Introducing Freebase: “the easiest way to add free, community-curated, Creative Commons licensed content to your web applications.” Watch the video. Imagine the possibilities.
Archive | July, 2009
Iranian social media police
On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said “no”, the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends.
Terrain Vague, Citizen Engagement & the Open City: The Roerich Garden Project
My first Artefatica project is coming along. Sooooo slowly. A draft of the website for our first book — Terrain Vague, Citizen Engagement & the Open City: The Roerich Garden Project — is up! Check it out, send some feedback, add your story or your vision.
Žižek. Trashy guy.
In April I went to see Astra Taylor’s Examined Life, a film that “pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets.” Right. No no really it was good. They just set themselves up for me to be bitchy by describing it that way.
Extending empathy forward
I got this expression from the first One Giant Leap film. From the section on time and the 10,000-year clock. I use it in my knowledge sharing work — when trying to explain why it’s important to document, tag, give context. The idea is to make it easier to build on each other’s work.
The Internet of Things: A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID
The adoption of he technologies of the City Control is not inevitable, nor something that we must kindly accept nor sleepwalk into. Each of us can help contribute to building technologies of trust and empower ourselves in the age of mass surveillance and ambient technologies.
Michael Thompson: Algae fighting over the surface of a ping-pong ball
We’ve been stuck swinging back and forth between the hierarchical and individualistic, the old public versus private debate. This model is inadequate and misleading. Instead we should imagine four different colours of algae competing over the surface of a ping-pong ball. When one gets bigger the others shrink. The edges are constantly changing.