"What happens when you get a bunch of hackers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them?
In London between 4th-6th April 2008, the Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems.
Our aim is to find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges."
I love this sort of rapid development thing. I may try to head down if work permits.
In April / May we’re hopefully going to be recruiting for some pretty exciting new jobs for 4Pioneers.
We’re getting the word out early so we can hit the ground running when we’re ready to go, so please forward this on to anyone that might be interested.
We’re hopefully going to be looking for the following:
Lead Developer (Ruby on Rails)
Community Manager
Design Lead
You can find the full information on the jobs and the project itself on the Maverick website.
The final New Media 4Cast is now online. This month we’re looking at how blogging, podcasting and online video can become the core of your marketing strategy as a creative individual or small business.
Those nice folk at Mediasnackers are growing their team. If you’re into social media and want to do something worthwhile with it then get in touch.
Here’s the lowdown:
I had the pleasure of working with founder DK recently and can vouch that he is a thorougly good egg.
It’s great to see an agency that is committed to showing what a positive force for education the web can be. Good luck to them (and to you if you apply..)
The Nabaztag is, wait for it, a wi-fi enabled bunny.
Yes, that’s right. It connects to the web and can tell you the weather each morning, play your podcasts, read your RSS feeds out plus a ton of other stuff. John Humphreys can’t do that can he?
Apparently, you can even ask it for advice. Nick Lockey pointed out to me that this might stray into Uncanny Valley territory (a hypothesis that says when robots get too humanlike they just start to freak people out).
I do like the idea though, especially because it shows we can interact with the web through physical objects as well as screens and keyboards. And why not? It might help my eyesight a bit.
Walkit.com is a newish site that’s trying to get everyone to walk places. Type in your route, it gives you either the quickest or least busy route (and tells you how much carbon you’ll save by getting out of your car). It’s also social so users can suggest new routes.
It’s been pretty successful in London and they’ve just added Birmingham to their list of cities. Not sure how useful it’s going to be yet but I’ll definitely give it a go (not that I ever seem to go south of Digbeth these days).
I like this one. A "terrorist suspect" decides to put his entire life online to stay out of Guantanamo. I’m sure they’ll still find a way. "You made an anti US remark between the 9:18 espresso and getting on the 325 bus at 9:23. You’re going down."
Here’s a mighty useful piece of software: Ibackup. Pay a few quid a month, Install it, within 5 minutes it’s backing everything up online, every night. Brilliant. I can finally go to sleep knowing that even if my flat goes up in flames I won’t lose all of last year’s invoices. Phew.
And while we’re on the subject of nuclear waste, check out these designs for a system of signs and monuments to let future generations know to steer clear of particularly nasty areas. Beautiful.
Here’s a little nugget which could turn out to be something big. Google have announced their new Social Graph API.
In layman’s terms the social graph is the representation of me and my contacts, and how we relate to each other (the friends list on Facebook is a good example). Problem is, you build one set in Facebook, one in Myspace, another in Twitter, yawn, you get the picture. Google’s API will mean they’re all nicely tied together so you only need to build your contacts up once and any app can use them. (That’s a vast oversimplification but you get the idea).
I’m wondering what this means for Facebook. When you think about it, Facebook’s major USPs are
Everyone’s spent a buckets of time signing up to it and building their social graphs (admit it, that’s the most fun part!)
You can run applications on it.
You can send each other messages.
But what happens when any online application knows who your friends are? Why are we going to need Facebook any more? What about when your email program links to your social graph - why would I bother using Facebook’s crappy messaging function? As Pete Ashton was ranting today, It doesn’t even let us search messages! Grr.
And then there’s Opensocial. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next year or so.
If you’re to take one thing from this, buy your domain name now (e.g. antoniogould.com). In the future we’re all going to be defined by our URLs.
