Danny Williamson
Danny Williamson is a research analyst at New Paradigm. Danny’s previous work experience includes a two year term as Assistant Director of the University of Waterloo’s Engineering Science Quest youth science and engineering camp. Danny holds degrees in History from Mount Allison University and Education from the University of Alberta. Danny is currently pursuing his MBA at Wilfrid Laurier University.
 |
|
May 1st, 2008, 12:05pm
|
Welcome to BlogRize. Currently in beta testing, the site is a new experiment in crowd sourcing - one that aims to make social news a more personal experience. According to founder Jesse Spaulding, the difference between BlogRize and other similar sites is that the site contains: “today’s news, filtered by communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs.”
Readwriteweb, one of the social communities currently beta testing on Blogrize, adds,
The way BlogRize works is by allowing members to join the community of their favorite blog or blogs. Within that community, the popular news stories are the ones recommended by the other readers of that blog. These stories will be a mix of not only that particular blog’s articles, but any articles the community thinks are interesting.
The idea is that, unlike websites like Digg which aggregate the opinion of the entire web, you can get a much more accurate picture of sites that interest me from a community of users who share my interests and who are, in essence, more like me. According the 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer, “people like me” - those who have similar interests and share a similar political outlook - have supplanted corporate CEO’s, government officials and doctors as the most trusted source of information. Read More »
|
|
April 29th, 2008, 04:00pm
|
Another in our ongoing series highlighting the folks who are doing interesting things with or thinking interesting things about Wikinomics out there in the blogosphere.
A very thorough wiki-based definition of the Web 2.0.
A piece by Thomas Hoffman, on whether or not corporate inertia prevents mass collaboration.
Nicola Morelli’s thoughts on design policy - contains some interesting thoughts on the impact of peer production in this space.
An interview with Don and some thoughts on Government 2.0
|
|
April 23rd, 2008, 10:09am
|
Arrested. One word posted to a Twitter account from a cell phone was enough to set of a flurry of international activity. According to the Washington Post, James Karl Buck, a journalism student from UC Berkeley, was arrested in Egypt last week for photographing a labour riot.
That one small message was enough to alert Buck’s friends in the U.S. to his plight and start the process of getting him released. Very quickly, both Berkeley and the U.S. Department got involved which resulted in the release of Buck from the hospitality of Egyptian penal system.
Twitter, which allows users to “communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” is a series of short messages (less than 140 characters) that act as a very basic status update or miniature blog.
Read More »
|
|
April 22nd, 2008, 10:02am
|
Continuing with our ongoing meander through blogosphere, here a few more folks applying wikinomics in interesting ways. Thanks to our new website, you can find these linked on the right hand side of the page under the title, “Wikinomics in the blogosphere” which will be refreshed often.
Here’s a link to Don’s keynote address to the Horizon Foundation and some discussion they had following it.
An interesting post on the future of corporations and interactivity. I particularly the interactivity matrix.
Some thoughts on motivation through peer production.
Parts 1 and 2 of a post on how wikinomics can impact the future of public media.
Selling the value of blogs and wikis to organizations.
|
|
April 18th, 2008, 11:32am
|
Here’s a neat example of crowd sourcing in action. “Ten Thousand Cents”, is a digital artwork project by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima. The project consisted of drawing a digital picture of a $100 bill. The catch here is that it divided the bill into 10,000 pieces and sourced each piece individually. The project payed 1000’s individuals, each working separately from one another, one cent per section paid through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk - making the total cost of the design work $100.
According to Koblin and Kawashima, “The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.”
You can purchase prints of the project directly from the website for, of course, $100. The proceeds of each print will be donated to the One Laptop per Child project which, as they point out on the project’s website, was formerly known as the $100 laptop.
Read More »
|
|
April 14th, 2008, 10:44am
|
I’m not a second life guy, per se, but I can see the appeal. This however, struck me as down right strange. Marc Owens, a design student from London developed a system whereby users can don a costume called the “Avatar Machine” which comes complete with virtual reality goggles and a head-mounted camera that allows them to view themselves as the move around. In essence, they are becoming a third-person character in their own life. According to Owens, “The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”
It’s certainly an interesting experiment. There’s a lot that’s been written on the subject of how the anonymity of the internet has made it easier for people throw caution, good sense and manners to the wind. One needs only to scroll through the comments on any popular website to see the cutting remarks that often follow a post.
