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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 how
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's
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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 traditional computing applications
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
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 penetration.
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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
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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 BBC
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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 I&
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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
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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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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.