Derek Abdinor

A wiki is a cute concept still hunting for proper application. Sure, it has a rocking video, poster child and its fun to say “wiki” three times in rapid succession, but is it really satisfying any organisational (business or informal) need? Collaboration We all like to collaborate. We even prefer saying that we want to […]

The US SEC (our JSE equivalent) announced on Tuesday that the format for financial statements to the regulator, Edgar, will be superseded by a format that has more in common with the social media tools today’s users have come to enjoy. You had to see the webcast (and followed the liveblog): The president-appointed chairman who […]

A year ago saw me trying to explain microblogging (when the Twitter Fail Whale was but a guppy), after having got the blogging presentation finally right. The Twenty20 Cricket World Cup was the rage, and I simply joined the dots: Twenty20 cricket is to 50-over cricket as Twitter is to blogging. It’s shorter, more intense […]

The web is not about technology, it’s about communication. Yet, in the ultimate schema of things, it becomes evident to the end-user only via HTML and clever client-side jinks. Despite our clever plans, middleware, and thousands of hours of social meddling, we are stuck with ouputting to a 1024px wide box encapsulated in virtual chrome. […]

I have this credibility problem with cartoons where, when they regularly reach behind their heads/into their coats, they tend to whip out gadgets/weaponry that outweigh them and flaunt Newton One to Three. For storylines, its weak. But for concepts like storing terabytes of data and other objects off your local grid, its incredible. And that’s […]

I’m grateful for search engines, but I still find it hard to accept living with Dead Text. Letters and figures on a screen. Not able to be mined, found, unlocked, extrapolated into meaning. What irks me in particular is tables of figures, especially financial information, that you would have to re-key into excel or some […]