Ben Bodien …

© Ben Bodien 2008

  1. is writing about “Olympic Medal Table Bias”

    Now that the spectacular events in Beijing have drawn to a close, I’ve been looking at the final medal tables and how different news sites are representing them.

    There’s something suspicious about the sorting order. The official table ranks by gold medal count (but includes a rank by total medals), putting China in first place. This method is also used by the relatively neutral Reuters and the BBC.

    Curious then, how the some US news sources are choosing to sort by the total medal count, which puts the USA out in front. How convenient:
    a few hours ago | comments | permalink
  2. is browsing “Lost and Found 2.0”

    The power of a social network — a lost camera is found and returned to its owner.
    a few hours ago | comments | permalink
  3. is looking at “Small Talk with a Web Designer”
    nearly a week ago | comments | permalink
  4. is measuring everything on screen with xscope's (http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope/) dimension tool - more addictive than bubble wrap
    a week ago | comments | permalink
  5. is browsing “An Event Apart Blogged”

    Jeremy Keith has very sportingly blogged (live) the first day’s sessions at the currently running An Event Apart — the conference for people who make websites.
    a week ago | comments | permalink
  6. is correcting some horrendous typographic slip-ups. funny how they're so obvious after a few days away.
    a week ago | comments | permalink
  7. is writing about “A Bizarre Attack on Fire Eagle”

    The BBC ran an article today voicing the concerns of a couple of privacy groups over Yahoo’s Fire Eagle.

    I’d love to know whether the director at the Centre for Digital Democracy actually used the service before declaring that sites like Fire Eagle are “building and collecting more data, not just about the content you like but where you go and where you are at the moment.” I’ll have to assume that he hasn’t, or he’d know just how daft he sounds implying that Fire Eagle is collecting data (it only stores the most recent location of each user), and that this data is being held for the purposes of extracting patterns in user behaviour (rather hard to do with a single location record per user).

    I had reservations about using Fire Eagle at first, but after getting it set up and experiencing the extent to which its creators have gone to ensure that the information you provide is safe, I’ve been nothing but impressed and perfectly comfortable with it. There are a number of controls in place to keep your data safe. Here they are:

    1. You can provide your location with as much or as little precision as you like, as accurate as exact latitude and longitude or as vague as your country.
    2. You choose which third party applications you want to use, and you can stop sharing your location with them at any time.
    3. You decide how much precision each third party application that you authorise receives regarding your location.
    4. Fire Eagle reminds you on a regular basis which applications you are sharing location data with, and unless you explicitly confirm that you’re still happy with that, it will block all application updates for you.
    5. You can put a temporary block on application integration so that you can go off-radar for as long as you want.
    6. You can purge your location data from Fire Eagle at any time.

    That all sounds pretty democratic to me, though it somehow fails to satisfy the CfDD’s definition of the word.

    Quite honestly, if half the web applications that store personal data paid even a tenth of the level of attention to the issue of privacy as Yahoo have done with Fire Eagle, the Internet would be a better place. The Brickhouse team are doing an incredible job, and I have to believe that there are more appropriate targets for this kind of misguided assault.
    a week ago | comments | permalink
  8. is watching “Endanged indigenous cultures, and the extreme diversity of their realities.”
    a couple of weeks ago | comments | permalink
  9. is browsing “Bubble Calendar”

    A brilliant idea, but I think I’d struggle to resist popping a whole month away on a whim.
    a couple of weeks ago | comments | permalink
  10. is watching “Paper prototyping interactions in an AJAX app”
    a couple of weeks ago | comments | permalink