Ben Werdmuller — March 8, 2009
[..] don’t forget that continued funding of any park hinges on public support. Kids who have access to green spaces grow up to appreciate their value [..], and a report funded by the Forestry Commission [..] suggests that kids who do shocking things like climb trees and build dens are more likely to visit parks when they’re older. So by ensuring access to parks, you are also securing public support and funding in future years.
Pathdigger – a new blog about parks and conservation by my sister, Hannah Werdmuller.
Ben Werdmuller — February 18, 2009
[..] the plain truth is this: it’s empirically way too painful still for first-time OAuth developers to get their code working, and despite the fact that OAuth is a standard, the empirical “it-just-works-rate” is way too low.
Joseph Smarr: Implementing OAuth is still too hard… but it doesn’t have to be.
This isn’t just true of OAuth; try writing an OpenID client or server from scratch. The same probably holds for every part of the open stack. Open doesn’t just mean that anybody can use a format or API; it also has to mean that it’s accessible. Coding barriers are just a different sort of closed.
I think what Joseph suggests here is absolutely right, and he’s doing a good thing to start the conversation rolling.
Ben Werdmuller — February 17, 2009
Why do we create and maintain social networks? Most people can immediately think of a few natural reasons — we get something from the interaction, or the person is nearby and is close to us in proximity, age or gender. But researching such theories on a large scale has never before been possible — until digital social networks came along.
Tracking the digital traces of social networks. The study found that technology reinforces existing social networks far more than it creates new ones – something that backs my Internet is People argument.
Ben Werdmuller —
A group of unpaid volunteers used social media to create a global event that has already – before anything like the final total has been counted – raised a six figure amount to provide clean water to some of the world’s poorest people. Your response to that was sneering and deliberately skewed to prove your point.
Can you guess what my column’s going to be about this week? Paul Carr rips Andrew Orlowski a deserved new one. Orlowski is an awful journalist, who seems to be prone to temper tantrums; here’s his version.
Ben Werdmuller — February 16, 2009
TI sees projectors as popular as cell cameras.
And they may well be right. The cellphone really is turning into the ‘portable multimedia computer’ that Nokia always talks about: an Internet connected device that allows you to download and play content, as well as record voice, video, photographs and documents and send them back into the cloud.
I think Apple and Google both see this; Microsoft seems to be a step or two behind, insisting on marrying its mobile operating system to its legacy Windows platform. I’m sure they’ll wake up eventually.
Ben Werdmuller — February 14, 2009
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Nothing particularly new here, but a useful study to be able to point to. 19% of 18-24 year olds have used Twitter or similar, and users of such services use technology to communicate, gather and share information at a high rate, as opposed to passive consumption.
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Calibre is an open source ebook library manager, synchronisation assistant and integrated reader. It does what I think an ebook manager should – basically acts as an iTunes for the written word – but doesn't quite have the visual polish of that kind of commercial app yet. I'm sure that as ebooks become more popular, projects like this will snowball correspondingly.
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ePub is the format (or in fact, collection of formats) supported by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It looks like it'll turn into an open ebook standard (in fact, the IDPF used to be called the Open eBook Forum), and is supported by everything from web-based readers through dedicated devices and software like Stanza on the iPhone. O'Reilly seem to be behind it hard, but where are the commercial publishers at?
Ben Werdmuller — February 13, 2009
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The number of users with the latest patch on Opera and Firefox never exceeded 46% and 80% respectively. (80% seems pretty damn good to me, but does leave an awful lot of people exposed.) Interestingly, Internet Explorer couldn't be used for this study because the browser string doesn't reveal the patch level. You could argue that this was for security reasons, or you could argue that Microsoft don't really want people measuring their version demographics.
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An interesting idea – the answer is "no", of course, but it's great to see different kinds of databases emerge for different use cases. The databases behind the scenes in web apps are typically relational, despite the concept of relational databases not being designed for application back-ends. Could there be a better model for this specific use? Probably.
