During the recent Economist debate on social networks, danah boyd pointed out that people were including lots of examples that weren’t social networks. She suggested that we define our terms rigorously. While she’s right that it’s difficult to have a debate if we’re actually talking about different things, this getting bogged down in definition is a habit that bedevils academic discourse to the point where we spend all our time debating what it is we will be debating. Quick joke: How many academics does it take to change a lightbulb? A: What do you mean exactly by an academic? And in what context are you using change? What type of…

I asked recently which three web 2.0 apps would you least like to lose, and had a few responses. So, in the interest of playing with Compendium a bit more, here they are as a mindmap, with the size of the logo representing the number of responses for that category. I’ve bundled some together, and used a recognisable single product logo, so for example some people said ‘Bloglines’ and others ‘Google Reader’ but I’ve put these all together here. The same goes for the generic ‘blog’ – people didn’t usually specify which blogging tool, so this isn’t really an endorsement for Blogger, they just have a nice logo. It is…

The traffic to this blog bumps along around 100-200 hits a day. Occasionally it goes up if someone like Stephen Downes links to me, and it goes down if I don’t post for a while, for example over the summer holidays. Overall though, it’s pretty constant (as an aside, I have the vague feeling that mentioning your traffic figures is a bit of a social faux pas, rather like stating your salary). Then on Sunday I had a massive spike of nearly 700. But it only lasted one day, on Monday it was back to normal. This is higher than I’ve had even when David Weinberger linked to me, but…

I recently read the fascinating ‘Founders at work’ by Jessica Livingstone, which has interviews with a range of tech start-up people. The insights are interesting, although I would say it’s hard to draw many general rules for success from the book. Here are some observations: Working with friends or people you find interesting is the starting point, not the technology or idea, which often comes later. This seems to me something we rarely take on board as individuals or organisations. Several interviewees said they met some people at college and knew they wanted to do something with them, but didn’t know what. It’s a young man’s game. Not many women…