New Media Awards 2008

Weblog Archive - May 2008

The upside of the downturn

Chris Adams believes that economic jitters could provide a catalyst for social innovation

When you're writing about social innovation and the web, and you work with the web daily, it's very easy to get overexcited about the fact that there is now a regular stream of people who want to talk to you and work with you on Idealistic Worthy Projects That Will Save The World. And sometimes, you even get paid for them.

Outside the online echo-chamber though, things look less upbeat. ...

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100m Hours of Thought

There's a powerful meme doing the rounds at the moment online, linking gin with sitcoms, TV and the wikipedia, put forward by academic Clay Shirky.

It proposes that TV sit-coms for the last 50 years have served largely the same role that gin did during the industrial revolution, and that interactive, collaborative media (like the wikipedia project) are roughly analogous to the formation of the welfare state infrastructure set ...

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