Author: Nick Booth

Second Life for children

They have barely got their first life started and already children are being offered a second. The BBC has announced plans to create a Second Life style environment where children can play and create and communicate. The beeb says CBBC world will have an emphasis on safety and responsibility with

no chatrooms or facilities for building new parts of the virtual world

Sounds more like a second life half life? Expect more social web announcments from the BBC now the license fee has finally been settled.

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Altruism & the Brain: Why Charities Should Excel at the Social Web

The BBC The Guardian and others (here, here, here) have written about research at Duke Medical Centre which suggests researchers have found the part of the brain responsible for altruism. I just want to digest this with two things in mind: other ways to understand the research and why these things might mean charities and non profit groups are brilliantly equipped to make best use of the social web….

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Davos – a few links.

As you probably know a theme of this week’s meeting will be web 2.0 and how it contributes to shifting power relationships. Keep tabs in a number of places including:

BBC: Richard Sambrook and others.

WE Forum Homepage

Davos Conversation

Commondreams usually as an alternative take

Speakers will include Bill Gates, Tony Blair, King Abdullah of Jordan, Angela Merkel, Joe Biden, Rupert Murdoch, Eric Schmidt, Hua Jianmin, John McCain, Mohammed El Baradei, Sergy Brin, Gordon Brown. Apparently Bono will also be there!

The Huffington Post is helping produce Davos conversations and is inviting us all to post our video questions to youtube using the tag davos07.

In the meantime anyone want to step up and have a stab at running their country?

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Technobabble : A short list of "Home Words"

Pete Ashton (a fine brummie blogger) pointed me to a wonderful post from George Dvorsky on Must Know Terms for the 21st Century Intellectual.

The list has some gems, from the increasingly familiar Moore’s Law and Open Source through to Noosphere, the freakily possible Participatory Panopticon and the onrush of the Technological Singularity.

I consider most of this language to be downright rude. They are what I call “home words”: the ones you can get away with only in ‘private’. It’s the sort of language which convinces others that a normal human has become a techno-evangelist (oops), at best a geek, at worst a raving lunatic and certainly to be avoided. So in the world of charities and the internet which are out ‘home words’? What will alienate rather than stimulate?

Here are my five starters…

nptech (tags don’t belong in the real world)
vlogcast (unh?)
blogosphere (we want them to join it, not run screaming)
user generated content (worse ugc)
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Please add yours. Trackback if you like, perhaps even tag them homewords.