Paulo Coelho, well known author of The Alchemist, has taken a novel (ha ha) approach to the “Scarcity vs Scale” discussion. He’s created The Pirate Coelho, a jumping off point to a Box.net storage account with PDF’s of some of his books. There’s a description of what and why on TorrentFreak and a video of… [Read more…]
January 25, 2008
The fascination with various “lifestreaming” tools continues apace. Brian Kelly has been getting particularly excited about the regulation (or not, as his fellow Twitterers are shouting) of these tools. “We should have standards” he says. “No! Standards are boring”, everyone replies… In this particular area I have to say I pretty much fall on the… [Read more…]
January 14, 2008
I’ve been finishing off the openness paper this week (taking me a long time to get my ideas together at the mo..) and doing some thinking around how you manage to still make money in this brave new world of free, open, readily available everything. Actually, let’s not call it making money but creating value,… [Read more…]
January 8, 2008
I’m just helping Brian Kelly author a paper on Openness in Museums for the Museums and the Web conference later in the year. It just stuck me that the movement of content around the web has followed / is following a pattern a little bit like this: Phase I: content held as HTML within sites.… [Read more…]
January 3, 2008
If you’re mired in confusion over the entire open standards debate – and frankly, it’s easy to get buried under the reams of material – then go check out dataportability.org. It’s refreshingly simple, with a list of the current range of projects and standards under the “portable data” umbrella, links to the relevant Wikipedia entry… [Read more…]
December 24, 2007
An extraordinary statistic just published in a Pew Internet report on content generation by teens seems to imply that the 1% rule is a little out of kilter with the reality of what’s going on among the yoof. The report claims that 59% of American teenagers engage in at least one form of online content… [Read more…]
December 6, 2007
I love it when I find something which re-uses a technology which has been around a while in a totally new and innovative way… Google maps, right – mashups – all that? Yeah, I know some of us (me too) are still pretty excited about the whole thing…but how about plotting incoming opinion in real… [Read more…]
December 5, 2007
I spend a lot of my time talking and living tech. Actually, I spend *most* of my time talking and living tech…and yet I’m not in any way a hardcore techy: a fact that often amuses or bemuses those people around me. I don’t really understand the detail behind TCP/IP, I only know the basic… [Read more…]
December 2, 2007
There’s a lovely article over on the New York Times about the parallels between Facebook and tribal culture, examining what makes Facebook so intriguing (read, “sticky”) to its users. The main point made is that our friend-making in the “real” world is based around “orality” and not writing: furthermore, we examine ourselves through a lens… [Read more…]
November 25, 2007
The long and frankly fairly boring (to those other than people like me, and probably you if you’re reading this..) debate continues about Facebook data – who owns it, who shares it, how it can be attributed, how open it is. Techcrunch as always pile into the debate with a simple point and a simple… [Read more…]
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January 29, 2008
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