Ben Werdmuller

Category: Politics

  • Gender differences on the new frontier

    It’s a commonly accepted fact that computing is a male-dominated industry, but I was shocked by the scale of the inequality. Okay, this is kind of unscientific, but take a look at these statistics: Female population of the world: 49.8% Female population of Facebook: 55% Female population of social networks as a whole: 54.7% Percentage […]

  • The mechanics of "open"

    Since we started Elgg, I’ve always kept a very open philosophy about how the software should work. From the human perspective, we wanted it to be as inclusive as possible, with an easy-to-use interface and innards that allowed you to do very technical things (like, in Elgg 0.x, republishing aggregated RSS) with very little knowhow. […]

  • Advocacy and getting someone to listen to your iPod

    This lecture by Obama transition team member Greg Simon is worth a watch (click the Flash icon in the top right). While ostensibly about advocacy strategies for lobbyists, the fundamentals of what he talks about are applicable to marketing of ideas much more generally – commercial marketing, creative writing, and so on. The first 40 […]

  • Barack Obama and the social web

    Barack Obama is the next President of the United States, and received the largest share of the vote by any Democratic candidate in 44 years. That’s an impressive statistic, and one that Wired put down in part to his Internet strategy: […] Obama’s rise to the presidency will be studied for years to come as […]