What Re-Releases of Star Wars can Teach Us About Art and Product Management
The other day I noticed this tweet fly by in the twittersphere Was this a complaint? In light of the fact the internet was rife with complaints…
Commentary
Smarter Ways to Have School Boards Update Parents
Earlier this month the Vancouver School Board (VSB) released an iPhone app that - helpfully - will use push notifications to inform parents about school holidays, parent interviews, and scheduling…
Open Data and New Public Management
This morning I got an email thread pointing to an article by Justin Longo on #Opendata: Digital-Era Governance Thoroughbred or New Public Management Trojan Horse? I'm still digesting it all…
Design Matters: Looking at a Re-themed Bugzilla
I'll be honest. There was a time when I thought design didn't matter. To my credit, it was a long time ago... but I used to think, if the tool…
Why Social Media behind the Government Firewall Matters
This comment, posted four months ago to my blog by Jesse G. in response to this post on GCPEDIA, remains one of the favorite comments posted to my blog ever.…
Open Source Data Journalism – Happening now at Buzz Data
(there is a section on this topic focused on governments below) A hint of how social data could change journalism Anyone who’s heard me speak in the last 6 months…
How Dirty is Your Data? Greenpeace Wants the Cloud to be Greener
My friends over at Greenpeace recently published an interesting report entitled "How dirty is your data? A Look at the Energy Choices That Power Cloud Computing." For those who think…
How the WSJ’s former owners could REALLY screw Rupert Murdoch
When the News of the World scandal began to really explode at the beginning of the month some intrepid reporter went and tracked down members of the Bancroft family -…
Depression and Decline: American Irresponsibility is Ending the American Era with a Bang
Despite the assurances of US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner it is increasingly likely there will be no debt deal. The United States is going to default on its debt. I…
Why I’m Struggling with Google+
So now I've been a couple of weeks with Google+ and I'll be honest, I'm really struggling with the service. I wanted to give it a few weeks before writing…
Using Data to Make Firefox Better: A mini-case study for your organization
I love Mozilla. Any reader of this blog knows it. I believe in its mission, I find the organization totally fascinating and its processes engrossing. So much so I spend…
The Audacity of Shaw: How Canada’s Internet just got Worse
It is really, really, really hard to believe. But as bad as internet access is in Canada, it just got worse. Yesterday, Shaw Communications, a Canadian telecommunications company and internet…
The End of the World and Journalism in the Era of Open
For those not in the United Kingdom a massive scandal has erupted around allegations that one of the country's tabloids - the News of the World ( a subsidiary of…
Lots of Open Data Action in Canada
A lot of movement on the open data (and not so open data) front in Canada. Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) Open Data Portal Launched Some readers may remember that…
Links on Social Media & Politics: Notes from “We Want Your Thoughts #4″
Last night I had a great time taking the stage with Alexandra Samuel in Vancouver for "We Want Your Thoughts" at the Khafka coffee house on Main St. The night's…
The next Open Data battle: Advancing Policy & Innovation through Standards
With the possible exception of weather data, the most successful open data set out there at the moment is transit data. It remains the data with which developers have experimented…
Visualizing how everything in Beijing is built at a Las Vegas scale
One of the things that struck me most about Beijing was the sheer size of everything. Beijing, it often seems, is built at a Las Vegas scale - the buildings,…
Social Media and Rioters
My friend Alexandra Samuel penned a piece titled "After a Loss in Vancouver, Troubling Signals of Citizen Surveillance" over at the Harvard Business Review. The piece highlights her concern with…
The Review I want to Read of “What Technology Wants”
A few weeks ago I finished "What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly. For those unfamiliar with Kelly (as I was) he was one of the co-founders of Wired magazine and…
PETA Sucks
A friend took this photo of a PETA advertisement he saw recently: PETA thinks the only way to get people to care about the exploitation of animals is through the…