I wanted to share some current ideas, projects and research with you in a certain order. Its a chance for me to get to know you and your own interests and for you to get a flavour of my own preoccupations.

Although the first link is a little old in web years the research and online software that has developed from this talk has become a talking point on the web and influential on all sorts of current and live debates about openess, sharing data, creative commons, cultural and social activism using new technology. One high profile result of this in the UK has been data released under Freedom of Information kick started by Journalist, activist Heather Brooke.
The talk given by Hans Rosling who’s project aimed to liberate and visualise UN publicly collected data came together in a project taken up by Google called Gapminder.org The video talk he gave is here and I have embedded it into this post below:

An interesting part of the lecture talks of the preconceptions that we all hold that give us a particular world view that may, as he shows, not be backed up by hard data. This, in your own year, will be an important thing to bear in mind. How can you guard against this in yourselves. How can you crap detect and keep the crap detector antenae sharp and tuned?

Howard Rheingold a well known technological commentator recently gave an interesting talk at the recent Reboot conference this July 09 in London. He talks about new literacies in the networked environment that we now find around us. An important aspect of this is our ability and techniques to critically question before consuming. (crap detection 101)

Sometimes its easy to Crap detect, Brass Eye “Cake”, although some of the celebrities apparently had difficulty in detecting any irony or satire.

To this BBC 24 News broadcast: