Ideapad S205

For the last couple of months I’ve been playing around with a Lenovo Ideapad S205. It’s a slightly bigger than a netbook machine that runs Windows 7. I’ve been a pretty dedicated Mac user for the last five years or…

What happened to November?

April may well be the cruellest month, but for me November was the busiest – and the illest (as in, I’ve been poorly. I’m not starting to talk “street”, you’ll be pleased to know*) as well. Kind of Digital seems…

Houses and clouds

The Government Digital Service blog is essential reading. Two recent posts well worth a look: What is that beautiful house? The phrase “not a CMS” has become a bit of a joke around the GovUK office (to the point where…

Trello, neat organising tool

Apologies for the light blogging this week, I’ve been doing a lot of travelling about. Still, I came across Trello yesterday, a cool and lightweight planning tool. It allows you to create lists of actions, which can be filled in…

Clouds v cartels

Interesting article by the erstwhile US government CIO Vivek Kundra, in the New York Times: AS the global economy struggles through a slow and painful recovery, governments around the world are wasting billions of dollars on unnecessary information technology. This…

“Kids today need a licence to tinker”

Nice article by John Naughton on the state of IT education in schools: What is happening is that the national curriculum’s worthy aspirations to educate pupils about ICT are transmuted at the chalkface into teaching kids to use Microsoft software.…

What is Google Docs?

Here’s another quick one page guide, this about about Google Docs. If you can’t see the embedded version below, you can head to the Kind of Digital site and download a PDF. What is Google Docs? View more documents from…

What is Flickr?

Next up in the series of introductory guides to social technology is this one about Flickr. Embedded below, or as usual, there’s a PDF to download from this page if you need it. What is Flickr? View more documents from…

Google tries social again

Google announced Google+ yesterday, their latest attempt at getting success in the social networking arena. Techcrunch have a good write up of the details, but for the best coverage, it’s hard to top Steven Levy’s piece in Wired (indeed, Levy’s…