He’s Just Had Coffee

“The primary goal of a social network is to connect people, to simplify their communication, and to help them stay in touch.” Alex Iskold on Read/Write Web This view is widely held by people who have failed to understand Granovetter’s idea of “weak ties” – contacts you can maintain with minimal maintenance. Social networks […]

My dear brother Shawn has started Big Hearts: Creative by Donation – which is intended to coordinate pro bono work by designers for charities and non-profits. Go take a look and think about whether you could offer your skills to some good organisation who might need it. Technorati Tags: design

I’ve been putting a simple façade page over the front of this site for a while to make a kind of index of projects. The times we live in have been wearing away my attachment to “timbomb” though… it gets more troubled reactions than it used to. Then it occurred to me I could just […]

I’m pretty sure that Frank Visser’s Integral World site has pop-up ads. Every time I go there, I get a pop-up - when I go back or reload, I can’t replicate it, but it seems to keep happening. I’m sympathetic for the need for revenue to keep a big project like that going, or […]

Caution: the following is a little childish. My friend Greg and I were comparing the websites of various religions and we figured we should take a look at the Vatican — who you’d assume would have a reasonable budget for web designers. Now for context, I teach web technology, so I’m a bit of a snob about […]

Tom Coates posts a lengthy meditation on Paul Graham’s talk about environmental conditions for technology start-ups (transcript by Suw Charman) which led to a long thread of comments by clever people like Julian Bond and Cory Doctorow. I chipped in something, perhaps not as clever, too. Technorati Tags: enterprise, entrepreneur, research

The nature of our ‘Mel is irrepressible. In Subtle Broadcasting via Obsessive-compulsive Tagging (OCT) he lays out a manifesto of why he tags: Tagging is a compassionate way to share our insights, discoveries, our philosophy, our context, WITHOUT pushing it down at someone else’s throat. We simply tag them, let them go, let them […]

I’ve just started watching The Power of Nightmares - The Rise of the Politics of Fear and I must absolutely commend it to people to watch. It’s a video presentation of a theory by Adam Curtis of the BBC that a terror of rising individualism of 1950s America inspired two men, Sayed Qutb and […]

Jenny Edwards invited me to talk to Grant Matthews from Interactive Multimedia and Learning. Grant is into blogging and flickr specifically, and we yarned on for a while about what IML is doing with blogging. He liked the idea of Open Working very much and we were both cheered to see that there was compatible […]

At this week’s meeting we agreed that the current focus ought to be on what would the “foggy mirror” in the virtual studio might look like. If we succeed in getting a number of people to pursue “open working” and posting “pinups” on a semi-regular basis, what might be a way to collect those pinups? People might post images […]

I haven’t kept up at all well with my notes about Virtual Studio meetings, but to address some of the backlog, I met with Chris Conlon this morning. She’s a lecturer in Journalism who specialises in online journalism. We had a good talk about the challenges that new media, and in particular hypertext, the web […]

I’ve spent a lot of time restyling my Virtual Studio blog to look a little less hurtful. The result is very… /me/. I’m also hacking furiously on the backend to convince [blosxom http://www.blosxom.com] to behave like my own personal content management system. When the basic sites are finished, I need to write it […]