The UK Government today backed the Open Source movement launching its Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use Government Action Plan. Calling the Open Source movement “one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades” it celebrates the achievements of the groups of ndividuals
In his article “Jurassic Web” Farhad Manjoo in the online magazine Slade talks about how unrecognizable the Web in 1996 was compared with the Web today. He concludes that despite early trends which predate blogging and user-generated content, it was all fluff and nonsense. I beg to disagree. In 1996
In an article in the most recent issue of The Biologist, reported by the BBC among others, Dr Aric Sigman writes about the biological implicatons of social networking. He looks at certain aspects of online interaction, mostly physical and concludes that there is substantial evidence to suggest that there are
One thing about the social web is that news, bad press and contrary opinions can fly round the world and gain momentum extremely fast, as many companies have found to their cost. It’s especially relevant if you’re actually a social media company. Facebook recently changed their terms of service and
I’m intrigued that it took a World Economic Forum (the one held recently at Davos) for some companies to realise that there’s more to working the web – gaining a business advantage using the internet – than simply having an expensive website. But when it comes to coping with Twitter,
Show me someone who doesn’t want to save time and work more effectively, and I’ll show you someone who’s about to retire! Most of us can do with tools and techniques to help us get more done by working smarter. Here are my top 5 suggestions: Inbox rules: most people
Rhonas Sharpe has made a couple of posts about ELESIG (one of the academic networks I manage the online space for) on her blog. She asked members what benefit they found from the experience of being a member of the community, and got some great answers: From Esyin Chew’s “I
How do we get more students from lower income families to go to University? Aimhigher and similar projects have not had the impact that was hoped. In fact, widening participation may be purely about financial aspects of studying. This was brought home to me the other day when someone pointed