Blog posts

Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog Not really about MySpace, more about social networking sites in general. A good set of quotes on the value/effects of social networking site usage. (tags: freakonomics myspace socialnetworking sociology) Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll: Recommender systems meet festivals Last.FM will look at your listening and build you a list of recommendations for which SXSW bands to see. Nice idea. ...

Yesterday, Matt Patterson and I moved into the office space we’re going to be sharing. In London’s fashionable Hoxton, right next door to a startup we like a lot, it’s a good place to be. We currently have space for one more full-timer to share the office with us, so let us know if you’re looking for a place to work. ...

Economizing can be penny-wise and pound foolish “Pick up the source code for a program and three highlighter markers, one green, one yellow, and one red.” leading into a good discussion of separating problem and infrastructure. (tags: design designpatterns domaindrivedesign refactoring) the ryan king » Introducing Conveyor “One way of describing it is as a “distributed, rewindable, virtual queue server”. It speaks HTTP and will soon have a peer-to-peer replication mode. It can be treated like a queue, but because it doesn’t actually get rid of any data, you can r ...

Trailer Mash-ups: Wall-E-nator Mashup Proves Cuteness May Destroy the Future Best mashup I’ve seen in a very long time (tags: mashup pixar terminator) Building explosion in Grand Rapids’ Eastown - The Grand Rapids Press Very bizarre news (tags: eastown explosion grandrapids) Londonist: Some Of Our Banksys Are Missing Someone’s painting over Banksys. My money’s on it being the man himself. (tags: bansky london streetart) Obituary: Larry Norman | Obituaries | guardian.co.uk Music Steve Turner on Larry Norman, who died a couple of days ago. ...

Developing OAuth clients in Ruby Nice step-by-step tutorial (tags: oauth ruby) Matt Legend Gemmell – MGTwitterEngine - Twitter from Cocoa “MGTwitterEngine is a Objective-C class which lets you integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa application, by making use of the Twitter API.” (tags: api cocoa twitter) foi.mysociety.org MySociety’s new Freedom of Information site is now in “public alpha” (tags: freedomofinformation mysociety nptech web4change)

‘If I find one reel, I must kill you’ | Features | guardian.co.uk Film “Erlend Clouston on the men who risked their lives to save the Afghan film archive from the Taliban " (tags: afghanistan film) Gary Younge in New York: It’s up to the superdelegates to prove Democrats believe in democracy | The Guardian “The elections we have all been watching account for 80% of the total voting delegates who will nominate the candidate. The remaining 20% goes to “superdelegates” - Democratic legislators, governors, former presidents and vice-presidents, a ...

In between writing reviews of tech books I’ve been gradually working my way through a wonderful little book called Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth?. I’ll write about it in more detail later, but it was very much in my mind as I read an article Nick posted back in January about Bolivia’s new constitution. While much of the consideration of “democracy” over the past few years has been focussed on US elections, ill-advised adventures in the Middle East, and occasional flare ups in other places, Bolivia has been hard at work on a new constitution. And whereas that often means a dry process of regulations and legal language, this constitutional process has been about throwing off the shackles of imperialism and looking for ways for a country to reflect its plurality, its history, and economic contributions from outside the normal economic sphere. ...

Tuesday night saw us heading to Water Rats to see Anathallo, friends from the US on their first UK tour. They’d been in the country for a while, opening for Manchester Orchestra, but this was their sole headline show of the trip. We were pleasantly surprised to see the small venue packed with people and, like the band, a little taken aback to hear quite so many people singing along. ...

Django is a framework I’ve long (in web years) held in some esteem, despite never having used it before the past few weeks. The framework’s creators’ many well reasoned contributions on all manner of debates about the web suggested a thoughtful approach, and the range of high quality sites powered by Django has kept growing, with the recent launch of EveryBlock being a prime example of its capabilities. So I was delighted to receive a copy of The Definitive Guide to django: Web Development Done Right for review. ...

London is Free is a great source not only of ways to save a little cash, but also to find out about a number of events that could easily be overlooked. That’s where I stumbled across the news that Billy Bragg and KT Tunstall would be performing together in HMV on Monday lunchtime. ...