By James Burke on
18 November 2010 09:13
 | A few tweets about the “web culture”, memes and their lack of use in academic conferences got me thinking. A @storify "curation" below prompted this post which coincided with an Ignite talk by Ben Huh at the Web2.0 Summit earlier this week. Ben Huh is a former journalist turned dot com entrepreneur who has a knack for nailing the zeitgeist. He has been credited with bringing Internet memes to the mainstream and popularizing Internet culture. The success of his business is attributed to his knowledge of memes, viral content, and crowd sourcing. Ben graduated with a BSJ from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Web2.0 Summit |
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By James Burke on
17 November 2010 08:49
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By James Burke on
19 October 2010 07:09
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By James Burke on
13 September 2010 09:55
| Whilst re-reading various extracts of Cory Doctorow's book Content this short essay titled “Free(konomic) E-books” from 2007 caught my eye. The rational question isn't, "Will giving away free e-books cost me sales?" but rather, "Will giving away free e-books win me more sales than it costs me?" I've had literally thousands of people approach me by e-mail and at signings and cons to say, "I found your work online for free, got hooked, and started buying it." By contrast, I've had all of five e-mails from people saying, "Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book, now I don't have to buy the print edition, ha ha!" I started giving away e-books after I witnessed the early days of the "bookwarez" scene, wherein fans cut the binding off their favorite books, scanned them, ran them through optical character recognition software, and manually proofread them to eliminate the digitization errors. These fans were easily spending 80 hours to rip their favorite books, and they were only ripping their favorite books, books they loved and wanted to share. The Internet isn't going to get harder to use. Better to confront this challenge head on, turn it into an opportunity, than to rail against the future (I'm a science fiction writer -- tuning into the future is supposed to be my metier). | 
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By James Burke on
03 September 2010 11:55
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By James Burke on
14 June 2010 15:24
| In this beautifully animated video by Andrew Park (of Cognitive Media) forThe RSA, Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world. |
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By James Burke on
29 May 2010 15:21
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By James Burke on
25 May 2010 21:09
 Bike to Work is a great “Digital Guide to Bicycle Commuting” by Carlton Reid (@calrtonreid).
This 98 page guide covers cash incentives (including the UK cycle2work scheme) “women on wheels”, security and clothing and more. Yes, there are lots of adverts but much of this is just “cycle porn”! There are some great counter points to “I don’t have time”, “I’ll get all sweaty”, “I’ll smell”, “My co-workers will laugh at me”, “Only expensive bikes are good”, “I can’t, I have to wear a suit” and so on. For me, I’m going to return to my 23 mile each way commute to the office on the back of this and use @runkeeper to keep track of commutes…!
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By James Burke on
25 May 2010 15:56
LinkedIn(CrunchBase profile) is the “de-facto” business/professional social networking site.
Personally I use LinkedIn as a “CV” but I’m not an avid “connector” in the business sense using this platform nor a user of this platform in the “social media” sense, however, my use case aside, the growth of the platform is undeniably impressive and this platform is around to stay as a “whuffie” component.
This infographic by Vincenzo Cosenza (licensed under a Creative Commons licence) provides a good current overview of the platform.
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By James Burke on
23 May 2010 18:09
 The term "curation" appears to be on the rise lately in many web, iPhone and iPad applications emerging and mainstream blog articles being published such as “Why Content Curation is Here to Stay” and “Curators of the Real-Time Web: Distilling the chatter to relevant, actionable information” although this is not showing up too much yet on google trends. User Generated Content (UGC) has become the "norm" in many web2.0 and post web2.0 applications where text, images, audio, video etc. is openly shared and licenced with licences such as Creative Commons or freely shared via the "embed" where legal reuse and repurposing rights and obligations can sometimes be difficult to ascertain due to that lack of an adopted content licence. RSS is well established for sharing a "collection" of resources from a single source and OPML is gaining adoption for "collections" of resources from multiple sources. On the real-time-web front protocols such as PubSubHubbub allow the real-time publishing of feeds but the usefulness and relevance of these feeds appears to be sparking a new area of interest in web apps. One aspect of "Web 3.0" could be seen as the "return of the expert" and the rise and validation of the "subject matter expert" where their curated "works" is seen as holding value over and above other people and their collections due to them having more contextual social capital or "whuffie".
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