Read More »
|
|
April 4th, 2008, 01:35pm
|
A few months ago, I wrote a post on Yahoo adopting OpenID. In it, I wondered,
Does the emergence and growth of these integrated online services make it less likely that I’ll spend time wandering the halls of internet miscellany stopping on anything that catches my eye? My second question is how Yahoo!, Google or anyone else for that matter, know what I want from the internet if I don’t know myself? Is my integrated online service portal only as smart as I am?
Well, this week, in further online consolidation news, Xoopit, a San Francisco-based company, has announced this week that they’ve developed software that turns your Gmail into a social environment. Read More »
|
|
March 28th, 2008, 03:10pm
|
This week, Youtube announced that it’s launching Youtube Insight which will allow Youtube users to track more detailed statistics about their videos. Its goal is to enhance the way in which users create, post and manage their video. By using Insight, Youtube argues that,
[Y]ou can increase your videos’ view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly. With this information, you can concentrate on creating compelling new content that appeals to your target audiences, and post these videos on days you know these viewers are on the site. (Maybe even post your next video in Spanish?) Read More »
|
|
March 20th, 2008, 01:27pm
|
In January, Anthony wrote a post on the potential for climate change to become the “killer application for mass collaboration.” In it, he speculated that,
An optimist could argue that we’re in the early days of something unprecedented—thanks to the web 2.0 the entire world is beginning to collaborate around a single idea for the first time ever: changing the weather. Climate change is quickly becoming a nonpartisan issue and all citizens obviously have a stake in the outcome. So for the first time we have one global, multi-media, affordable, many-to-many communications system, and one issue on which there is growing consensus. Around the world there are hundreds, probably thousands of collaborations occurring where everyone from scientists to school children are mobilizing to do something about carbon emissions. Read More »
|
|
March 14th, 2008, 03:32pm
|
There are a lot of things I love about the internet. I love the way I can find information on anything that pops in to my head at any second of any day. I love the way the internet makes fascinating products from strange fellows. Most of all, I love the way the internet gives voice to anyone. All that aside, I’m having a hard time seeing the internet in a rosy light this week. It seems like everywhere I look this week, someone is attempting to limit privacy or curtail freedom of speech online.
Read More »
|
|
March 5th, 2008, 03:39pm
|
MC Hammer has a social network. The network, Dancejam, aspires to be a social community built around dance enthusiasts. To be honest, I’ll never use this site. I can’t dance and I only listen to the occasional rap ditty (I used ditty to describe a rap song; the defense rests). But let’s be serious here folks, for most of you reading this, the words “MC” and “Hammer” together were enough to pique your interest - they certainly prompted a flurry of google searches for me.
At first, it’s easy to dismiss the idea of a former celebrity (preacher, IRS person of interest, reality television star,…) jumping on the bandwagon of what’s “cool” and “next” to claw their way back into our collective consciousness after seeing net-based music efforts achieve massive success. But in an interview with Wired Magazine, it seems that Hammer is serious about creating a space for a community around one of his passions. In a Q and A with The Washington Post, he describes the difference between creating a social network and not simply using Youtube,
Read More »
|
|
February 29th, 2008, 04:23pm
|
Breaking news from the Digital Music Forum East 2008 Conference. In Ars Technica’s coverage of the conference, they posted the highlights of Ted Cohen’s opening speech which contained the groundbreaking news: Music 1.0 is dead. To be fair, the former Senior Vice President of Digital Development and Distribution for EMI seems to have a pretty good idea about what’s going on.
What surprises me, is that it needs to be said at all. Is there anyone anywhere who doesn’t understand what kind of trouble the old music industry model is experiencing. There’s more print and and bandwith devoted to the topic of its slow death every day than Gutenberg could have imagined in his wildest dreams and yes, I can see the irony in writing that in a piece on the same topic.
Here’s just one example of the what I’m getting at. Last year 48% of U.S. teenagers did not buy a single cd - a ten per cent increase over 2006. One estimate puts the ratio of illegal to legal downloading at 20 to 1. Clearly, it’s time to re-think things.
