Lately I’ve been reading Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It’s a really interesting book, and one that I would thoroughly recommend if you’re interested in this kind of thing. Something in Chapter 11 (Promise, Tool, Bargain) struck me because it resonated with an experience I had this week […]
Been reading a lot about how the music industry and the TV and movie industry are falling down, and they all blame “pirates” (great article on how stupid and offensive a label that is given the Somali pirates here). I also recently finished reading Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World […]
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If You Can’t Find It, You Can’t Buy It
Recently, I tried to pay my Rogers (Canada) bill online. Considering that you’re trying to give them money they really make it very difficult for you. Eventually I managed to set up an e-billing account for my banking. Linking this to Rogers for some reason necessitated downloading Firefox, as it does not support Safari (this […]
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Average Users
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “average user”. Who are they? What do they use their computer for? What do they know? And – I think this is the most interesting question: How much do they care about the things we [programmers] spend all our time on? I recently wrote a paper about […]
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Greetings, World 2.0
So, I was talking to my supervisor the other day about what I’m reading for my research, and he told me that I should be focusing on academic papers, because blogs, newspapers, and books aren’t as reliable a source. And he’s right, I can’t just cite The Economist, and The Guardian and the Bloggers Blog […]