There are two things I understand about cloud computing. The first is that it works as an insurance policy. My house might burn down, my computers all get stolen, my hard disks fail simultaneously, and still I will not have lost any of the data I care most about because quietly every night Jungle Disk [...]
If the past is a foreign country, how much more so the future. There have been endless articles – to say nothing of entire books – about the digital generation, but few of them in my experience really bring the differences to life. I was struck by a piece danah boyd has just written which [...]
I have been using Feed Demon as my primary feed reader at home for quite a while now. It’s flexible, doesn’t force an approach to organising and reading feeds, but is immensely powerful in it ability to organise them in whatever way works for you. And as it has been essentially hand knitted by Nick [...]
Great to have been one of the “govvy people” allowed in to see the show – it was deeply thought provoking at a number of different levels. I can’t afford to be as cheerfully dismissive of the government (which anyway simply does not exist as a singular noun) as many of the creative minds at the event, those of us who are in government certainly do need to respond to the challenge.
Ed Felten spells out the difference between outreach and transparency: Outreach means government telling us what it wants us to hear; transparency means giving us the information that we, the citizens, want to get. An ideal government provides both outreach and transparency. Outreach lets officials share their knowledge about what is happening, and it lets [...]
The publication of the advert for the new Director of Digital Engagement has prompted an outburst of commentary, with two of the most interesting contributions both coming from Steph Gray, who is systematically crowdsourcing the real requirements of the job. And of course that process works both ways: it makes visible what the crowd thinks [...]
And as one commenter observed: Shouldn’t the line extend right through the x-axis? Enough meetings and you can actually get negative work done.
And still more on paying attention – or in this case, tools to support not paying attention. There seems to be a flurry of ways of shielding people from some of the more distracting effects of emails. So here is news of a programme called Freedom which shuts down all network connections from a Mac [...]
In the spirit of paying attention to what I am paying attention to, I can’t help noticing that emails are still feeling oppressive. Dave Pollard has the answer: To all employees: Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have [...]
Twenty years ago, a business case was required for the purchase of a single PC. Ten years ago, internet access was through a modem attached to a computer in a small locked room at the end of the corridor, with a book kept beside it to record sites visited. The past gets strange and distant [...]