Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

This week, there were 16 items.

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Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

This week, there were 20 items.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

This week, there were 1 items.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

This week, there were 6 items.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

Read the rest of this entry »

The idea behind Omegle is really simple. You come to the site, you hit “Start a chat” and now you’re chatting with someone completely random and anonymous. Discuss politics, fend off creepy inquiries, whatever. Or, if you’re me, pretend to be an alien:

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: greetings, earthling
Stranger: meeep mop meeep meep
You: this planet is full of robots. how delightful!
Stranger: indeed
You: we thought it prudent to communicate through this anonymous channel
You: plausible deniability
Stranger: uh. ok? lol
You: you will all die
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

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“Agile” software development is something I have used in limited forms for a number years. Agile has always made sense to me: it puts control in the hands of developers, reduces conflicts in an organization, and is eminently practical for small organizations.

Now that I’m at Samasource.org, I’ve had a chance to implement an Agile development process for an organization that really needs it (we’re small, growing fast, and with many competing priorities.)

Below are some brief thoughts on Agile, but the real point of this post is to explain how we’re using Basecamp to conduct an Agile development process. Enjoy!

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Now that I’m at Samasource, I get to indulge my fascination with the ideas around “crowdsourcing” a lot more. It’s a new enough concept that even that term is falling out of favor. The whole idea tickles me because it allows for a whole new speculative realm of problem-solving.

First, here’s Clay Shirky from a year ago, breathlessly describing the Big Deal that crowdsourced collaboration models represent in the historical context of human production:

And below is a more recent, deeper look into these ideas, by Jonathan Zittrain. As it turns out, there are many issues to mull over with crowdsourcing: How do labor laws apply? What are the social effects of disaggregating and anonymizing your work to the point where you have no idea what ends your efforts serve? Zittrain does a back-of-the-envelope calculation: A brute-force Amazon Mechanical Turk search could identify any single Iranian protester out of 76 million photographs for a mere $17k. What are the implications of this? The first half of the talk is interesting and entertaining (and Samasource gets a mention, about 15 minutes in) but there is really good discussion with the audience in the second half: the place is packed with big thinkers:

UPDATE: Zittrain lists as one of the potential negative effects of crowdsourcing the ability for political operatives to simulate large-scale citizen actions online. This is also known as “astroturfing” (a play on the term “grass roots”), but crowdsourcing has the potential to reduce the cost of it dramatically. As it turns out, this potential negative effect has been realized: Here’s an article describing how rewards (offer) systems in online games are allowing the health insurance industry to get gamers to fill out surveys and send letters to their representatives. Done well, this would be very difficult to distinguish from genuine political expression. Thanks to Health Policy Dialog for the link.