April 2011
1 post
On indefinite hiatus
I’m parking this Tumblr blog for now. I have learned loads about openness.
Maybe check out my main blog.
March 2011
1 post
Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free... →
Superb piece
January 2011
3 posts
What if Flickr fails? →
Doc Searls:
“realize that the pendulum has now swung full distance in the silo’d direction — and that it’s going to swing back in the direction of open and distributed everything. And there’s plenty of money to be made there too.”
"Why wasn't I consulted?" →
An insightful way of looking at the web
If you tap into the human need to be consulted you can get some interesting reactions. Here are a few: Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Hunch, Reddit, MetaFilter, YouTube, Twitter, StumbleUpon, About, Quora, Ebay, Yelp, Flickr, IMDB, Amazon.com, Craigslist, GitHub, SourceForge, every messageboard or site with comments, 4Chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica. Plus the...
The Philosophy of Facebook (or, the real reason... →
“This sort way of thinking about the world long pre-dates Facebook, indeed, it runs throughout the philosophies embedded in the modern internet. It is the culture of the Californian Bay Area that has codeveloped along with the technologies it has created. Described most simply, it is a form of technological utopianism whose rhetorical roots lie in Nortbert Wiener’s cybernetics of the...
December 2010
3 posts
Wikileaks: The Blast Shack by Bruce Sterling →
“The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of...
Blog, poke, twitter and be damned →
“But it doesn’t follow, as the president suggested, that posting weird (to older people) things on the web — in blogs, social networks and the like — should be an automatic turnoff or disqualification for a responsible job later on. The notion of punishing someone decades later for what he or she said or did as a teenager or college student just feels wrong to me.”
Good...
“It seems to me that at the end of this chain is BitTorrent. That when WikiLeaks...”
– Dave Winer
November 2010
6 posts
New York Times: The Decision to Publish Diplomatic... →
NY Times rationale for posting WikiLeaks documents
Wikileaks plans to make the Web a leakier place →
WikiLeaks’ release strategy, from Oct 2009
The embargo period is a key part of the plan, Assange said. When Wikileaks releases material without writing its own story or finding people who will, it gains little attention.
“It’s counterintuitive,” he said. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not...
Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain... →
“Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults – namely their parents – for quite some time. For this reason, they’ve had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully...
Firesheep, enterprise software and other broken... →
Astonishing stuff from Kevin Marks on corporations and the firewall
“Ben Horowitz’s article on enterprise sales in TechCrunch today tries to justify corporate practices, even as he recognizes the inversion of the innovation flow.”
“What this misses is the underlying economic justification for the existence of a corporation in the first place - the economic theories that...
Who's Lobbying Blog: Who's Lobbying launch reveals... →
whoslobbying:
We are excited to announce the Who’s Lobbying site launches today! The site opens with an analysis of ministerial meetings with outside interests, based on the reports released by UK government departments in October.
Our analysis shows the five organisations UK ministers reported the most…
The unrevolution (is open source Communist?) →
“What most characterizes today’s web revolutionaries is their rigorously apolitical and ahistorical perspectives - their fear of actually being revolutionary. To them, the technological upheaval of the web ends in a reinforcement of the status quo…”
October 2010
11 posts
The British Library's Future: Shiny, Locked-Down... →
“Moreover, there is not the slightest sign here that the British Library understands anything about the effect that the Internet is having on creating a massive, innovative market of non-rivalrous, abundant digital goods. There seems to be no inkling that plenty of companies make money by giving stuff away (actually, it’s how most television channels, newspapers and industry...
Failcon Privacy Panel topic: why are location... →
“Let’s say we were using Loopt and that Dan wanted to let me know where he was. He checks in, and a crypto key that I have would let me unencrypt his location without letting Loopt see that. It’s actually a lot more complex than that, and you can see how it works on the paper they drew up.”
“But after explaining it all to me, they said none of the location-based services were...
The iPhone’s Challenge to Open Source →
The internet is not the enemy →
“Marshall McLuhan was wrong, back in the 60s, when he said “the medium is the message”. He was talking about television, but even as his ideas circulated, David Attenborough was commissioning Kenneth Clark to make the inspiring documentary series Civilisation. The vast differences between good and bad television, which still exist – and which were confirmed in the 70s by the...
