I know I largely talk to myself here, but I do think that from time to time I may have something of more general interest to say. I invite comment and enable trackbacks in case anyone should cite something I write. There have been a couple of conversations. But daily I am hit with between … Continue reading Spam generators, catfish and a shared stop-list

Financial services now constitute a kind of tax on the real economy as well as distorting its priorities; short-termism and the search for impossibly high returns are rife. The culture, of which systematic insider trading is part, is having a growing impact on business ethics. via guardian.co.uk Will Hutton and the Equality Trust are two … Continue reading Call it wealth extraction, excessive economic rent, whatever – make no mistake, we pay the bonuses

Traditional media campaigns have a beginning and end. Social technology fuels conversation. One, five, ten or ten thousand people could all be stirring up and participating in conversations using social media tools. The conversation has a time dimension that just runs on and on. ... this is why social tools adopt a river-of-news style. With … Continue reading Enterprise (and institutions?) lag in Social Web Savviness: implications for #ssbr

ShopSavvy uses a phone's camera to scan an item's bar code and look up prices for it online and at nearby stores. via washingtonpost.com Now that is the kind of mobile, location aware service that might be useful; but in the end I guess the whole world will be shopping for everything at Confused.com: the … Continue reading Android, iPhone, Windoze Mobile all boil down to price comparison shopping?

Just because computing is done in the cloud, that doesn't mean it has to be insecure and subject to outages. Or so says the U.S. Defense Department who just put into operation their cloud computing services for military personnel. via readwriteweb.com Admittedly the missions are different, but higher education really should be looking harder at … Continue reading US military cloud computing platform (via RWW)

More digital literacies at Brookes One of the key messages arising from national research is that although technology is pervasive in many learners' lives, learners entering higher eduation lack basic information literacies skills and have little idea of how they can use technology to support their study (see for example JISC Google Generation, Great Expectations … Continue reading Digital literacies at Brookes #pcthe

Collaborative annotation of the physical world? via readwriteweb.com GPS means the iPhone knows where it is. An internal compass means it knows where it is pointing. Any GIS tagged data in Wikipedia in the iPhone's line of sight can be overlaid on the camera image. The Wikitude app then has a service that lets users … Continue reading Collaborative annotation of the physical world (via ReadWriteWeb)

Having emerged from the worst period of its history, the genocide of 1994, Rwanda has placed its faith in IT with some big promises - mobile phone use should double from just 20% to up to 40% by next year. The government is giving away 35,000 handsets to help that happen. It wants a PC … Continue reading Rwanda forges ahead with IT (via the BBC) water, agriculture, IT & energy in parallel

It [the Internet] is as much a new opium for the people as a catalyst for democratic awakening.via matthewtaylorsblog.com This is as true in the "free" west as in the various "authoritarian regimes" identified. It is just that it is not the government regimes or apparatus of the states in the west that are producing … Continue reading The internet society – time to get real : Matthew Taylor via @josiefraser

Social Media Governance Empowerment with Accountability via socialmediagovernance.com Now that is a useful link: a page of links to the social media policies of 82 organisations such as the American Red Cross, BBC, Cisco, EFF, Dow Jones as well as a host of universities and Web2.0 companies. Policy wonks, enjoy! Posted via web from George's … Continue reading Online Database of Social Media Policies via @dtssmithers