Category Archives: Internet

Improving Freecycle

I’ve been a member of our local Freecycle mailing list for a few years, successfully using it to offload and acquire various items, from a double futon bed to an mp3 player. In 2006, Giles Turnbull blogged about Freecycle’s shortcomings, … Continue reading

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dConstruct 2008: part five

(This is turning into a marathon: parts one, two, three and four precede this one. I can’t guarantee your sanity should you choose to read that lot.) Joshua Porter: Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design “Rationality be damned…” We (humans) … Continue reading

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dConstruct 2008: part four

(Parts one, two and three precede this…) After the workshop ended, a few of us decamped to Komedia Bar for an ale; at 7pm it was time for the emerging tradition that is the Pre-Pre-Party Burgers, next door at Gourmet … Continue reading

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dConstruct 2008: part three

(See part one for some fascinating travel and eating anecdotes, and part two for the first half of Joshua Porter’s workshop) Designing for sign-up Contrary to what I (and presumably others) thought, this isn’t about the sign-up form! It’s more … Continue reading

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dConstruct 2008: part two

(If you’re short on things to do, part one contains fascinating details of my journey and dinner) Thursday morning brought a slight respite from the high winds and torrential rain of the previous night. Breakfast in the hotel was really, … Continue reading

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dConstruct 2008: part one

Last week I made the annual pilgrimage to Brighton for dConstruct – one of the UK’s leading grass-roots Web conferences. Now in its fourth year, the theme of the conference this time was “Designing the social Web”, a topic increasingly … Continue reading

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The Web Versioning genie needs to be re-bottled

Today I got embroiled in a debate with Pete and Brian on Twitter about the term Web 2.0 and its increasing meaninglessness. This was only a few days after jumping on an old school friend’s use of the term, citing … Continue reading

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Twitter Endgame?

As I write this, I’m trying (and failing) to load twitter.com/home. Oh – it just timed out. According to Is Twitter Down? it’s not down, but I can’t get to it. There have been no updates on my timeline for … Continue reading

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UK ISPs in new depths of customer hatred

BT, Virgin and Talktalk broker deal with Phorm.com, who intercept internet traffic, set anonymous cookies and deliver targeted ads… There are lots of comments on this Guardian article, including this one from martinusher: I had a quick look at this … Continue reading

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If you build it (right), they will come (on any old platform, even a phone)

I’m rather enamoured of OpenID, the really neat, decentralised way to log in to any OpenID-supporting web site with one username/password. Simultaneously, I’ve had a Vox account since I was invited to try the beta pre-launch. It was moderately interesting … Continue reading

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