Weblog Archive - April 2008

Corbet Place in the Truman Brewery, East London is heaving with geeks and city workers, drawn by the lure of an open bar. At one end of the space people are swapping stories over a beer, while at the other handful of earnest looking men are hovering around a raised stage, with some kind of presentation projected onto the wall behind. One picks up a mike, and starts trying to ... read more

Many of the strategies, techniques and tools that have been developed in the last ten years of mainstream web use are struggling to make the transition to the Web 2.0 world.

Media sites have had to turn from being one-way publishers of information into conversational spaces while more and more of us are using social network sites to manage aspects of our online and offline lives. We seize on new ... read more

This month, MySociety released the latest metrics from writetothem.com, a civic engagement tool designed to make it easier for constituents to raise issues with their MP. As ever, the stats make for fascinating reading, if not least because they give a glimpse of what accountability in a networked democracy might look like.

There are league tables, metrics on how good MPs are at responding to issues raised, and ... read more

Intense followers of the NMA awards may remember a nomination made last year for OpenStreetMap (OSM). The project, set up four years ago, involves creating a wiki-map of the world that can be modified by anyone who creates an account. Unlike other online and offline map providers, the resulting map is free to copy and use how you like, with no restrictions or fee except ensuring that you credit ... read more

When the words “Virginia Tech” come to mind, the first thing most people think of is tragedy and a year on from the 16 April shootings it is especially remembered.

In the shock immediately following the shootings, people were baffled as to how Cho Seung-Hui could have carried out his bloody spree over so many hours.

People wanted someone to blame and most came to the same conclusion: the ... read more

Looking through the nominations for the New Media Awards 2008 that have come in so far I was pleased to see the Big Green Switch there. Similar to Do The Green Thing, it’s a site that can help us all to overcome the apathy that so easily undermines our best efforts to recycle and reduce our resource consumption. These sites, and others in a similar vein, work in the ... read more

On the first Friday of this month, I joined a load of other well meaning programmers, designers and social entrepreneurs at Social Innovation Camp, to see if we could apply novel uses of technology to tackle social problems.

By lunchtime the same weekend, we had split into seven teams, and each team had developed an idea into a working prototype of an online service to pitch to a funding ... read more

In some respects it’s a shame that the New Media Awards are still going strong. When I was the facilitator of the judging panel for the first awards in 1998 I think we believed that the fuss over ‘new media’ would have vanished by now as they would have simply been absorbed into daily life.

The absorption has happened, at least to some degree, and many of us live in ... read more

Twitter is a fast growing social messaging service initially used for sharing informal, short messages with friends.

This time last year, Twitter was surfing a veritable tsunami of hype at SXSW Interactive, and now, a year later, people piping the minutiae of their life onto their Facebook profiles and weblogs is a growing commonplace.

Much of Twitter's success seems to lie in its willful simplicity, and the ease ... read more

When we held the inaugural New Media Awards in 1998 the internet was a strange concept which most people could barely grasp.

Now, 10 years on, virtually all of us have come to rely on new media for everything from news to music, social networking to buying holidays and banking.

The word revolution is something of an understatement when you think of the scale of this transformation and few could ... read more