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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

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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