Alejandro@Oxford

I am not entirely sure whether this comes from the journalist or from the conservationist. But the BBC has posted a news article titled “Internet threatens rare species, conservationists warn“. We should really be careful of this guy called Internet. He looks like a tough, ugly, evil man (or woman). Be careful kids! OK, to [...]

Another genius strip from xkcd

At the request of the UK government, Facebook took down 30 pages linked to prison inmates who were, according to the authorities, behaving inappropriately on the site, including taunting victims’ family members. It took them 48 hours to do it. In itself this fact is worrisome. At the request of a government Facebook decides, at [...]

Pilar Juárez was the head of the political section in the European Union delegation in Haiti. She was trapped in the collapse of the United Nations building in last week’s earthquake. On Sunday, 17 January, the Commission received news of the confirmation of her death, with High Representative Cathy Ashton releasing a press release, after [...]

Ulysses knew how to pass safely by the coast of the Sirens. In the Odyssey, we are told how he instructed his sailors to put wax in their ears, bind him tightly to the mast, and by no means release him until they had passed the Sirens’ island. Ulysses knew that the Sirens’ temptation was [...]

The Internet may be facilitating the creation of echo chambers and the balkanisation of politics. This is what Cass R. Sunstein, now Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said in his book Republic and then repeated in Republic 2.0. It meant that because of the new possibilities of filtering our [...]

Just bumped into Cory Doctorow’s review of Chris Anderson’s Free book (I know it was published on The Guardian netaaaages ago i.e. July 28). The core of his review…
There’s plenty in our world that lives outside of the marketplace: it’s a rare family that uses spot-auctions to determine the dinner menu or where to go [...]

Yesterday, I went to the BBC Proms. Walking back home with my partner and her brother we passed the British Natural History Museum. A big orange banner said in big letters “ADMISSION FREE”. I’ve seen this banner in another museum, Tate Modern perhaps? In the morning I had been listening to the free audiobook of [...]

For some time, my interests have turning towards the direction of public transparency and collaborative government. I started my PhD at Oxford with the intention of writing a thesis on foreign policy and the Internet (!), and now I find myself absorbed by four things: freedom of information, open data, open government (the three legs [...]

For all of those like me that couldn’t go this year OpenTech in London, you can access their good quality audio recordings on their website. For those that don’t know what OpenTech is, let me copy&paste their descriptionOpen Tech 2009 is an informal, low cost, one-day conference on slightly different approaches to technology, democracy and [...]