Answering Gladwell: Perhaps a revolution is not... →
“We do not live on a platform; we live across platforms. We choose the right tools for the right jobs.”
Beth Kanter and Allison Fine on the Networked... →
“Kanter and Fine offer the idea that the complexity of social problems outpaces the abiity of any individual organization to address them. They wonder whether organizations working through networks could do better.”
“Many nonprofits are built of departments that work in silos, united by a logo and protected by an institutional firewall. These organizations are starting to...
Stowe Boyd: Google Understands the Problem... →
stoweboyd:
paulpedrazzi:
The Real Life Social Network v2
Incredibly smart stuff from Paul Adams.
my two cents
A Google presentation focused on how people network, and a lot of premises explored, like groups, Dunbar Number, social scale, weak ties, strong ties,…
Are parents the biggest threat to online privacy? →
“The survey for the security company AVG questioned over 2,000 mothers in 10 countries, and found that 81% had uploaded images of their children. Not that surprising, you might think. But 23% had uploaded antenatal scans for friends to see, 7% had given their baby an e-mail address, and 5% had created a profile on a social network.”
“In summary, most babies born today will...
CK12 Foundation →
Textbooks are like dinosaurs: clunky, archaic, and not readily available. That’s why Neeru Khosla founded CK12 Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to lowering the cost of educational materials and making them more freely accessible around the world. Khosla recruited teachers from all over America to help write CK12 textbooks and published all the material under Creative Commons...
Cory Doctorow: The real cost of free →
“You see, the real mistake Lindvall made was in saying that I tell artists to give their work away for free. I do no such thing.”
Public Spaces, Private Infrastructure →
YouTube, commercial services, strong hosting - and activists in Egypt and Burma
“Here’s the tension. I’d love to be able to offer a stern warning that we risk our freedoms of speech by allowing critical debates that should take place in the public sphere be hosted on private platforms. I’d love to urge everyone to to think twice about whether they want YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion or...
September 2010
24 posts
The principle of indirection →
“Here’s a quiz that looks easy, and should be, but turns out to be quite hard for most people. Somebody asks you: “What information do you have about topic X?” It’s a multiple-choice quiz. There are two ways to answer:”
“1. Make a list of things, and send a copy of the list.”
“2. Make a list of things, and send a reference to the...
Gladwell and The False Poles of Digital and... →
“Digital activism has been construed as its own movement, a new wave of organizing unique to the 21st century digital world. In fact, digital tools are complementary to “traditional” activism, for a number of reasons: They allow organizers to quickly mobilize large numbers of people; they help draw media attention to causes, and quickly; they allow for a centralized portal of...
Sharing: Theft or Duty? →
“Not being able to share digital files turns out to be far worse than not being able to share analogue ones like second-hand books in terms of the positive benefits foregone. Moreover, you don’t even have to give up your original copy where digital artefacts are concerned, so there is no disincentive for you to share it; some might even say that the social benefits of doing so...
U.S. Wants to Make It Easier to Wiretap the... →
“WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.”
Zuckerberg on platforms and mobile →
I don’t subscribe to Techcrunch, too much emphasis on making gossip out of the minutiae of start-ups and venture capital. It’s the wrong blog if you’re interested in doing innovation yourself.
But there are some good insights in this interview with the founder of Facebook, a guy who understands platforms.
This blog is about openness - Facebook is NOT my favourite model out...
I pushed 20 more of my projects to GitHub →
“Quick note on GitHub - GitHub is the best invention ever for programmers. Nothing stimulates you more than pushing more and more projects to GitHub and seeing people forking them, following them, finding and fixing bugs for you. I wouldn’t be doing so much coding if there wasn’t GitHub.”
Solutions for a Creativity Crisis: Technological... →
Innovation and idea sharing in Cuba
“Given the harsh economic conditions, the lack of technology, products, no sources of income — one would expect a complete collapse of the spirit of the people, and for the heart of the country to begin to crumble, and ultimately, for creativity to wither. After all, we have seen research that shows how creativity is killed by restrictions, stress,...
