on the backend - which won't make much difference to you, but makes maintaining the site much easier for us. So what can you expect from this upgrade? The
General
Paul Allison has uploaded a couple of really fascinating videos of K-12 students using the Elgg site on Youthvoices.net over at Youtube. Here's the latest. Students are creating podcasts, embedding videos, writing blog posts and more. {{video:http://www.youtube.com/v/VdyM3oke2tE}} Exciting stuff!
General
Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU (PDF link) is worth a read, particularly for page 216: It is obviously likely to have a strong impact on the future usage of FLOSS products and the
General
I'm really happy with the way the Elgg development mailing list has been shaping up lately - so far this month we've had lots of discussion of everything from how we do the Elgg.net front page through LaTeX plugins and speed enhancement. You can sign up
General
Apple has some of the least forward thinking environmental policies in the industry - whereas manufacturers like Dell offer recycling schemes and have reduced usage of known toxins, the folks in Cupertino continue regardless. Computers are becoming one of the bigger polluters, and it's nice to see that Greenpeace
General
Over at the Yahoo Developer Network, they're asking members what's on their wishlist for 2007. Some people are asking for better or limitless APIs; some are asking for how-to screencasts; others for free T-shirts. My request would be for a standard, open API developed
General
If you've ever mistyped a Google search request, you've probably seen the "did you mean?" prompt - a really useful touch that most of us use all the time, usually without thinking about it. It would take Google a very long time indeed to process
General
{{video:http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-3318912723598074205&hl=en}} This video is kind of quaint now (it dates from 1992), but I was delighted to discover that Tim Hunkin's Secret Life of Machines TV series is now completely available on Google Video. It's
General
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
General
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
General
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
General
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'