As a consultant at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JSMC) at HKU, I've been able to see some of the interesting work being done with Open Data here in Hong Kong.

I attended a presentation today by Irene Jay Liu, news editor for Thomson Reuters and project leader and editor for ConnectedChina. It was a great demonstration of the app, especially since there is so much to see in the app. It is difficult to understand all its potential unless you see someone using it or you spend a lot of time with it.

Information Architecture is both a familiar and foreign concept to me. As a web developer, I followed lots of tips on how to structure information in a way to make it more useful. Being the kind of person who likes both systems and structure, its principles appealed to me immediately.

I watched Lawrence Lessig's recent TED talk, in which he makes the argument about the corruption in the United States. I enjoyed it, because I love the ideas in the book. I'm not quite finished, but close. But the TED talk I found a little odd. Specifically, his introduction of this analogous place called Lesterland

Design is not as important as usability when it comes to web development.

Anil Dash has a great post on the Knight Foundation blog called the end of the beginning: lessons from open government so far. In the post, he outlines that we've done a lot of thinking about what open government could mean, but that we haven't yet really got started, solving real problems and building real tools.