Subject
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…
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 situation in New Orleans painfully illustrates a totality of social disintegration, a powder keg of anger and anarchy primed by the greatest oppressive capitalist state this world has ever seen.…
Frederic Jameson, author of Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism gave a lecture at Vic yesterday about Representations of Globalisation. Jameson's project can perhaps be summed…
Is the popularity of Twitter best explained using the psychology of addiction and gambling?
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…
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…
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…
In the last 30 years neuroscience has given us great insight into the workings of the human brain and as more information emerges, it becomes clear just how out of step with reality conventional attitudes…
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,…
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…
It's hard to step away from our assumptions and actually consider the experiences that non-technical people have using the web.
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…
I have to ask this - what the fuck does social media actually mean? Given that most of the parrots harping this are probably completely unaware of basic tenets of sociology, it still doesn't seem…
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’.
The world of Alice and Kev is an experiment by Robin Burkinshaw, playing a homeless family in The Sims 3.
The youth suicide rate in New Zealand appears to be more than 5 times greater than that of Germany and twice that of the United States.
Who would have thought that knitters could be so obnoxious, rude, and catty?
“Just as soon as we begin to hone the ability to communicate through images it is stripped away from us.”
“If all you can say is ‘fresh from the wholesale market’ then you have to be cheap and open all hours”
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Twitter as performance; Dean Allen ruminates on the end of an experiment.
I have decided that John Key has wholly entered into hyper-reality, becoming little more than a holographic-psychic protective shell created by the minds of stress affective New Zealand taxpayers.
Celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy causes an existential crisis by quoting a hoax author.
Rethink the expectation that people will use a service for that which it is intended.
New research finds that the historical background of Google’s PageRank algorithm is richer than previously suspected.
The explosion of conversation-driven web applications in today’s world is a sign of technology beginning to fold in upon itself.