using my head

Today I feel like getting out some placards, flying across the pond and picketing the streets of Washington, D.C. The US government could potentially lift the ban which currently prevents greedy ISPs from charging people for the amount of bandwidth they use, instead of a flat fee. Here’s my somewhat disgruntled post about it from the NESTA blog, which highlights the serious implications this could have on the way we live & work online:

Not only is this a backward step for consumers (remember dial-up?), this clearly has societal implications, allowing only the moneyed classes to readily access high-bandwidth content such as video, or to stay online for long periods in Second Life or MMORPGs. But there’s so much more at stake than missing out on YouTube or online games. The entire economy of the internet would change. Would you do your banking, grocery shopping or check-in for flights online if you had to pay extra to do so?

The rise of cheap broadband also opened the door to exponential growth in online social networks and collaborative tools such as Basecamp and Central Desktop, not to mention online meeting tools and VOIP. There are millions of people online every day, collaborating on projects and ideas, sharing knowledge in ways that weren’t possible before, and just plain getting things done… Taxation such as that being debated could kill these kinds of online collaboration.

Read the full post & comment here on the NESTA blog >>

One of my colleagues at NESTA informed me that the total amount of UK venture capital dedicated to tech startups is just 1.6% of the total amount of money invested by UK VC every year. That’s shockingly low.

My blog post about it over on the NESTA blogs generated quite a flurry of response… have a look here for the full story.

I can’t believe it, but I am going to link to Microsoft…

A post I wrote on the NESTA blogs about the winner of Microsoft’s Design IT competition, which is a screensaver created by user-generated content designed to help Alzheimer’s sufferers store their personal memories:

The screensaver is a simple application with the “why didn’t I think of that” factor: a carer and person with dementia can upload text, video and photos to the screensaver to help them remember important people, moments and facts about their lives. It’s great when an existing technology like this can be adopted and put to good use…

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

A little comment I wrote on the NESTA blogs about the constant stream of mixed and confusing messages we are bombarded with these days:

Two stories which resonated with me this morning…

1) A colleague forwarded this nugget from popb*tch:
An avatar in Second Life has a larger carbon footprint than the average Brazilian

2) Slashdot commented on the world’s biggest digital dump, where Chinese locals harvest the gold, copper and other valuable parts within discarded PCs from the West.

How should I feel about these things? It’s a confusing state, as both coins have 2 sides…

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >> 

We just launched our new structured wiki Intranet at NESTA, and I can’t wait to see how this new approach works for the staff in a small/med public sector organisation such as ours. Here’s a post I wrote on the NESTA blogs about it:

I think the structured wiki approach is a great way of introducing organisations to the concepts of the social web - in theory, providing the best of both worlds: the empowerment and collaborative elements of wikis, with the order and familiarity of traditional content-managed systems. In my mind, this caters for both types of users: the freeform searchers & the more traditional navigators. It reduces the fear of chaos, while still providing a great deal of the flexibility and tools common in other ’social web’ environments…

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

My personal favourite moments from NMK’s Goodness 2.0 event, written for the NESTA blogs. Goodness 2.0 was all about how charities, non-profits and NGOs can make use of 2.0 tools and techniques. My main take-away from the event was about the power of the social web to share with the world some truly amazing stories, like the one about a violinist who wanted to give directly to the people who needed it most, rather than giving indirectly through a charity (links below). It moved me to tears.

… there was one big takeaway for me: Steven Buckley’s intro with the water buffalo story. Check the NMK blog for details, or watch the video yourself…

I love stories like the water buffalo story. It’s things like this and the Free Hugs movie that make all this social web stuff worthwhile.

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

A post for NESTA which comments on the recent political adoption of things like YouTube as a campaigning tool.

Today French politics joined the USA in adopting ’social web’ media as a platform for running political campaigns & debates - only the French are using Second Life instead of YouTube. And here on these shores, David Miliband has once again posted video onto YouTube about climate change, his third such video.

Is all of this a sign of the times, a clear indicator of the burgeoning role the social web will play in our lives?

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

A post I wrote following up on the Wobble 2.0 event, hosted over at the NESTA blogs. It’s about the fact that I don’t think Web 2.0 is necessarily about solving the big problems of the world, but instead solving the little problems that make you think “There must be a better/easier way of doing this”.

Andrew [Orlowski from The Register] stated that the big returns on investment would come from ’solving the big problems of the world’, and that Web 2.0 was never going to do that. I take his point, but who ever said that Web 2.0 was meant to be about solving major problems? In my mind, most of the ‘web as platform’ side of Web 2.0 is about solving small problems…

… So much of what we think of as innovation is about simply tackling an old problem in a new way; the Dyson, long touted as a leading example of innovation, is a pretty straightforward exemplification of ‘building a better mousetrap’. That’s what I think Web 2.0 does.

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

Here we go…

I’ve started this blog as a space to house all my thoughts about the online world. I have worked within the medium since 1994, when I made my very first website to house my artwork and photography. It was hot pink and pretty horrid…

Since then, I have been working with websites in a number of ways: deisgning, building, marketing, and analysing them. I’ve also worked extensively with e-mail marketing, community building, e-commerce and online application implementation. So after all this time, I’ve decided to unleash my brain onto the web. I hope you find something worthwhile here.