technology-essays

  • Preparatory Thoughts for “What are the Rules? Digital Media and Citizen Action in #Ferguson”, Tonight with the Illinois Humanities Council

    Tonight I’m joining a discussion hosted by the Illinois Humanities Council. Here’s the framing: Not long after protests over the shooting of Michael Brown began in Ferguson, MO, online hacktivist collective Anonymous took up the cause. Though its tactics have been polarizing – one member publicly, incorrectly identified the shooter – the group has undeniably…

  • How I Got My Personal Health Records

    10/15/2011 Signed up for Microsoft Health Vault, which is “a trusted place for people to organize, store, and share health information online”. Once I signed up, they offered a huge list of other services that have information that I could place inside my Health Vault account. I clicked on every single one of these services…

  • More on Linked Data

    There are some exceptions, especially within specific areas of business. Yelp utterly *owns* restaurant name SEO, in part because restaurant Web sites are awful and in part because Yelp usually delivers quality information about a place (hours, address, cuisine, etc.) right up front. Depsite some issues (squatters, domainers, black hat SEO phreaks), URLs are a…

  • The Importance of Documentation > Elementary School Websites

    Last summer I created a pretty big weblog network for a Catholic elementary school here in Chicago. I also documented my work pretty heavily, showing why I did things certain ways, showing css snippets, and generally laying it out so that people who come in later can see what’s going on. When my friend Cliff…