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Paul Graham's Y-Combinator request for startups that will kill Hollywood has opened up a can of exploding radioactive mega-worms - and this time, they're angry. In the wake of the Internet industry's fight against SOPA and PIPA, he posed the problem: The main reason
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It's Ada Lovelace Day today; an opportunity to "share your story about a woman — whether an engineer, a scientist, a technologist or mathematician — who has inspired you to become who you are today." There are so many technologists who I admire that happen to be women.
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Steve Jobs sold the idea that the computer, formerly just a business machine, is a tool for artists and dreamers. In doing so, he captured the imagination of the world. He didn't personally invent the computer, or (as ReadWriteWeb points out) anything; but he understood that if computers
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Education, for me, is still the most exciting field that open source is opening up. It's a vital part of any civilized society, and so it seems right that the software that helps participants teach and learn should be open. I have no qualms about charging private institutions
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With all of the inside baseball politics surrounding TechCrunch lately, what I hadn't had time to consider was that Disrupt would turn out to be the most high energy, intensively productive conference I've attended for a really long time. It certainly helps that I'm
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The events that occurred ten years ago were undeniably horrific, scary and tragic. They were also an opportunity to show how strong democratic values are; to show how powerful reason is when armed with information; to unite behind our belief in freedom of speech and freedom of knowledge. I was
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I wrote a piece over on Google+ about Spire Magazine, my first real Internet project: [...] One piece we ran several times was called "What do you do on the Internet?" Nowadays the answer would be "everything", but back then usage was still emerging. So people like
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I'm really taken with Codecademy, a series of free tutorials on learning to code. It's incredibly simple, and you can take the first exercise without signing in. I know quite a few people whose portfolio of skills could be enhanced with a little bit of coding;
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I believe that web intents are the last missing piece for decentralized social networking. (Previously I've talked about creating a social web architecture using Activity Streams and OAuth; this builds on that idea.) Picture this chain of events: 1. I visit your website, and see that you have
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I wrote a piece for the Australia Council of the Arts: The web wasn’t designed to be made of pristine brochure pages. If you’ve ever tried to manage a web project, you’ll know that each version of each web browser displays pages just a little bit differently,
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I wrote a post - okay, a rant - over on Google+ about sexism in the software industry: Tim O'Reilly had to post a code of conduct for his conferences, which made immediate waves. (Quite a few of the women I know who aren't in the
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Together with today's Mac OS X Lion release, Apple also released a set of server extensions in the App Store for $49. To run Lion Server on your machine, you make sure you're running Lion (available from the App Store for $29), and then buy the