Do schools kill creativity?

A witty and profoundly moving talk that will change the way you look at education. Sir Ken Robinson makes a case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize -- much less cultivate -- the talents of many brilliant people. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online. A typical review: "If you have not yet seen Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, please stop whatever you're doing and watch it now."

SCMP on Facebook

Wondering how you can keep up with the latest developments in China and be on Facebook at the same time? Here's your answer... the South China Morning Post news widget, created by Palava Digital and developed by our tech friends in Israel and Eastern Europe.

Quietly launched on 15th November 2007, this custom-built Facebook application has already attracted over 130 users in two weeks. To enjoy access to headlines of the South China Morning Post's daily news coverage of China and Hong Kong, click here to add the application to your Facebook account.

Where are you?

With the proliferation of platforms for sharing every second of our lives over the internet, do we need to continue asking that simple question, "where are you?"

Watch and listen below (thanks to fora.tv) to the entrepreneurs behind these new life-sharing platforms as they give us insight into why we humans have taken so rapidly to publicising our meagre existences over the internet. Recorded at the recent PICNIC '07 Conference in Amsterdam.

Linda Stone, a writer, speaker and consultant, brings up the fascinating question, "Are social networks continuous partial attention for continuous partial friendship?" and interviews:

• Jyri Engestrom, Founder of Jaiku
• Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, Xanga, Blogger, Odeo and Obvious
  
• Raymond Spanjar, Co-Founder and Chief Hyving Officer of Hyves
• Felix Petersen, Co-Founder of plazes
• Matt Biddulph, Founder of Dopplr

Creative Commons Workshop - Nov 24

If you're looking to create content online and are wondering how to protect and share it, then here's just the event for you: Creative Commons - Practical Workshop.

Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright (c) — all rights reserved — and the public domain (pd) — no rights reserved. By making content "Some Rights Reserved" you let people easily share your work all over the world. This also gives others the right to remix and reuse creative works under Creative Commons licenses legally, without the fear of infringing others copyright.

The workshop will be held from 9:30 - 12:30 on Saturday 24th November at HKU SPACE Admiralty Learning Centre. Topics to be covered

1) What is Creative Commons, how it works, and what is the value of Creative Commons for Hong Kong, and its policy implications.

2) Tips, tools and practical skills of using Creative Commons licenses - how to use Creative Commons licensed work, and how to publish your work under Creative Commons license.

3) The variety of creative works available in the Creative Commons including music, photos, educational materials, and others.

Sofa Session - Yat Siu, CEO of Outblaze

Another Web Wednesday social mixer is in the bag!

Now that the event is regularly attracting over 100 attendees, we're happy enough to stop counting and spend more time socialising. (Or perhaps we'll just wait until Google launches it's 'party tracking' app).
Our guest at the sofa session was none other than Yat Siu, Founder and CEO of Outblaze, a global digital media and collaborative messaging powerhouse that now houses 16 separate companies under its roof.

Yat's reputation as a humble but successful internet entrepreneur attracted a wide range of people, including start-ups, web strategists, interactive agencies, media buying houses, designers, programmers, bloggers, students, job hunters and even lowly marketeers.

Although we skimmed over a wide range of topics, from benefits of open source to the meaning of web 2.0 (simply "a marketing term", according to Yat), the packed audience remained attentive for a full 45 minutes.

The need to replace dying audio recorder batteries (for the podcast) offered a short interval and a natural seque from the topic of re-education (by labour) of local software programmers to the hotter topic of media sharing, as practiced by 172 million Chinese copyright "sharers".

For ease of listening, we've separated the interview into two parts, the first being about open source and the second about social media and advergaming. Simply click on the play buttons below and enjoy! (Download speeds will depend on your bandwidth connection).


powered by ODEO


powered by ODEO

OpenSocial and OpenHandset - open for business!

Within the first seven days of November, we've seen two ground-breaking announcements that are going to dramatically change the way we interact over the internet: OpenSocial and Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

For those of us who belong to more than one social network, OpenSocial will allow us to conveniently manage one profile across multiple sites (finally!). So far the following social sites have signed up: Bebo, Engage, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

By pioneering these two open platforms, Google has provided a massive distribution channel for developers to launch and monetise new applications, be they accessed via your PC or mobile phone. Popular apps that have joined include ilike, flixster, rockyou and slide.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and social networking has fostered an explosion of information ripe for the picking and monetization. Google naturally is not going to miss out on this one. The official site for OpenSocial APIs is here and have launched Campfire presentations to promote the use and understanding of these new platforms. The first one contains demos of most of the above partners and can be enjoyed below (don't worry, it's not all technical geek speak).

Online personas - defining the self in a virtual world

In preparation for tomorrow's social mixer, a fascinating panel (although recorded back in November 2006, still relevant today) about online personas and social networking with Robin Harper, Vice President of Community & Support, Second Life; Shawn Gold, Vice President of Content and Marketing, MySpace; Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Facebook and Reid Hoffman, Founder & CEO, LinkedIn. Conducted by David Ewing Duncan, award winning author of six books, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.