DIY
Yahoo releases Reputation Design Patterns (Yay!)
Yahoo’s Design Pattern Library is a pretty awesome collection of design patterns - proven solutions for common or well-known problems. The idea is to provide answers to questions people (here: developers) encounter over and over again. Why reinvent the wheel?
Now there’s a whole set of design patterns for a reputation system, as well as some […]
Little Brother: Protect Your Privacy To Protect Your Freedom
Privacy isn’t usually the most sexy topic. At least it isn’t usually treated that way, which is a shame. All the better: Cory Doctorow’s latest novel Little Brother (download for free, buy on Amazon) more than makes up: Little Brother is a passionate & compelling rant against government surveillance, and a rally cry to protect […]
The OLPC Laptop’s Interface Translated For Adults
A neat preview of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) user interface Aquatic Sugar, as well as an explanation of how it works:
(More about the One Laptop Per Child project? Click here for my posts on the topic.)
(Thanks for the hint, H.!)
Less bad product designs with redesignme.org
Redesignme (Flash, HTML) is a good implementation of a simple, but powerful idea: Users submit really bad product designs, then propose what could be done better and how.
That’s it.
But that’s pretty cool, too. After all, it’s the users who know about the bad usability and all the problems. It’s a pain to use? Chances […]
How Creative Commons Can Interact With Commerce
Over the last couple of years, Creative Commons licenses have become pretty widely adopted in the non-commercial field. (You’ll find a great number of blogs and podcasts under a non-commercial Creative Commons license.)
But what about commercial use? Are Creative Commons licenses the natural enemy of commercially used contents? By no means, quite the contrary. Here’s […]
How to build your own mesh network?
As you may know, I’ve been obsessing about the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) for awhile, for both its aims and potential. Here’s another project that ties right in, a simple guide on how to build your own mesh network. (The OLPC laptops support meshing out of the box, but if there’s no network […]
Mashup Online Magazine That Writes Itself
That’s an art project I’d love to see one of these days: An online magazine that writes itself, based on a calendar, a pre-written set of tags connected to the calendar, and a bunch of RSS feeds.
Imagine, just for simplicity’s sake, a lifestyle magazine for women. (Of course, every other type of magazine would […]
Open Source Hardware: Buglabs to ship in Q4
Tired of your bricked iPhone? You’re not alone. (Ok, to be fair, iPhones aren’t even being shipped in Germany yet, I think. But anyway.)
There’s at least two new projects that are open sourcing not just their software, but also their hardware: They’re specifically designed for hackability. How awesome is that?
First, there’s OpenMoko, an open source […]
Opening the Social Graph
Lately the web has been buzzing with talk about the Social Graph (or Social Network Portability, as others prefer to call it).
The basic question? Who owns your social network, and how can you move it back and forth between different services and applications? (You should be the only one with complete control over your […]
Do we need standards to protect customers online?
Google has decided to discontinue their online video store, effectively just taking back the DRM-”protected” videos they had sold before. (BoingBoing has a brief round-up.)
This just shows, again, how deadly all the license agreements are that all users click through on a daily basis. (Yes: you, too.) Basically, whenever you purchase or rent anything on […]