http://benwerd.com Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:08:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The following post contains my notes for a talk I gave at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University on June 25, 2009. What is a social network? I would like to reclaim some language: Social is an adjective that means ... http://benwerd.com/2009/07/building-the-user-centered-web/ I’ve spent the last week in a series of very interesting mind-sharing meetings. First, the American Association of Colleges & Universities flew me into Washington DC to discuss the future of assessment in higher education with education professionals as well as new techsphere friends like Silona Bonewald and Amber Case. ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/adapting-to-the-real-world/ It’s exciting to see some of the big names in the Silicon Valley web scene shift gears from evangelizing about the power of the social web to explaining how it can be used to the outside world. For example, Robert Scoble, sometime Microsoft videoblogger and latter day net celeb has ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/beyond-the-echo-chamber/ Blogs.com just published a top 10 list of blogs about the social web that I wrote for them. People are already beginning to comment with blogs they’d love to see added to the list – if you know of one that I missed out, please feel free to add it ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/top-10-blogs-about-the-social-web/ This how-to isn’t in the usual remit of this blog, but it solves a problem I’ve had for a while – I can’t use the iPhone’s built-in calendar functionality with Google Calendar - so I thought I’d share. The iPhone 3.0 software update supports CalDAV, an open standard for ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/synchronize-your-iphone-with-google-calendar/ Tony Stubblebine has written a great post about the lessons he’s learned from Twitter, which was created at Odeo while he was working there. This advice stands out for me: Have you ever looked at a piece of social software and thought, or worse, blogged, that ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/assume-theres-value/ ScienceBlog reports that on Saturday, Carl Whithaus will announce the preliminary results from a California Department of Education study into increasing academic achievement using computers in 4th grade classrooms (emphasis mine): During the first year of the two-year study, student achievement increased 27.5 percent, according to ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/learning-on-the-social-web/ Following on from my post yesterday on Opera’s new web-server-in-a-browser product, Chris Messina has written a pretty scathing, in-depth critique that also happens to be very smart and on the money. The Financial Times Techblog has an equally skeptical post but misses the point a bit. In summary: Opera ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/opera-unite-divided/ Opera just released Opera Unite, a version of their web browser that also contains a built-in web server. As Harry McCracken explains over at Technologizer: While it’s impossible to judge at this early date whether it’ll “forever change the fundamental fabric of the Web” as ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/opera-unite-a-great-idea-wrong-center/ When Google Wave was previewed last week, most people focused on its Gmail-like user interface and the slick way it handled collaborative spaces in real time. What was more exciting from a web technology point of view, although much less sexy, was the underlying protocol: Google Wave is built on ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/xmpp-powering-the-real-time-really-live-web/ I believe a truly decentralized social web is required to fulfill the web’s potential as a platform for business collaboration, and I’m very interested in helping to push the technical and conceptual boundaries in that direction. I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about that, but I ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/making-the-most-of-the-web-right-now/ The rise of social networking Monetization vs. collaboration The open web Fluid collaboration The rise of social networking Social forces have been the driving force behind application innovation on the web. ... http://benwerd.com/2009/06/social-networking-beyond-the-silo/ The emerging news out of WordCamp 2009 in San Francisco is that WordPress and its Multi User cousin are to merge into one product (further discussion). This makes a ton of sense, and makes it even easier to create a community of blogs. I’m looking forward to this – I ... http://benwerd.com/2009/05/wordpress-mu-and-ad-hoc-communities/ For almost five years, I’ve had a dream of creating a decentralized social networking system with granular access permissions and a customizable workflow. It would be open source, with an underlying, decentralized open protocol based on XMPP that anyone could build on top of and extend. It would redefine the ... http://benwerd.com/2009/05/google-wave-is-exciting-and-transformative/ The following is an expanded version of the short talk I gave in Oxford yesterday. My original slides follow the transcript. There’s a new kind of web development afoot, which marries old-school object-orientated programming techniques with the distributed power of the web. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are published ... http://benwerd.com/2009/05/the-open-stack-and-truly-open-apis/ OutMap is sponsoring BarCamp Transparency by donating a portion of my time to developing the website (for which I'd already provided the copy), as well as providing Twitter walls and projectors on the day. If you're in the UK and interested in open government, cyber activism or social media ... http://benwerd.com/2009/05/supporting-freedom-of-speech/ I thought I'd share two small bookmarklets I've been using to find references for a page I'm looking at: Web references: page Web references: site To use them, drag each link to your browser toolbar. This will create a couple of buttons that you can click when you ... http://benwerd.com/2009/05/find-web-references-to-the-page-youre-looking-at/ Standards geek: "I think we need to establish a standard for representing poetry on the Internet. I've drawn up this draft which encapsulates stanzas inside an Atom feed. It's pretty simple; the spec fits on a page, so it should be easy to implement." Visual poet: "That's pretty cool, but ... http://benwerd.com/2009/05/notes-from-a-working-group/ Congratulations are in order for the Curverider folks: over on the Elgg blog, Dave's announced a new round of funding for the company. Additionally, Leonard Lin is working with the team on a consultancy basis. Although I left to pursue other projects last month, Elgg is close to my heart. I ... http://benwerd.com/2009/05/elggs-new-round-of-funding/ North Oxford is the wealthiest part of a wealthy city, where BMWs sit in gravel driveways and wine bars nestle amongst delicatessens and stylish cafes; a part of the city I always yearned to belong to as a kid, but never quite did. It was where I went to school, ... http://benwerd.com/2009/05/bens-big-gig/