Notebook is a blog by Imaginary Media that features our work updates as well as technical news, information about web development, online media, and internet culture.
Videos from a Twitter conference, held in September 2009, are available: presentations by Alex Payne (al3x), Jason Calacanis (Mahalo.com), and a panel featuring iJustine, Dave Peck, and Tara Hunt.
There is also a good video that explains Twitter in Plain English:
We’re big fans of the online microfinance site Kiva and today they are celebrating their fourth birthday. The idea is fairly simple: Kiva allows users around the world to make small loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world.
Small Change, Big Payoff is a great article that covers the history of Kiva. Much of their success lies in corporate partnerships with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and MySpace, as well as PayPal which process transactions at no cost, an agreement organised by Kiva president Premal Shah who worked at PayPal for six years.
One of the Kiva co-founders, Jessica Jackley, was inspired by a speech given by Nobel laureate Muhammed Yunus. Yunus founded Grameen Bank, a community development bank which is 94% owned by borrowers and 6% owned by the Bangladesh government. Many of the social benefits of microfinance can be understood from the 16 Decisions that Grameen bank borrowers vow to follow – each of the decisions focus on improving communities through health, education, and justice.
In four years Kiva have made loans to 235,721 entrepreneurs, loans totalling almost $95 million. Most of the loans are made to women (over 80%). The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialised agency of the UN, notes that loans to women help elevate their status both at home and within their communities as well as having significant impact on their families’ quality of life. Women are also less likely to default on loans.
With the Indonesian earthquake, the Pacific tsunami, and typhoon Ketsana, there are plenty of immediate reasons to be making donations but Kiva loans are also something to consider. We’ve set up a Kiva lending team so if you’ve never made a Kiva loan, check it out and see how easy it is to make a difference.
The presentation was given at The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London. More information and videos should be made available on the FOWA site soon.
I saw the presentation given by Daniel Burka, the former creative director of Digg, at last year’s Web Directions South. The amount of thought and testing going into the features and design at Digg is really impressive. You can read the slides and listen to the audio from that presentation here.
Speaking with clients it is amazing to learn how many of them have dealt with cowboys, generally for search engine optimisation. No qualifications, no details of the work performed, just big promises and big fees.
The next generation looks to be the Social Media Guru, as this hilarious video shows, (language warning):
Like SEO, social media requires some time to set things in motion but is generally about content. If there was ever a magic bullet it’s quality content.
Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has presented a “white flight” thesis that deals with social network membership division along racial lines.
Since April 2008, Facebook has been the most popular online social network worldwide though it was only in June 2009 that Facebook outpaced MySpace in the US. The “white flight” thesis contends that among US high school students “MySpace is seen as ‘black’, while Facebook is ‘white’.” The research is controversial and offers the conclusion that online communities reflect the same segregation found in society.
While the two networks provide certain demographic information for advertising purposes the research underscores the importance of a broad social networking policy. Companies, universities and government bodies who opt to use social networks to reach users will obviously need to understand the diversity of the user base for each network and not simply rely on the apparent ubiquity of MySpace or, more likely, Facebook.
In July 2009, engineers at Digg published some interesting figures on the use of Internet Explorer 6. Considering the time and effort required to support IE6 users, who represent only 10% of site visitors and only 1% of active site users (based on the number of people ‘digging’, ‘burying’, and commenting), Digg want to end support for the browser.
Microsoft have officially announced ‘Extended Support’ for Windows XP and by extension IE6, which was the browser shipped with Windows XP, until April 2014. By that time, IE6 will be almost thirteen years old.
The Digg article goes further to explain that the large majority of IE6 users aren’t able to upgrade due to system administration issues – either lack of access or restrictions in the workplace.
What may be a solution is the new Google Chrome Frame an open-source plugin for Internet Explorer which brings the fast Chrome V8 JavaScript engine and WebKit rendering engine to the browser. Microsoft were quick to suggest that this would make IE less secure but that seems a rather impossible feat considering the number of exploits facing IE.
The move by Google isn’t meant to provide developers with a means of ending support for IE6. Instead Google have created the plugin to ensure that their more advanced products, like Google Wave, will be able to run on more browsers – the plugin simply extends support for canvas and other HTML5 and CSS3 features to all versions of Internet Explorer.
Hopefully it will also provoke shame at Microsoft and get the IE team working on implementation of HTML5, CSS3 and an improved JavaScript engine.
Although this has long been suspected by search engine optimisation professionals, many companies still promote the practice and charge their clients for this service.
The FCC have announced OpenInternet.gov, a site to allow the discussion about the future of the internet.
The chairman’s remarks indicate a dedication to network neutrality and an understanding that the success of the internet has been largely dependant on this.
Historian John Naughton describes the Internet as an attempt to answer the following question: How do you design a network that is “future proof” — that can support the applications that today’s inventors have not yet dreamed of? The solution was to devise a network of networks that would not be biased in favor of any particular application. The Internet’s creators didn’t want the network architecture — or any single entity — to pick winners and losers. Because it might pick the wrong ones. Instead, the Internet’s open architecture pushes decision-making and intelligence to the edge of the network — to end users, to the cloud, to businesses of every size and in every sector of the economy, to creators and speakers across the country and around the globe. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet is a “blank canvas” — allowing anyone to contribute and to innovate without permission.
