It’s a humble beginning, and it may very well be a humble end, but I wanted to let people know about a site called Mothershare.

It’s a wiki for mums, dads, carers, babysitters, grandparents, and hapless uncles like me who get called on to babysit every now and then.

There’s lots that needs improving, but I don’t have the time, money or talent to do it. (In some cases, one or the other, in some cases all three! )

Perhaps more importantly, I’m not a parent, and I really feel it should be run by parents, and not just a few, but any who want to be involved.

Personally, I think it’s a good thing, especially for first-time mums, or families moving to a new area. I’ve been amazed (and appalled) at seeing how steep the learning curve is for my sister Vicky and for other friends with children. Anything to reduce that, I think, is very much worthwhile. And that’s why I’m helping in my own small way.

So there it is. Mothershare is out there, for you all to use, criticise, improve, ignore, nurture - whatever you see fit! Rough and ready? Yup, but being tidied up all the time. Useful? I really hope so.

September 16th 2005 | Comments(1) | Asides, Life on parents, project social computing

John Templeton in the New Scientist (it’s a pay-for read)

“Science creates vast power rapidly … [but] to invest in advancing power without investing in stewardship is folly”

A little angst-ridden tale of how homebrew book-classification goes wrong. (from the Guardian

On the table at which I am writing there’s a pile of disconsolate books. They are homeless. At the end of a long and weary process of rearranging my bookshelves to accommodate new arrivals, there are, as ever, some that don’t seem to belong in any known category. It’s possible, no doubt, for mere householders to follow the catalogue numbers used by the British Library, but it’s best in my experience to put your books in places where your instinct will lead you to them. Which is simple enough in most cases; but then you are left with the awkward squad.

Funny how tagging as folders naturally descends into tagging as description.

I liked this from Sweet Hallucinations Of A Psycho.

I had a dream…
I always wanted to become a famous talented actor & take part in an important play as the main charecter…

Decades have passed and my talent wasted. Haven’t made it as an actor and lead a completely different life. However I have realized a more important fact.

No need to have the looks of Brad Pitt or even the talent of Al Pacino. Hollywood is not the only place to come up with incredible roles.

Not called an actor, I am a part of the most important play existing as an actor starring as no one but myself, playing for the world in an unrepeatable scene.

• Flock
  “Flock advertises itself as a “social browser,” meaning that the application plays nicely with popular web services like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us. Flock also features widely compliant WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop blogging tools. The browser even promi
  (tags: social_software browser)

September 14th 2005 | Comments(3) | Asides on social computing tools

This man is rapidly becoming my idol.

Kenya’s oldest school pupil, 85-year-old Kimani Nganga Maruge, has boarded a plane for the first time in his life - to visit the United States.

He is going to address a United Nations Millennium Development Summit on the importance of free primary education.

Source: BBC

Nice spot by Will Davies which I’ve only just picked up. A team at Lancaster University looked at better ways for us to organise and retrieve information for shared use, and to do that the researchers investigated how couples catalogue and retrieve their digital photos

“There is a widely held belief that people benefit from working together to remember details of things” for instance, film storylines. However, research has shown that when they try to recall information which they learned individually, the overall amount remembered is less than if the same people were trying on their own. People mentally organize information in different ways, and cues that help one person recall may inhibit another. So retrieving information from computer systems, such as a keyword search in a library catalogue, may be impaired by a mismatch between the user’s mental organization and the cues provided by the system.”

Interesting given the personal vs collective arguments of KM, I thought.

Thought I’d give a quick plug to a Seminar on Social Computing & The Organisation that I’m organising in Oxford on October 7th.

Feel free to come if you’re interested (or let me know what sort of things might be useful if you want to track it from afar). There are some interesting, clever and fun people coming so far - both speakers and “delegates”. I’m looking forward to it.

In fact, the only dark cloud over my excitement is that I can’t think of a better word for “delegates” or “attendees”. Somehow doesn’t express how important they are

September 14th 2005 | Comments(4) | Asides on event, social computing templeton

Valdis Krebs‘

“biggest take-away from this year’s MeshForum conference was the FEMA person who was on a panel about connecting in catastrophes. She said something amazing, yet so basic. She talked about Table-Top meetings before any major event.

‘We must KNOW others before working together in an emergency — if we
are strangers at an emergency, that is a BIG problem.’”

Comments like that make it worth signing up to AOK

September 06th 2005 | Comments(2) | Notes on communication, decisions groups

Dusted off Mike Brearley’s “The Art of Captaincy” this evening, in preparation for the gut-wrenching Ashes finale on Thursday.

It’s got loads of gems (perhaps only if you like cricket - I can’t tell ), but these struck me as wise words:

too many people believe that others should be doing just what they themselves find interesting

Quick checklist:
- Are you a talker?
- Are you a phoner?
- Are you a letter-writer?
- Are you an emailer?
- Are you a blogger?

And if yes to any of the above is it a badge you wear with pride?

September 05th 2005 | Comments(2) | Asides on blogs, culture, questions, survey tools

Great stuff from Tom Coates:

“We believe that for a piece of Social Software to be useful:

• Every individual should derive value from their contributions
• Every contribution should provide value to their peers as well
• The site or organisation that hosts the service should be able to derive value from the aggregate of the data and should be able to expose that value back to individuals”

Really. Great stuff.

September 01st 2005 | Comments(2) | Notes on frameworks, social computing TomCoates

A New York paper is running a story on Thao Nguyen’s transformation ” from quiet Web developer to feisty crimefighter”. [thanks Matt for the pointer]

Allegedly (and while I’ve every sympathy with her if it did happen, it looks like it may well have, but I still think it’s an “allegedly”), in response to the man below unzipping himself and pulling it out on a mid-afternoon uptown R train, she pulled out her phone and took a picture of him.

+=

Not long after it was evidence submitted to the police, and posted on Flickr.

Tama Leaver has written a corker of a post about the ramifications of this.

“while I commend Thao Nguyen for her quick thinking and wish her every luck in prosecuting the man who appears strongly to have abused her, I simply want to add a few words of warning to the digital ether and ask you to think about the ramifications of digital images becoming a form of citizen “justice”. We need to be wary in such cases, or our new digital resources may indeed open a seductive but ultimately unjust hi-tech pandora’s box.”

Spot on.

On a broader level, it does make you wonder about individual freedoms and just how pleasant bottom-up life is. Stowe Boyd coined the term swarmth for all that wonderful collective decision making ability that networked people are beginning to be able to show. But I would hate it if we forgot that these swarms have stings too.

September 01st 2005 | Comments(2) | Asides, Thoughts on crime, crowd, justice lynching