Structural words and turns of phrase are used as social signals that carry key information about the relationship between the parties involved in a discussion.
How to leverage the power of personal websites to share private information with your direct personal contacts.
Rethink the expectation that people will use a service for that which it is intended.
Twitter as performance; Dean Allen ruminates on the end of an experiment.
Mutually escalating aggression is more than just plain old ‘internet trolling’.
From a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users, it would seem that men follow men, and nobody tweets. As you might suspect, this is a textbook example of ‘participation inequality’.
How Do Committees Invent? is a 1968 paper by Melvin Conway, where he describes a social phenomenon later transliterated into the Conway's Law adage by Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man Month. The essence…
It's probably a good idea not to try and fight the law of unintended consequences. People have a natural tendency to use and recombine things in their own creative ways if the technology allows it,…
From Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?, which discusses the declining value of blog comments and social news sites: A funny thing about these sites is that they know about this problem.…
Tantek is fighting an uphill battle in his quest to rid the world of email. Email is ingrained, ubiquitous, and everywhere. Every person that regularly logs on to Hotmail or Gmail contributes to this…
The future lies in making networks happen. Last month, respected security technologist Bruce Schneier explained why you would want to share your Wi-Fi bandwidth. It's not nearly as wrong as it sounds. To…
I fear that I'm beginning to sound like a stuck record by now, but I can't help attempting to push back against that particular form of inertia that has infected our discipline. First I saw this,…
It gets tiresome when every time someone publishes an article about this issue, a stream of misogynistic trolls start babbling and complaining. You fucking assholes are just proving the point…
There's a lot that could be said about emerging products like RedTacton: Using a new super-sensitive photonic electric field sensor, RedTacton can achieve duplex communication over the human…
Clay Shirky on moderation strategies: Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding…
As much as Web 2.0 ideas are about openness and freedom, they indicate an increasing emphasis towards power and heirachy. You can see this directly manifesting in the present situation of Yahoo! swallowing…
Thinking more about Wikipedia, and the kind of content disputes that seem to demarcate in terms of specialist/expert vs non-specialist/layman, led me to wonder whether there…
The huge amount of public anticipation and scrutiny of their activities is not going to be particularly helpful.
How David Bowie and the Grateful Dead predicted the arc of internet influence.
On the frequency of Facebook redesigns, and user reactions.
“Every time we went down the ‘wrong’ path, we learned something concrete — if not about software than at least about people”
How an indie musician can make $19,000 in 10 hours using Twitter says it all.
I recently heard of a situation where a project was completed ahead of schedule, on time and under budget. Much of this was that the person running it didn't bother waiting for pointless meetings…
Dog Bites Man Month. Or does it? The criticism is sharp, but I'm not sure how deep it cuts. Anecdotal evidence is no less valid than statistical reasoning if it is widely understood to be advice that…
The meme of PHP's deeper language problems and possible extinction has bubbled to the surface again from various recent discussions, but my views on this are very different to what they used to be.…
What does time to market really mean? Beyond face value, Time to Twitter sets up a grotesque caricature of the real evolution of Twitter as an idea. Going by the original sketches, Twitter was conceived…
Many of us are still conditioned to think of design frameworks in terms of grid systems, Swiss graphic design, and rigid corporate identity systems. The problems with these are similar to the problems…
As languages change, so do typefaces. These changes are not radical; they are subtle evolutions that address culture and technology. Modern typography requires modern typefaces, designed by the…
Rowan has posted a summary of the Trade Me Manifesto, which in turn, was influenced by Google's Corporate Philosophy. Much of it should be plain common sense, except for the fact that so many…
Verizon decides to act against its own economic best interests and block messages from an abortion rights group. This kind of discrimination sets a troubling precedent.
Is the popularity of Twitter best explained using the psychology of addiction and gambling?
Trapped in the Neue Zealand ghetto region, and can't even fly to Auckland at the moment, let alone San Diego... But I'm keenly interested in a couple of presentations in particular: Firstly,…
This piece landed in my inbox twice today, and immediately caught my attention. It's well written, and makes some excellent points that I think are exactly on the mark. Paul Graham has elaborated…
The real reason why nobody is right, even when they are.
The explosion of conversation-driven web applications in today’s world is a sign of technology beginning to fold in upon itself.
Apple has no civic responsibility or moral obligations, but the citizens of the United States do.
“Just as soon as we begin to hone the ability to communicate through images it is stripped away from us.”
Software industry zealots focus far too much effort on debating methodology for methodologies sake.
Man the lifeboats... Rowan explains why you shouldn't underestimate being in the right place at the right time - and he of all people would know from experience. Great Entrepreneurs are PASSIONATE…
Interesting research is emerging that explores new programming models for mesh connected mobile devices. The experimental language called AmbientTalk is a prototype based object oriented language…
Personal branding - building online equity through ones own internet identity - has become a prime movement in the recent trend towards renegotiating the conventional relations between employer…
Recently, I've been talking a lot about freeing the internet in Wellington by spreading excess bandwidth from various 'net connections across a city-wide mesh. But this is a best case scenario compared…
So I've started another website, a kind of ongoing accident, with the idea echoing so intensely during Webstock as I culled together my 8x5 presentation, it just seemed to burst out of my brain and…
"Agile" has balkanized, and the individual cults have - in some cases - become religions that are just as bad as the things they intended to replace. But at the outset, the interesting thing about…
It just wouldn't be fair to ask where are the women in open source and criticize open source usability without providing some kind of summary of how we can do something about it. Humanized…
Write Articles, Not Blog Postings could be one of the most arrogant and ineffably crude pieces of writing that Jacob Nielsen has ever published. He starts with reasonable and valid advice: thorough,…
My Salient feature about the gender imbalance in computer science is out - Putting Women in their Place. Obviously, it's focused on the specific situation of VUW, but it should be relevant in a…
Our formal attempts at understanding language tend to be hierachically structured, but when it comes to actually organizing language, it is well known that meaning is relational and constantly fluctuates.…
I can't believe they're still arguing about this... it's the year 2005, can we really take the idea of investment and competition in copper wires that seriously? As if theres going to be incentive…