Companies like Google and Facebook can seem like out-of-control Goliaths, but it is each and all of us that have made them like that. After all, if they were pointless and useless, no one would use them. Thinking about current issues of Google and Facebook, like paying taxes, legislation to protect our (suddenly) valuable and awesome data and vital privacy… Read more →
This post is the result of what happens when communicating into the void, online. It is about being open to misinterpretation, assuming people will get where you’re coming from, but lacking visual cues, people just don’t. They sometimes really do need explicit guidance and it’s your job to give that. Here, I try to make it clear what the role… Read more →
Recently I started to get a lot of emails from different ‘job sites’ with their current vacancies, apparently suited to my ‘preferences’. After getting a few in quick succession from different companies, I realised I didn’t recall registering at ANY of these sites. So, my spam phishing radar went off on full alert. At first I thought some kindly and… Read more →
You know those surveys of job roles and relevant pay scales? And then those other articles about how and why domestic housework is never included in those surveys and any pay scale? Well we now have a new kind of housework: data housework. This is where we as users or customers do all the admin grunt work for services and… Read more →
A superior way of viewing your most used websites (web platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Gmail, for example) is to view them as ‘apps’. This is achieved really easily. On Windows, open your website in Chrome and do the following: Click on Chrome top right customise icon Go down to ‘more tools’ Create a shortcut Click the option to ‘open… Read more →
It can be time consuming to find the image content you need to support your lecture or lesson plan. Sometimes you need to provide your students with suitable digital images so they can use them for their media projects, or digitally manipulate them to learn techniques in Photoshop or After Effects. Sometimes you need specific image content to enhance your… Read more →
Much like deep sea fishing, data trawling is a bit more of a catch-all than a targeted pull of specific data-points, but from that larger less focused catch you can then drill down very specifically and effectively. For example, if you import data into a tool like Gephi you can potentially see interactions and comments from each member of a… Read more →
The recent EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), due to come into effect May 2018, is important. It is a bit dull to read, but should be checked out by everyone. GDPR is generally very good news for all digital citizens. It simplifies territorial compliance, and protects users from baffling legalese in the terms and conditions they sign up to every… Read more →
So here’s the thing. We’ve all noticed how dull our social media feeds are getting (Facebook), or how impossible they might be to actually manage in any meaningful way (Twitter), or how inane most of the content is (Instagram). OK, this may not be strictly true for everyone, but I reckon we all nod in at least some agreement, recognising… Read more →
I’ve been reading Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek. It’s excellent. The book is a very readable summary of academic research into the rapidly expanding world of tech company domination and ownership of global money and economies. A chapter called The Long Downturn explains in uncomplicated terms how we got where we are now in terms of government policy for propping… Read more →