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My del.icio.us bookmarks for July 4th through July 5th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between July 4th and July 5th:

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My del.icio.us bookmarks for July 1st through July 4th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between July 1st and July 4th:

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Closing the Gates after Bill

[This is my BBC column from Monday – I forgot to post it here in all the week’s excitement (2gether08, New Media Awards, Shift Happens). You can read it on the BBC News website too.]

The publicity surrounding Bill Gates’ departure from Microsoft should not obscure the fact that he is still deeply involved in the company he founded in 1975.

Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie may now be in charge, but they were chosen by Gates, worked with Gates and are still answerable to Gates.  After all he remains company chairman and a major shareholder, and he will be working as an ‘advisor’ on special projects.

Gates also played a major part in setting Microsoft’s strategy for the next few years, as it continues to try to figure out how to convert its enormously profitable operating system and office software business into something that can generate money as we all move applications online and look for stripped-down, secure and reliable operating systems on our desktops, laptops and handheld computers

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We Can Show Them A Better Way

When Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson launched his ‘Power of Information Task Force’ in March he was applauded by campaigners for open source software and  free access to public sector information and easier availability, but there was a general concern that it wasn’t clear what the Task Force could actually do.

Since then there have been a few speeches, some ideas have been floated for general consideration, like the recently announced Treasury review of how Ordnance Survey and other trading funds operate, and there’s been an interesting investigaion into how crime mapping might operate.

But now they are putting their money where their mouth is – or, to be more precise, our money where their mouth is since they are a public body – with an online competition to find the best ideas for ways to reuse governnment data.

‘Show Us a Better Way’ has £20,000 to offer to people who come up with innovative ways to use a wide variety of data sources, including a massive amount of medical data from NHS Choices and neighbourhood information from the Office of National Statistics.

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I saw this…

Here’s what I’ve tagged on del.icio.us on %date%:

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My del.icio.us bookmarks for June 25th through June 28th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between June 25th and June 28th:

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Openness and Innovation

My latest post over at the TCS Innovations blog was drawn from the introduction to the Openness and Innovation panel at the recent Media Futures Conference

Just as open societies have, since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, been the pre-condition for the social, cultural, scientific and technological innovations that have created the modern world – with all its flaws a better place to be a human than any time in the last 50,000 years – so open standards and open systems have provided the underpinning for the network world.

Read the whole thing here.

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My del.icio.us bookmarks for June 16th through June 23rd

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between June 16th and June 23rd:

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Changing the Way We Think

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website, and Nick Carr has picked up on it]

In her recently published book ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century, Professor Susan Greenfield brings her considerable expertise as a neuroscientist to bear on the question of whether and how our current use of computers is changing the way our brains work.

Greenfield argues that the visual stimulus we get from screen-based information and entertainment differs so markedly from that available to previous generations that certain areas of the brain, specifically those areas that are older in evolutionary terms and retain the capacity to alter as a result of experience, may be affected in ways that express themselves a changes to personality and behaviour.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, and one that has the virtue of being experimentally testable, unlike many other claims about the effect of modern living on human psychology.

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