General
This lecture by Obama transition team member Greg Simon is worth a watch (click the Flash icon in the top right). While ostensibly about advocacy strategies for lobbyists, the fundamentals of what he talks about are applicable to marketing of ideas much more generally - commercial marketing, creative writing, and
General
A very happy new year to everyone reading this (assuming you follow the Gregorian calendar, obviously). One of my new year's resolutions, alongside the annual stalwarts like "lose weight", "eat better" and "go to bed before midnight once in a while", is
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If these products existed, they'd make it onto my Christmas list for me and my loved ones: The open ebook reader * Electronic paper screen * A DRM-free format (in a perfect world) or at the very least a format that allows borrowing (from libraries and friends), lending and passing
I just finished watching Pirate Radio USA, a great little independent documentary about pirate radio and free speech over the airwaves. It makes one major, fundamental point: although freedom of expression is guaranteed by the US constitution (and by similar laws in many countries worldwide), because the medium of that
Elgg
The following post is a fleshed-out version of my notes for my talk at the Elgg International Conference on Monday, December 1st, wherein I discussed my attitude to social networks and how they should be built. My slides are available in Powerpoint or OpenDocument Presentation format. Let's take
As has been reported by everyone and his dog in the tech echo chamber, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey have swapped roles at Twitter. I really like the Twitter guys; I've met Ev and Biz in different contexts, and they're both extremely open and generous with
Last Thursday I found myself in Brighton, which is a revelation - a concentrated community of tech entrepreneurs who get to live by the sea, drink at awesome cafés and have the kind of social values I love. As well as some consultancy at the University of Brighton, we were
General
http://benwerd.com/2007/09/13/the-mobile-web-needs-new-hardware/ One interesting thing about my recent trip to Silicon Valley was the sheer number of iPhones being waved about. Given the price tag (even with the recent drop), I’m genuinely surprised by their popularity - the US doesn’t even have 3G
I had a great meeting over at the SixApart offices yesterday; there are a couple of interesting conversations growing out of the data sharing summit, and this was one. I'm flying back out to Britain tonight, energised and really glad of the time I've spent out
General
I will develop this into a post later, but I have an unfinished thought about semantic discussion vs real world system building. I'm sat here at the DataSharingSummit, using the free wifi kindly provided by Innovis, eavesdropping on a couple of different concurrent sessions. Yesterday's discussions
Thoughts from the summit are over here; I'm typing this from the second day, and will summarise that tomorrow.
At an event a couple of years ago, I made the mistake of claiming to an elearning manager that people would one day search for information through social networks rather than flat text search engines like Google. That was pretty much the end of the conversation; he couldn't