Hello! This is the website of Ben Ward. It was started in 2004, and this what it looks like right now. Read more about Ben, see his CV, or search this site.
Hello! This is the website of Ben Ward. It was started in 2004, and this what it looks like right now. Read more about Ben, see his CV, or search this site.
In stripping everything back and starting the blog anew, I've been able to cherry pick what's really important to me in terms of metadata and display, and try to present new posts in a way that I think is best for content on the web. Categories, timestamps, locations, timezones and more have all been considered.
This site has been here in some form or other for ten years, most of them as a blog, and seven of those running WordPress. But from time to time you just have to tear it up and start again. Here then begins an adventure in Jekyll-powered, git-stored, version-controlled blogging. Not that it will ever end.
Leo Hickman wrote about FourSquare. Badly. But not entirely incorrectly, which means swallowing geek pride, and focus on a the major social behaviour problem that he highlights.
The Web does suck at APIs, and hardware devices, and 3D acceleration. None of those things have anything to do with being a web of information. This essay tries to explain why I disagree so strongly with recent detractors, and why I passionately believe in the web’s true, native architecture: Interlinked information.
Some months ago, Apple acquired a music service that I didn’t care about: Lala. I didn’t care because between my personal library in iTunes and on my iPod, Spotify (via proxy), Last.FM, and Hype Machine I was well hydrated for music discovery and appreciation. Lala was famous for its ‘web songs’ model, where you pay a small fraction of the retail price for a song or album in order to stream it repeatedly from its site. Neat, but I’m sceptical of ‘renting music’.
Many of the restrictions around the iPhone OS are well documented and infamous. Here though, I lament the loss of a less regarded capability of open systems; the extensibility of existing applications themselves, and explore the closest alternative on the iPad: The web browser, and the web itself.
I like the iPad; I’d like to buy one for my parents.
Part one of my Designing for Location series. Back in 2008 I worked for Yahoo! on Fire Eagle, in 2009 I tried to present everything I’d learned to an audience at Chromatic in San Francisco, and this is the long delayed write-up of what I know.
There is value in email, and that value is communication. Over years, service providers and publishers have taken advantage of email’s ubiquity to adapt it for push, notification and automation. Better solutions to those use cases are emerging (or already exist), so this is the time to reclaim the inbox, reduce your email throughput back to what the medium is really good for. I’ve already seen that a little bit of persistent effort can greatly increase the quality of email as a tool.
A copy of my vitriolic response to James Aylett’s dissection of the Tenth Doctor’s finale, ‘The End of Time’.