The UK’s Guardian newspaper ran an interesting photo gallery last week showing mobile phone masts ‘dressed’ up as trees. For a while it seemed these might catch on as increasing numbers of people complained about the appearance of ‘ugly’ metal masts in their neighbourhoods. While inner-city masts can be hidden, in the country there are fewer options. Disguising them as trees is a favourite.
More images and descriptions on the Guardian website gallery here.
After months – maybe years – of badgering by good friend Erik Hersman (he of White African fame), late last December I finally moved my blog over to WordPress. I actually began blogging in February 2006, but started with a plain-old HTML page on the kiwanja website. Shortly after I moved over to Blogger before finally seeing the light and moving to the king of blogging platforms. (Erik – you were right). 🙂
It’s been great seeing the readership grow, and with a neat calendar year of invigorated blogging behind me I thought it would be fun to throw together a list of the top twelve most read posts of 2009. These posts are the most read, rather than most popular (usually measured by number of comments, Tweets, etc):
1. Bones for mobile phones (1466 reads)
2. Anthropologists! Anthropologists! (946 reads)
3. A mobile database that brings it all together (806 reads)
4. The making of an SMS icon (727 reads)
5. The Million Dollar Homepage (639 reads)
6. Dispelling the myth? (603 reads)
7. Time to eat our own dog food? (564 reads)
8. Mapping medicine availability via SMS (547 reads)
9. FrontlineSMS: Now with Forms (540 reads)
10. Step inside the laptop bank (538 reads)
11. Grameen’s AppLab comes of age (533 reads)
12. Radios. Batteries. Solar. Implications (529 reads)
And three personal favourites which didn’t make it to the list:
13. “Inappropriate” appropriate technology?
14. Why does this picture trouble me?
15. A glimpse inside social mobile’s long tail
Interesting that three of the top six posts are anthropology-related (as is one of my favourites). Anyway, happy new-year-blogging to everyone! Thanks for reading. Here’s to 2010!
Eleven days and 8,500 miles ago I stepped on a plane to Washington DC (I’m about to do a final 3,500-odd miles back to London). It’s been a hectic but very productive few days.
To kick things off, I spent a couple of days with the Institute for Reproductive Health helping them design a prototype “standard days method” texting service using FrontlineSMS. It was exciting and interesting work, and I’m looking forward to following their future progress.
The following day saw me speak to around 150 leaders from Latin America who had gathered for a workshop at George Washington University. It was the first time I’d spoken to an exclusively foreign audience accompanied by a live translator, but at least I now know my jokes translate well. Next I headed to the west coast and spent the weekend working with an interesting bunch of computer scientists who had gathered at Berkeley. You can read my thoughts and reflections on that in a blog post here.
After spending a couple of extra days catching up in Palo Alto and San Francisco (one of my favourite places for taking photos, incidentally), I headed back to Washington DC to speak about innovation on a panel at the UN Youth Assembly. It was the first time I’d been to the UN, let alone spoke, and it looked and felt exactly as I’d expected (see photo, above). It was a great experience, and after the short talk I was totally cleaned out of \o/ badges by the delegates.
Today saw a final – and slightly random – parting event when I featured on the BBC “Test Match Special” cricket website, which had earlier in the day been discussing the demise of Tophill Joe, a championship breeding sheep. The image (below) comes from an earlier tweet of mine in the week when I saw what can only be described as a “niche” publication in a bookshop in Palo Alto, California.
It was a nice way to end a fun and productive – if not tiring – eleven days on the road and in the air. Next stop Cambridge, i.e. home.
