The brute force of money

David Weinberger on the purchase of Mendeley by Elsevier: I seriously have no interest in judging the Mendeley folks. I still like them, and who am I to judge? If someone offered me $45M (the minimum estimate that I’ve seen) for a…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: On IBM, OpenStack and Chef: an interview Intelligent Impact: Evaluating an open data capacity building with voluntary sector organisations WordPress.tv: Understanding the WordPress Dashboard Tony Hall’s biggest test as BBC director…

Outliners are cool!

Do you use an outliner? Have you even heard of them? An outline is a load of text, organised into a hierarchy. It looks like a bulleted list, with content at various levels, but proper ones do a bit more…

Anil Dash – The web we lost

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the response to this conversation about the web we lost because one of my central points is that the arrogance and insularity of the old-guard, conventional wisdom creators of social media, including myself, was one…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: How can local authorities achieve smart cities? Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Androids Designed Around People stop talking about jobs How to delete your digital life How to…

Permission taken

Well worth listening or watching this talk from Dan Gillmor: Once, personal technology and the Internet meant that we didn’t need permission to compute, communicate and innovate. Now, governments and tech companies are systematically restricting our liberties, and creating an…

Our regressive web

Ryan Holiday writes in Our Regressive Web: We’re regressing because we’re so focused on the new that we forgot the importance of the old. The tech press is too busy chattering about other “innovations” like retargeting, paywalls, native advertising. Except those changes are at…

The joy of plain text

These days, I write pretty much everything in plain text. This is driven by two main things: Annoyance Paranoia How I write pretty much anything of any length (blog posts, reports, proposals, longer emails) is to write them in a…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: A new intranet for DCLG (with more big savings) Mobile = inclusive, but not inclusion TEACAKE: How to run your own brewcamp In which I put my faith in humans The…

Public service messages with a smile

I’ve been a bit serious lately on the blog. Sorry. Here’s a bit of whimsy to lighten the mood. Worcestershire County Council have produced this video to inform the public about what they are doing about pot holes. As you’ll…

The dream is fading fast

John Naughton: Because we’ve all bought into the techno-utopianism of the early Internet, we tend to assume that it’s always going to be open to everyone. But as more and more of the world goes online, it’s clear that we’re…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: Crime and Justice: an open data challenge Simple steps towards local prosperity Editorially is the collaborative writing tool we’ve been waiting for Google’s Keep: is it for keeps? Probably not The…

Let’s do the LocalGovCamp again

It’s probably about time we sorted LocalGovCamp out again! For various reasons it’s going to be running after the summer rather than before, as has previously been the case. So, the two potential dates are 21st or 28th September. Let me…

Fragments

Donald Barthelme, in See the Moon?, in 1968: Fragments are the only forms I trust. Italo Calvino, in If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller, in 1979: …the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments…

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: MOOC provider EdX goes open source – with an interesting choice of licence Making better choices for the technology we use Remember Ning? Once-buzzy social network has relaunched again as a…