BrucieWeb

Official Google Blog: A new approach to China

A brave, sensible and audacious move that will garner them many fans. Google have just suddenly got rid of their achilles heel.

Google’s about turn in China

Mag+, a concept video on the future of digital magazines – Blog – BERG

How a Tablet/Slate device really could work, if done well…Apple!

BBC News – How online life distorts privacy rights for all

There are serious concerns about this. It will be interesting how this evolves in the future – with future politicians having their online Uni past dredged up.

Telegraph

Welcome to the prototype Datastore for London. This is where we’ll be releasing all of the Greater London Authority’s data for all Londoners to see and use free of charge.

via A first step towards freeing London’s data | London DataStore.

The strange tale of Lukeywes1234, lover of “Star Wars” and unlikely inspiration for a bizarre porn prank which hit YouTube today

via The littlest YouTube sensation – Salon.com

Disney’s great leap backward – Times Online

A delightful uplifting positive story about people in business doing the right thing! And guess what, they have another hit on their hands – clever.

Stephen Fry & Biz Stone by brucieweb

At NESTA

A List Apart: Articles: Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients.

Good article, I’ve seen something similar before with softwear design — trying to communicate with a client is always hard.

Dustin Curtis is human..

A friend asked me what this Twitter malarky was all about – I gave her some hints – I thought I’d share this further.

It isnt very obvious to begin with is it. In simple terms, you write little messages about anything you wish – up to 140 characters. You can update your status either through the twitter website, by a text message, via a 3rd party desktop twitter application (like TweetDeck) or a mobile platform application, depending on what kind of mobile you have.

Then, you can begin to follow other tweeters – and their messages will appear on your timeline. You can reply/refer to your followers, or anyone in fact by mentioning their username in your tweet but you have to prefix it with a @ sign – for me you could tweet ‘Hello @BruceElrick how are you?’ I would be notified of this tweet and could reply.

Another thing that grew organically with twitter users, was the re-tweet. If you like a tweet, and would like to alert your followers to it – you copy the tweet and prefix it with RT. If you are using a twitter application, they build in this functionality to make it easier.

And the last thing to tell you about are hashtags and trends. You have millions of people on twitter all tweeting about all sorts of topics, you may want to follow these trends or topics – so hashtagging evolved to make it easy for people to collate all the tweets on a certain topic. Hashtags evolve organically in the twitterverse.

Say for example – tomorrow, Gordon Brown threw up during an important speech – within seconds people will be twittering about this, and someone will use a tag that quickly becomes the one everyone else uses – it might be something like #brownsick. So, you may tweet ‘Oh my, poor Gordon, did you see that? #brownsick’

This would then become a trending topic, as millions of people would be using the same tag – and by typing the tag into twitter, you would see all the tweets on this subject.

Hashtags are often hijacked by spammers – as they know their tweet will be seen by millions, this is quite annoying. Also, you get odd things trending out of the blue for ‘fun’ these are annoying and juvenile too, people expect that twitter will address these annoyances soon.

Your industry TV, has fully embraced Twitter. Most programmes now encourage live programme twitter interaction. The first programme to really get into this was Channel 4’s ‘Surgery Live’ it was the top twitter trend most evenings it was on.

BBC Question Time is now in on it – and progs like Strictly and X-Factor are massive on twitter, with the shows using it as a live feedback loop and for competitions.