March 2009
6 posts
Ada Lovelace Day Heroines
When I first heard about Ada Lovelace Day from Suw I was struck with two things. One, what a wonderful idea it is, and also how amazingly needed it still is. At Rewired State the other week the boy to girl ratio was as it ever is at technology events. At Google I/O last year the band of the conference, The Flight of the Conchords, wondered out loud if they were in the right place and rather...
Why Facebook shouldn't be Twitter and why MySpace...
Another blog post, another slightly fanboy-esque clipping from the twitter stream of Tim O’Reilly from me, however he’s nailed it again.
I’ve spent a few days being quite quietly frustrated about the new Facebook design. In my opinion it took a really nice concept of their own invention, the activity stream, and tried to munge that together in a design entirely of another...
Three libraries, a framework and an API - how...
“You can build prototypes in the time it takes to have a meeting”
Simon Willison - Open Platform launch
This is phrase which sticks in my mind from Tuesday and I make no apologies for including it in 2 blog posts in a day. It has to be said that I don’t want ever to be in a 7 hour meeting (that was roughly how long ContentTagger took to build). However it’s still quite a...
Building on the Open Platform with Cass Sculpture...
I’ve been lucky enough for the past few months to be working with Matt McAlister, Simon Willison and Matt Wall on the OpenPlatform project at The Guardian. My role has been as an internal external developer which has been both fascinating and also a lot of fun, it’s been a pleasure to be there at the birth of what I think is an important step forward in publishing and also in moving...
What a good week for APIs
When I wrote the post about the government building APIs after my Rewired State demo it had to be carefully written and edited as I knew about two really cool APIs which were upcoming: The Guardian’s OpenPlatform and TfL’s tube station data.
First of all, hats off to TfL for releasing APIs. We can now build AccessCity the right way; making it an aggregation hub weaving together data...
Why the Government should build APIs and let...
I had a really amazing day at Rewired State yesterday. First of all, massive hat tip to James Darling, Richard Pope and Emma Mulqueeny for a genius idea brilliantly executed. Seeing the fantastic poster, with the phrase “Code a Better Country” emblazoned across a stream of binary, on my way out of The Guardian just made me grin. The quality of the work built yesterday there clearly...