techno-culture

Observer columnist John Naughton has a superb blog post today on Cyberspace and its Discontents which nails exactly the Janus face of the internet: why the net is wonderful/the net is hideous. An adept picking apart of the Stephen Fry/Jan Moir/Trafigura twitter situations.
His quotes from Stephen Fry’s blog also leave me deeply impressed by [...]

Google has launched its Google Sites, a wiki constructor, for the general public, extending availability beyond business users. I am off to go experiment a bit — this looks great for networking friends, colleagues, family. You can check out some useful sample sites there on the main page, to get the creative juices on the [...]

From GMSV:
If I see another business plan for a social network, I might blow my brains out.”
— Barry Schuler, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, offers some guidance to budding entrepreneurs seeking capital
… but it’s press releases for same, in my case.

Apparently being kicked around by 50,000 angry petition-signing users, privacy advocates, and bloggers didn’t bother the company too much because Facebook is back at it again:
 Six weeks after Facebook launched a controversial advertising program that tracked its members around the Internet, the Palo Alto company is quietly testing a new system that slips links to [...]

For those into or interested in xVM and open sourcing data centres, Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz has just announced (during his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld) a new open source community site: www.openxvm.org. xVM technologies target data centres.

Doc Searls’ new blog is here so be sure to change your blogroll if you link to Doc and add him on now if you don’t as he has a great mix of tech and general musings.
Something nicely provocative from his new blog:
We’ve not only hardly started to build the new (or renewed) institutions we [...]

I went to camp on Saturday, but instead of weaving lanyards, singing camp songs, and roasting marshmallows for S’mores, I learned a lot about techie stuff. The camp was BarCamp, the first one held in Dublin, also known as an ‘unconference’. Search blogs on Google for BarCamp Dublin and you’ll get plenty of detail on [...]

After a couple of years using phpBB for my Cavaliertalk board I’ve reached a frustration point with spam registrations and feeble member management tools (I’m at 1250, amazingly enough, and pick up a few each day) and after talking to various folks, have decided to port it to vBulletin. I looked into other open source [...]