Gapminder.org

Wonderful presentation from Hans Rosling of Gapminder.org

STOSS now Socialtext Open

I am so pleased that Socialtext Open Source Software (STOSS) has been renamed simply Socialtext Open. STOSS always sounded so sinister – I once told Liz Henry that it reminded me of STAZI and BOSS – two happily defunct secret police organisations. Maybe living in the DDR for a year made me too sensitive to this kind of thing… anyway – Long live Socialtext Open!!!

WikiOhana, WikiPo

Added a couple of pages to the “getting started” section of WikiOhana – good fun getting to grips with a new wiki mark-up (OddMuse in this case). Which reminds me I must remember to write up the “Four Circles of WikiPo“.

Exciting times at Socialtext

Ross Mayfield (my boss at Socialtext) got the whole company blogging and chatting on IRC this week – it is really impressive how his company-wide blogging-101 training session seems to have brought “the t-shirts”and “the suits” together… you could feel the energy and the tempo move up a notch or two… barriers dropped, conversations started. Actually it was a blog post about cultural dilution within Socialtext that seems to have kick started the process.

It is great to be part of such a dynamic and exciting group of people.

Note to self: The worst cultural influence that Wikipedia has is the lack of humour to be found in wiki projects (with some exceptions)… we must inject some humour into the wiki world at work…

Seeing the invisible

Why didn’t anyone tell me about Blind Atlas ?

Which reminds me I must spend some time on Batan City – move it onto a proper server – running it on my 10 year old £20 Dell PowerEdge server (thanks eBay) isn’t doing it any justice.

Then we should send ambassadors to other virtual cities -maybe start the virtual equivalent to “twin cities” .

Not above the law

Uncivil Servants helps ordinary citizens highlight the abuse of parking permits in New York.

Yell shares plunge as US phone book earnings drop

Software wars

More fun from Wikiality (via Wikia). (copyright & kudos to: Steven Hilton)

Identity 1.0

Who needs biometrics?

Perl Poetry

EGOogling Batan City I stumbled upon Sebastian Mary’s friends at the Future of the Book where just above a nice blog post about Batan City and other literary experiments I found the winner of the The Perl Poetry Contest 2000 by Angie Winterbottom:

if ((light eq dark) && (dark eq light)
&& ($blaze_of_night{moon} == black_hole)
&& ($ravens_wing{bright} == $tin{bright})){
my $love = $you = $sin{darkness} + 1;
};

It’s derived from a verse from the Pandora’s Box album ‘Original Sin’:

If light were dark and dark were light
The moon a black hole in the blaze of night
A raven’s wing as bright as tin
Then you, my love, would be darker than sin.

It made me want to learn Perl. Got a book about it somewhere… also must go back and read more about Future of the Book.

Sebasian Mary Harrington always seems to know such interesting people and do such interesting things.