digital living

The growth in the number of APIs is one of those exponential curves often associated with digital. The Programmable Web Directory now lists over 4,000, a milestone it recorded only 6 months after it logged its 3000th, which in turn was only 9 months after it passed its 2000th recorded API.

Recently I had the privilage of hosting a stimulating panel at Pivot 2011 with Joe Fernandez, founder of Klout, Larry Levy, co-founder of Appinions and Elisa Camahort, co-founder of BlogHer. The idea of digital influence or how influence works within the social-digital space is on the mind of not only marketers, but policy makers and anyone in the business of communications and or influencing stakeholders to achieve desirable outcomes.

As a small business working in knowledge-intensive, research-driven areas, I've got first-hand experience of the frustrations caused by mainstream research publishing: you find a research paper that looks useful, but it costs $30 to read the 15 pages if you haven't got some kind of institutional subscription. These costs keep going up, and even institutions are having to look critically at what they can afford, in what is known as the serials crisis. Recently George Monbiot stirred up a small storm by drawing attention to this — see one angry reaction, for example.

This is a rather intriguing idea. A book reading app that seeks to use the properties of the iPad to create a new type of immersive reading experience for ebooks featuring audio, video and rather lovely animations.

Adam recently observed that "there are two, diametrically opposed dangers on tablets: being a print fundamentalist and being a web fundamentalist".

The era of “Big Data” has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and many others are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions.

I have a chronic habit of reaching more for biological metaphors to help describe how we inhabit a world of abundant technology and media. Two decades ago, when I was working on large IT systems in the civil service, Ian Franklin and I suggested a shift from thinking about these systems as engineering interventions to a more organic, gardening-style approach.