I’m excited about Brave, the new browser coming out with privacy and content payment features built into the core browser code. I won’t detail it here, but you need to check it out. The piece that people miss about all these debates about Facebook-ization and evil tracking and big data is that the Web we… Continue reading

If you’ve started a new site on Wikity, you’ll notice that it has a new interface. We’ve taken some cues from people who loved the index-cardiness of federated wiki and from others who urged us to embrace the “like Pinterest for text” elevator speech and JUST GO WITH IT. These are your latest posts, with… Continue reading

Wikipedia turned 15 today, a day where I happen to have my back against the wall on some deadlines. Turns out faculty want to nail down their edtech plan by week three of the class. Who knew? But in any case, I didn’t want to let the anniversary go by without saying something. The thing… Continue reading

A recent-ish study looked at film recommendation systems and found an interesting result: perceived novelty of the recommendations was negatively correlated with user satisfaction, and user satisfaction was correlated adoption. One of the most striking things we found is that the novelty of recommended items has a significant negative impact on users’ perception of a recommender’s ability… Continue reading

We got our first piece of spam on Wikity, so we’ve rotated out the join code. It used to be “peloton”. It is now “copies”. If you are reading this post more than a month after it was posted, you probably need to look for a more recent post on Wikity, with a new join… Continue reading

I work a lot with teachers that don’t want to expose themselves to risk, argument, or harassment on the web. They create crazy good stuff that would be useful to other people for their classes, but the thought of sharing it on the web where they would be prone to lawsuits or complaints from wingnuts… Continue reading

A lot of people have been tweeting and emailing me and DM-ing me the recent Guardian piece by Iran’s “blogfather”. You should read it yourself, but in short it is the story of a man sent to jail for blogging in Iran at the height of blogging’s influence and coming out of jail many years… Continue reading

Markdown support has been added to Wikity (more specifically GitHub-flavored Markdown). I’ve done this for some very good reasons, and I’ve also done this a bit differently than most implementations, and I thought I’d explain why. First, a brief description of what Markdown is, for the uninitiated. Markdown is a markup format produced in 2004-ish… Continue reading

Here’s the pattern for searches for “open textbook” searches on Google. I just ran this out or curiosity a couple minutes ago. You’ll notice immediately that there is a cyclical pattern. Click source up under the image to go and explore the graphic yourself, but the pattern is pretty easy to sum up. The high… Continue reading

I just found this 2014 quote from Clint Lalonde: Something that is easy to copy makes it more likely that it will be copied. And if it is copied, it has more chances of living beyond its original life. A thousand versions of something seems to me to be the ultimate sustainability plan for any… Continue reading