Author: Nick Booth

Wikipedia Founder gives away the ultimate social networking site?

This is just a quick mention of this story (also here) . Jimmy Wales tells us he plans to use www.openserving.com to offer us all free hosting plus 100% of all advert revenue from the stuff we write, as long as we keep a link to his company Wikia. He plans to host all sorts of open source software (including wordpress which creates this blog) and allow us all to create multiple author blogs with voting and feedback buttons etc etc.

How will he make his money – it looks like it should come from advertising on wikia.

This is an enormous opportunity to draw many more people into using the social web, and for non-profits to not only see their web cost tumble, but start earning money from the things they and their supporters are saying. It is also likely to become the focus of a huge amount of (mainly open source ?) creative effort to make the different websites work well and look fab.

Still don’t understand it properly though.

Win a Sony PS3 and support young homeless people

I wouldn’t normally write about specific competitions or even gadgets, but Jane Slowey (once my boss for a few months) e-mailed me about a tie-in between her organisation The Foyer Federation and Dixons and I really want others to blog about it. After all it’s a huge improvement on reports that homeless people were paid to queue in Tokyo and the US when the PS3 was released there.
The fundraiser is a competition. Enter here to win a PS3 from Dixons and a proportion of the £1 fee goes to the Federation. (It might also help get round fears of shortages) So think of this as an experiment in attracting a new audience for you and helping a good cause. If enough of us use this link perhaps we can get it onto the front page of technorati. With the tags below we’ll certainly find new readers and give them a way to turn their gaming passion to good use. If you give it a go please send me a link and I’ll add it here, or use trackback or perhaps add a comment with a link. I’d also love to know what effect it has on hits to your blog.

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Time to capture the Dark Matter

David Wilcox has just put up a post which helps think about the relationship between formal and informal structures – whether in non-profit or profit organisations.

He cites a thought which popped into the head of Lloyd Davis at It’s Social Stupid. It occurs to Lloyd that creativity most often happens in the ‘shadows’ – the informal links into and out of  formal organisations – rather than within the naturally constraining structures which were designed to get things done.

I think we all spend some considerable time in the shadows. You know: Read more