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I'm finding myself trapped by a problem that's often been expressed to me in the past - who can you legitimately call a 'contact'? On a system like Elgg I'm happy to add anyone I'm interested in, but LinkedIn's
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The Internet Is People
As Dave will confirm, before we embarked upon Elgg I had an idea for a book called The Internet is People about running a web business. The thesis was that the only web businesses that would ever succeed were ones that looked at the Internet as a collection of people
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Sharing your reflections to a wider world
I was lucky enough today to meet Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Odeo, the podcasting creation service and directory. Podcasting is much more than downloadable radio over the Internet, although it does that very well; Evan has a vision that encompasses personal reflection, collaboration, voicemail-like services and
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Commercial tagging
Amazon is trialling tagging to enable users to find resources (in this case, items to buy) using a bottom-up ontology. You can view tags used by people you know, and automatic connections are made, Flickr cluster style, between tags that are commonly used together. From the screenshot above it&
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iReekie
It's truly the Internet age. If Dave and I are ever feeling homesick for Edinburgh, we can download MP3 tours of the city from the VisitScotland website. Although they're really intended for people actually walking around with their iPods, I'm sure they'll
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(Untitled)
The Critical Advocate at Learning Rocks has a rather nice couple of posts on Elgg: see part one and part two.
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Teacher abuse
From BBC News Online: The teacher targeted by the obscene messages is not a member of the National Union of Teachers. However, the union said the incident showed that teachers now needed to be protected not merely from physical or verbal abuse, but also from new forms which developments in
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Facebook penetration
According to TechCrunch today, 85% of students at supported colleges are members of Facebook. That's massive - 882 US colleges support Facebook, with more to come. Very shortly the vast majority of students will be familiar with social networking software - but more than that, 60% of users log in
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It's not just teenagers
According to this BBC News Online article: It also said they were much more likely than adults to read and have a weblog. Important fact to note: 52% of teenagers online keep a weblog, of their own volition, in order to reflect on their lives. These will be your higher
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Fear and loathing in academia
My mother recently started a distance learning course using WebCT, and immediately asked if this was "one of Elgg's competitors". "No," came my answer, "but I'm interested in how you're finding it." She was neither impressed nor unimpressed,
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ePortfolio 2005
Team Elgg: David Tosh, Misja Hoebe, Ben Werdmuller (l-r). I'd say this was a productive conference, all things considered. It was great to meet Misja and have a face-to-face discussion between the three of us; it was also nice to meet all these other people
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Dave Tosh on the learning landscape
(This entry was live-blogged during Dave's talk at ePortfolio 2005 in Cambridge.) Most people running eportfolio systems seemed to think they were social software - an interesting development! I'm not sure this would have been true this time last year, but as more people actually implement