Words 

This piece by Justin Jackson maybe one of my all time favourite things I have read on the web. It sums up my feelings about things more articulately than I could ever manage.

Despite everything at its heart the web is all about words and that is what makes it special (to me at least.)

Search Engine Privacy: DuckDuckGo does not track its users 

Nice little interview with the CEO of DuckDuckGo Gabriel Weinberg, whose search engine has had a serious boost in profile since the PRISM allegations surrounding Google and others.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo full-time for a couple of weeks now – I’ve updated the Chromium ‘omnibus’/address bar to use it as the default search which has really embedded it into my workflow. The results are quite different from Google – as an example my blog is weirdly the number one result for the phrase ‘digital by default’ on DDG but even logged in on Google it doesn’t appear until page 2 (its result three on Bing). So clearly I am biased now 🙂

Connect Lockleaze project wins prizes for tackling digital exclusion 

Nice post from @wood5y about an important project close to home for me. I live a couple of minutes walk from Lockleaze and have known people there my entire life. It is an area that has suffered from deprivation and neglect over the years (and at times in the past it has had some local pubs that were not for the faint of heart!) and projects like this are important if the residents there are going to have an opportunity to move forward. I actually proposed something very similar for Southmead a couple of years ago but it never got off the ground.