Blog posts

I was pleased a few months back to see Calvin College sign up for twiter. A small college in the Michigan town where I lived for three years up until last summer, the college is my wife’s former employer, a previous client of mine, and a place that dominated quite a bit of our social life in Grand Rapids. Twitter seemed a simple way to keep up with what was going on without much effort. But within a couple of months I stopped following them, partly out of frustration with some recent political developments on the campus but primarily because their twitter presence felt far too much like an anonymous broadcast, and close to an abuse of the medium. ...

Conversations about privacy are an increasingly vital part of any planning process for a membership-driven website. Having been engaged in such a conversation for a new project and fielding support emails for an existing one, it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately. We’re all managing a lot of personal data, whether we’re running sites that might be described as “social networks” or simply a blog that provides a way to connect up a commenters contributions. On any new project questions inevitably come up about whether or not users should be able to hide their profiles or specific pieces of information, often influenced by the way facebook’s closed walls give a sense of privacy by not letting google index profile data. I’m given to thinking that facebook’s approach has actually hurt such discussions, by implying a level of privacy they don’t really offer. ...

Reading Stowe Boyd’s thoughts on plurk and writing my own post on the topic I began to wonder how much work it would really be to add a timeline view using something like the Simile Timeline library. As a quick proof of concept I saved my twitter homepage to my laptop and added a little javascript. As well as calling in the timeline library from http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/api/timeline-api.js and using the first javascript iso8601 code I found through google, I added: ...

Along with many others I’ve been responding to the recent unreliability of twitter by checking out a few of the alternatives that are out there, particularly the dreadfully named but fairly cute plurk. Plurk has quickly gained quite a few users but didn’t make a good first impression with me. The first thing that I was asked after signing up was to hand over my IM username and password to allow them to import my contacts. Being asked for passwords for such a purpose isn’t rare, but as Jeremy Keith so eloquently noted, it’s a very bad idea and— as dopplr show—increasingly unnecessary. That the developers ignored those sorts of details in an attempt to quickly build critical mass for their service makes me wonder how in step they are with other ideas of best practice on today’s web. ...

On Friday 13th June it’d be great to see those of you within reach of North London at a little get together Iain Archer and I are putting on as part of the Breathing Space series. From 8pm at St. Luke’s Church, West Holloway, Iain and his band will be hosting an evening of music featuring Julie McKee, Burning Codes and Foreign Slippers. Each artist will perform a selection of their songs, and then they’ll all gather to chat about their music and perform a few “in the round.” ...

mad.ly – Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview Helpful overview of one of a number of great improvements coming up in the next version of rails (tags: rubyonrails timezone) Mapping Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa | White African More great work being undertaken using the Ushahidi engine (tags: africa ict4d nptech ushahidi)

Despite years of progress by web standards advocates, and a significant improvement in the quality of the HTML on the web, many of us still end up grappling with outmoded, broken HTML on a regular basis. When confronted with a large site filled with broken pages it can be hard to know where to start. Elliotte Rusty Harold’s Refactoring HTML offers a step by step recipe book for migrating such sites to clean, semantic code. ...

I’m getting my event blogging a little out of order but a few words on last weekend’s excellent geeKyoto seemed in order. Put together by Ben Hammersley and Mark Simpkins to see what a group of self-identified geeks would say in response to the question “We broke the world, how are we going to fix it?” the event brought together a couple of hundred of us in a hall in Central London for a Saturday for a fascinating journey through a wealth of ideas. ...

With all the talk of credit crunches, sub-prime mortgage crises, and all that follows from them it can be difficult to know how to make sense of it all. When you add in the fact that money is a far more complicated beast than most of us realise it’s pretty bewildering. Ann Pettifor is an expert in getting to grips with these issues, communicating them and campaigning on them. And I’m very pleased to say that you can now find her blogging at debtonation.org, the result of a quick project Jenny Brown and I have been working on. ...

In trying to get to grips with the NESTA Innovation Edge conference I’ve kept returning to Tim Berners-Lee’s appearance early on in proceedings. Berners-Lee himself didn’t offer anything groundbreaking, but made a series of sensible comments on innovation, the potential of the web, and providing space for creative people to get on with exploring their ideas. But his comments were rather awkwardly juxtaposed with a claim in NESTA’s video introducing him that he could have become rich beyond measure from the web had he not chosen to give it all away. ...