Were Haystack's Iranian testers at risk? →
“Haystack is the Internet’s equivalent of the Bay of Pigs Invasion…”
Google releases censorship visualisation tools →
Google Transparency Report is a set of tools designed to show censorship levels around the globe
Policing Content in the Quasi-Public Sphere →
“Online conversations today exist primarily in the realm of social media and blogging platforms, most of which are owned by private companies. Such privately owned platforms now occupy a significant role in the public sphere, as places in which ideas and information are exchanged and debated by people from every corner of the world. Instead of an unregulated, decentralized Internet, we...
"Haystack's story makes for great Hollywood... →
“I like Hollywood as much as the next guy — and yet something just doesn’t feel right about Haystack. What really bothers me is that one cannot download and examine their software; as far as the Internet is concerned, Haystack doesn’t exist. In fact, Heap says that it is only distributed to trusted contacts inside Iran; putting it online would create a situation where...
Eric von Hippel and 2.9 million British innovators →
Household innovations and open tech collaboration among ordinary people
Facebook Places location-aware service launches in... →
‘Rik Ferguson of security firm Trend Micro, trialled the service as it was launched on Friday. He raised a number of concerns about the functionality that allows users to check in their friends at a given location.’
‘“One of the major issues is the way that Facebook have implemented his functionality,” Mr Ferguson told BBC News.’
‘By default, users...
How Open Data is Used Against the Poor in... →
“We tend to believe that the web and data are meritocracies, where anyone with enough motivation can create value and the tide will rise, raising all ships. Maybe that’s not the case, though…”
FOI truths, or myths? →
“Based on their detailed evaluation of the impact of FOI on Whitehall, Robert Hazell, Ben Worthy and Mark Glover argue that FOI is not much used by ordinary citizens, that more proactive publication is unlikely to anticipate what FOI requesters actually want, and that they could find “very little evidence” of a significant chilling effect.”
Record and release free music without copyrights →
“Musopen is a non-profit library of copyright free music. This project will use your donations to purchase and release music to the public domain. Right now, if you were to buy a CD of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, you would not be legally allowed to do anything but listen to it. You wouldn’t be able to share it, upload it, or use it as a soundtrack to your indie film- yet Beethoven...
Stowe Boyd: Surrender To The Stream, And Be Happy →
stoweboyd:
Streaming apps — based on the open follower model, or variants of it — will be the dominant motif of the web for the foreseeable future. And this is having an impact on everything that touches it, including our sense of time.
A great deal of research has shown that that our perception of time is…
What people don't understand about OAuth →
“Here’s a key point a lot of people don’t get about OAuth.”
“When you grant an application access with OAuth, you are giving them the same power you would with your username and password.”
Welcome to the Civic Commons →
“One of the core reasons why sharing works is that it spreads the effort, and avoids the constant re-invention of the wheel. One area that seems made for this kind of sharing is government IT: after all, the problems faced are essentially the same, so a piece of software built for one entity might well be usable - or adaptable - for another.”
A New Home for the WordPress Trademark →
“Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity…”
Could Free Software Exist Without Copyright? →
“A couple of days ago, I was writing about how Richard Stallman’s GNU GPL uses copyright as a way of ensuring that licensees share code that they distribute – because if they don’t, they are breaching the GPL, and therefore lose their protection against claims of copyright infringement.”
“That’s all very well, but as many people have pointed out, this does ...
Galaxy Tab unveiled as Samsung's first tablet... →
“Samsung has become the latest challenger to enter the tablet computer battle, unveiling its Galaxy Tab at the IFA conference in Berlin.”
“The device will run on Google’s Android operating system, with a capacity of 16 or 32GB, expandable by 32GB more.”
Joi Ito - Tea with The Economist →
Joi Ito on “privacy, startups, Internet, Creative Commons and other random things”.
Ten Theses on Wikileaks →
August 2010
9 posts
Why Privacy Is Not Dead by Danah Boyd →
“The way privacy is encoded into software doesn’t match the way we handle it in real life…”
“Each time Facebook’s privacy settings change or a technology makes personal information available to new audiences, people scream foul. Each time, their cries seem to fall on deaf ears.”
“The reason for this disconnect is that in a computational world,...