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….
Tag: Birmingham UK
Podnosh is based in Birmingham in the UK, so often we write about exciting things that are going on near us.
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)
trackback
Please add yours. Trackback if you like, perhaps even tag them homewords.
Green iPod
Number 2 on the netsquared, squidoo, getactive list of the 59 smartest online organisations was Greenpeace. It has gradually been chipping away at Apple with classic guerilla tactics – using their opponents weight to their own advantage. Greenpeace is encouraging supporters to use the creative power of their macs to imagine, produce and share new images and ideas which may compel the company to change it’s policies.
So Greenpeace started a campaign for environmentally friendly macs with a friendly spoof site GreenMyApple and have just added this to youtube.
[youtube]2Uo_4kyrkDc[/youtube]
When is a window broken? Reverse Graffiti and Social Rules
I was in Barcelona recently and found myself puzzling over something. Almost all of the graffiti was on the shutters of shops – not the stone or brickwork. It appears as though the ‘taggers” (also see this on Birmingham tagging and youtube) have decided not to spray the buildings themselves. If this is a correct observation (and please tell me if it’s way off the mark) what’s going on here? …