Cohen suggests a solution. He says that instead of wallowing in their desperation, the industry needs to be to be “wildly creative” and look a new models of doing business. I have a wildly creative suggestion. Instead of trying to swim up stream, all the time, the music industry could try getting with the program. Do I have a concrete solution? No. But there are success stories that the industry can look to for starters.
The success of Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want album is just one example of the music industry trying to drag itself into the 21st century. The digital market is only going to grow as legal downloads occupy an increasingly important and sizable component of revenue. It’s time the music industry took these fringe ideas and ran with them instead of trying to prop up a failing business model.
Read More »
|
|
February 22nd, 2008, 02:42pm
|
In a post by Don earlier this month, he wondered if China would ever bring down its firewall. In the post, he speculates that the coming Olympic Games would only make the crackdown worse. Well it looks like he may have been right and wrong according to this piece in the National Post yesterday.
The article says China will open up very limited parts of the “Great Firewall” in order to give visiting foreigners unrestricted access to the internet for the duration of the games. They’re able to do this because the Chinese Internet censorship system is precise enough that it can filter (or not) searches from specific IP addresses as well parts or all of any webpage - the Chinese are hoping to medal in this discipline in 2008.
Read More »
|
|
February 15th, 2008, 12:12pm
|
While looking for the beta version of Firefox 3, I came upon a post on the Mozilla Labs blog announcing the winners of the the Extend Firefox 2 contest. The contest asked contestants:
“Will you be the brain behind the next great Web innovation? Do you have the drive to take your Firefox Add-on idea to the masses? Are you ready to affect everyday life for millions of people around the world?”
Read More »
|
|
February 8th, 2008, 02:28am
|
The web has the potential to be a great equalizer of opportunity. It’s a chance for people who have traditionally not had equal access information customarily reserved for those with the fortune or the fortunes to access it. ReadWriteWeb has posted an article on just such an enabler of equal information, MoveSmart.org.
The website argues that “[u]ntil now, information on neighborhoods has been buried in the back of academic reports, pinned to community center bulletin boards, and locked in data sets only available to planners, inaccessible to those who would benefit from it the most: housing seekers looking for a better neighborhood.” Focusing on the Chicago area, the site seeks to use social networks, mashups, forums and other tools to allow home seekers with limited resources to access better housing resources with the goal of economic and racial integration.
Community is a big deal. It brings people together, gives them something in common and gives them a reason to be concerned for each others’ wellbeing. Hopefully, this project is a success and prompts an expansion or similar programs in other cities. Hopefully, municipalities will embrace this type of solution as a means to revitalize parts of their cities that have fallen by the wayside and utilize them to build more vibrant, integrated communities.
You can watch a video of the organization’s vision for the project below:
|
|
February 1st, 2008, 08:36pm
|
While looking for more information on the first half of this post, I stumbled across Google Experimental Labs. This is the page where Google posts ongoing projects and solicits feedback from online users. On of their current projects is an update to their search feature. This update will allow users to have more control over the way they search for and interpret data on the internet.
The new search feature adds three new tabs to the traditional search: Info, Timeline and Map. This allows users to search for data, then stipulate specific measurements or information they’re looking for. After that, they can find data from a given month in a given year or go to a google map of key locations related to their search.
With the pool of human knowledge growing at expanding rates and the internet ballooning with knowledge, it becomes increasingly important for us to be able to find the information we want and to be able to interpret and express that data in meaningful ways. Will this be enough to help us better search through the mass of information out there or is it just a better mousetrap? Are you as curious as I am for the answer to those questions? Well, unless you’re interested in bioinformatics conferences, Thomas Jefferson or Koalas, you’ll have to wait until whenever Google gets around to launching this new feature.
|
|
February 1st, 2008, 08:17pm
|
ReadWriteWeb has a post on Google’s announcement today that they’re rolling out their Social Graph API. The API is based on open source so it should be interesting to see where this development goes. The announcement comes on the heels of Google (amongst others) joining the DataPortability Working Group. They’ve posted a cool video primer on how the API works. You can watch the video here.
