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
Web
Chris Sessums has written about the educational WordPress Multi-User hosting provider Edublogs' switch to inline context ads. These turn words within each blog post into ads, without the original author's knowledge or permission. This is annoying in the wild, but takes on another meaning entirely when the
Web
OpenID is becoming the open single logon standard, and all kinds of websites and web-based software are using it to allow people to use a single username and identity across all their services. A while back, Yahoo! did some research on OpenID usability (PDF link) that a lot of people
Enterprise
The purpose of social media is to augment your real life: connect with people, discover new links and resources through them and potentially discuss and collaborate on ideas. It's sometimes easy to forget that the Internet is just people connected by wires, uplinks, frequencies and protocols. They aren&
Politics
Barack Obama is the next President of the United States, and received the largest share of the vote by any Democratic candidate in 44 years. That's an impressive statistic, and one that Wired put down in part to his Internet strategy: "It was a peer-to-peer, bottom-up, open-source
Web
Attribute Exchange is a lovely idea. It happens like this: when you log in, the application you're logging into asks the application that holds your account whether it knows about certain pieces of arbitrary data about you. Things like your website address, Twitter account, and so on. The
By far the most popular photo on my Flickr photo stream is this one: It's a picture of my sister in Cornwall, where she was a warden on Looe Island for a summer. It's had somewhere in the region of 6300 views, accounting for over a
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
A couple of years ago, I was heavily involved in the e-learning world, and spent a lot of time advocating the use of Elgg (naturally) and similar social media tools to that community. Two worrying trends became apparent: the use of mass-media hosted networks like Facebook and Flickr to host
Worldmapper's statistically adjusted maps provide some food for thought. Check out worldwide personal computer ownership, as of 2002, or Internet users from the same year (they're very similar). I spend a lot of my time thinking about how Internet technology can promote information flow, and through