Recently, I made a brief reference to the so-called Dunbar number in relation to my list of friends on Facebook.
Since then, I’ve spent some time reading up on Dunbar’s number and the concept of friends on social networking sites, and feel the need to delve deeper into this discussion. danah boyd, one of the [...]
Posts under ‘Tech’
Dunbar’s number and Facebook
On technological progress
I bought a new phone recently.
Buying a new phone is a big thing for me, since I’ve been holding on to my old phone for ages, and it has served me well. But the reason behind this sudden purchase was not that my old phone had stopped working, but rather that I finally decided [...]
Tapping into the cognitive surplus
Last week I began a 4-week internship at Social Square, one of the leading Danish developers of social software. “Leading” can be somewhat misleading since there’s almost no dedicated developers of social software in Denmark. Actually, the founders have spent the last two years giving talks and writing a book about social software, making the [...]
Online communities work like parties
Recently, I’ve come across several blog posts using the metaphor of a good party to describe well-functioning online communities. Paraphrasing Matt Mullenweg, founder of the Wordpress project, Service Untitled sums up the metaphor thus:
Parties that are successful bring the right number of people together. Those people end up having a good time and having fun. [...]
How to do a good powerpoint presentation
For the past month, I’ve been taking a course in project management. Mostly to “sharpen my business profile” and get a better understanding of the requirements and expectations that might be put to me in the corporate world. Apart from a lot of weirdly fascinating business jargon such as “Lean”, “Synergy”, and “SWOT-analysis”, I found [...]
Human Computation
A long time ago, I came across an interesting talk by Luis von Ahn, a young assistent professor in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, on what he calls Human Computation. This concept basically revolves around a computational process which performs its function by outsourcing certain steps of its process to humans.
How does this work? [...]
Bruce Perens Live
“Free Software and Open Source are the same. What difference there used to be between the two is now deprecated. When we first began working on the term ‘Open Source’, Eric Raymond was afraid that IT companies couldn’t deal with Richard Stallman, and thus it would be necessary to distance ‘Open Source’ from Richard and [...]
One thing mac owners can’t do
hee hee hee
A computer dies with a whimper
Unfortunately, this time it was my computer. Dear Rosinante served me well for more than 2 and half years, and is quite unlikely to resume service, as it is no longer covered by the warranty and changing its motherboard and CPU is likely to be just as if not more expensive than buying a whole [...]
Hackers and censorship
Yesterday there was something like a tumult going on around a couple of the most popular tech news sites, as Digg, a site well-known for its populistic-democratic moderation system which allows users to vote stories up or down, almost collapsed under the pressure of hundreds of news stories all featuring the same item: The recently [...]
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