This has the potential to be something really cool because I, for one, hate having to re-populate my lists of every account I create online. Here’s a question though, do we sacrifice anything through all this connectivity? I’m not sure. I do like that Google has specifically said that their API returns only public connections from public pages. But, that might not necessarily be the case in the future.
|
|
February 1st, 2008, 12:35am
|
Here’s a great post from Techdirt on a inventive way of choosing film festival entries. The festival, Cinequest, located in San Jose, California, aims to promote “Maverick Filmmaking” through:
- The Cinequest Film Festival: a discovery festival of films and technology forums that was recently named the Top 10 festival in the world by the Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide.
- Cinequest Distribution: delivering films to fans worldwide through cutting-edge Internet technologies plus DVD—while creating new marketing and business models for the Independent.
- Mentoring and Education: groundbreaking education and mentoring programs including Camp Cinequest.
As opposed to traditional film festivals that choose their films by way of a panel of experts, Cinequest asks filmmakers to post their films to a social media site where users vote on the submissions. The most popular films are then screened at the festival. You can see a selection of clips and films from the festival on Youtube.
Not everyone is wild about the new model of distribution. An article by the AP notes that, “the software they chose also enables illegal sharing of movies, music, software and other content. And that raises the ironic prospect of an up-and-coming filmmaker getting a legitimate distribution deal after succeeding at Cinequest, only to see his future work traded illegally using the same software that gave him his break. ”
I, for one, think this is a fairly shortsighted view of things. By and large, we’re not talking about films that are going to go on to become major blockbusters. The films shown here, and their filmmakers, are ones who would be unlikely to crack the public perception without the efforts of Cineplex and other like minded entities. I’m all for giving talented people a chance to show their craft and likewise letting moviegoers decide which movies are worthy of their time.
|
|
January 24th, 2008, 04:59pm
|
How Do has posted a note on the city council website for Manchester, England being voted the BT Online Excellence Awards best local government website.
Sponsored by BT, online respondents were asked, “We’re all increasingly using the internet as a way to find out what’s happening and interact with our local councils. Which is the best website to get information about what is happening in your area or about services available from your local authority?” The article goes on to quote Matt Walton, head of online channel development at BT, on the criteria behind the selections. He said, “[W]e weren’t interested in the technical aspects of the sites – just why users like them. As we suspected, the range of products or information available was the most important factor, followed by how easy it was to use.”
Read More »
|
|
January 17th, 2008, 12:36pm
|
Recently, the United Nations released its 2008 E-Government Survey entitled, From E-Government to Connected Governance whose goal was to determine, “the e-government readiness of the 192 Member States of the UN according to a quantitative composite index of e-readiness based on website assessment, telecommunication infrastructure, and human resource endowment. “ You can read all 246 (yes, 246) pages here.
They also have a number of interesting comparative tools on the report’s website. The Graph It feature allows you to compare up to five countries against a specific region while the Country Profile section lets you drill down and do some specific examination of an individual country. These tools have been invaluable in my eGovernment Fantasy League - any one interesting in trading for Burkina Faso?
There are a number of key takeaways in this report, from my perspective. First, the report emphasizes the central importance of the customer in the process of developing eGovernment services - always a good thing. The report also highlights the need for a number of key components in order to achieve results. Namely, country’s require adequate infrastructure, the ability of users to access government services on mobile platforms, basic literacy and internet abilities and a sufficient level of trust in the government as a service provider. It also focuses on the need to bring citizens into the policy development process.
According to the above criteria, the following countries scored in the top 10 on the Readiness Index:
A follow-up point from the survey:
It is worth noting that in this year’s Survey, there were no countries in the top 35 from the African, Caribbean, Central American, Central Asian, South American, and Southern Asian regions.
I’m certainly not suggesting that countries in these regions haven’t made significant gains. Barbados, Angola and El Salvador (to name just a few) are all examples of countries that are embracing the principles of eGovernment with great success. However, in looking from top to bottom on this list, there is significant disparity. The countries at the top have a plethora of resources to focus on eGovernment while others on the list have to contend with the basic needs of safety and security.
For me, the most important takeaway is this: Government 2.0 can fundamentally change the way citizens interact with their government - for the better. It allows for true citizen involvement in the creation of policy and responsive government services tailored to individual citizens. My question then is, how do we take the next step? How can the results of this survey be used to focus assistance and resources for further gains?
« Previous Entries
del.icio.us
Digg it
Furl
reddit