August 2005 Archives
Here are four blogs that don't look like "blogs." Have you got more?
I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to find well-designed blogs. The other day I pointed to ShuanInman.com. I'm really interested in blogs that don't necessarily look like a "blog." Here are a few more I enjoy:
So I ask you all? What blogs do you think are well designed or at the very least look different than one of those ugly Movable Type templates?
[Also, just as a side note, the more I look at these really well-designed sites, the more I question this one. There are some things I'm seriously questioning (like the blue boxes on the deks). But does anyone have any comments to improve the design here?]
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Two cool Google-related discoveries made today.
I discovered two cool Google things today.
1. When I went to download the new version of Adium (the spectacular free OS X IM client). I could remember the address so I went for a quick Google search. The site turned up at the top of the results, as expected, but check out what the listing looked like:
Notice anything weird there? For some strange reason listed directly under the link to the homepage are links to other parts of the site. They're not additional listings, as you'll notice, but instead just appear as a sort-of nav right below the listing. Seems pretty cool to me, anyone got any ideas what's going on here?
Then . . .
2. (This one comes via Creativebits.) Just the other day I was telling a coworker that you can't set up Gmail to send from any email address other than your @gmail.com address. Well, turns out I was wrong.
All you've got to do is go to "Settings" followed by "Accounts" where you'll see "Add Another Email Address." At that point it's as easy as inputting your additional address which Google verifies by sending you an email with a link to click. Once you've done that all you've got to do is choose the appropriate email in the newly added "from" field. Nice.
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What brings some people's creativity to the surface?
Creativity is one of my favorite topics. I'm fascinated by what makes one person considered creative and another not. I believe that everyone has the inherent abilities to be creative, so what gives some of us the potential and others not? I think Steve Jobs
is on to something when he says, "Creativity is just connecting things." However, connecting things is not really something you can just throw around as easy. I mean, everyone can "connect things" in one way or another, and Jobs caveats his statement by talking about connecting diverse experiences, which gets us a bit closer to just what's going on. But the question remains, if everyone can "connect things" and everyone has "diverse experiences" in one way or another, why are only some people considered creative?
I think there are two major steps that stand in between experiences and connecting that explain creativity. The first I'll call digestion. A creative individual doesn't take things at face value, they examine and dig, trying to find meaning, sometimes for a mass audience and sometimes just for their own good. Bruce DeBoer explains it like this in "What makes me creative?" (via Lifehack.org):
Information and experience are like food for the creative process. It's raw substance. Information needs to be digested to brain-fat so it can re-immerge as mature creative energy. It's as if it needs to be inculcated into our souls before we are free to randomize it into original creative expression. If we don't digest it, a creative product – art, innovation, music, etc. – is sure to be more derivative that original. Creativity is using our unique inner selves to rearrange the raw material.
So if diverse experiences are the food, the creative individual digests it by attaching meaning. For those geeks out there, you can think of this as the metadata of the experiences. This allows the creative individual to come back later and search for that raw material using terms and ideas that are easily understandable. Another way to think of this would be as translating the experience into the language of creativity.
Following the digestion/metadata/translation I believe some grouping happens. This is is a lower level process than the "connecting" that ultimately makes someone creative. It's about finding some basic buckets to throw your digesting experience into. In a way this step could be included as part of the basic metadata, and maybe should exist as a step before, but since I'm writing this by the seat of my pants, it exists as step three for now. A simple example of this would be your state of mind as you experience something. For instance, as I sat outside reading Emergence today, I was thinking in the bucket of creativity. In fact, the further I write this, the more I think this basic grouping process is more of a second step than a third, since it really is about the state of mind your in as you have your experience. (Anyway, you get the idea.)
Finally, after you've bucketed and attached your metadata it's time to start connecting. Like I said, anyone can connect, but if you haven't done the previous work, your connections will be less fruitful. Think of it as background research: the more you know before you begin, the more fruitful and efficient you can be when you actually get to working on your project. Now that everything is arranged and prepared, you can easily see where they connect to both each other and to new experiences. Connections seem obvious to a creative person because of this preparation they've done. They're ready to connect everything together.
Which leads me to the final piece of the creativity puzzle: adaptability. I don't think this is necessarily a step in the process as much as it is an overall state. Creative people can adapt to changing environments, in fact, many enjoy this adaptation. They enjoy immersing themselves in topics and ideas that are out of their regular comfort area because they realize they can adapt. When you think about, things outside your regular comfort area are probably only a few connections away anyway. So when you're open to these new ideas and thinking critically about how they may connect to your old ideas and experiences, your creativity can flourish. Adaptability allows people to follow courses that may not seem to obviously connect with the belief that they will eventually find where the two roads merge. Without this constant openness/adaptability, the process I've laid out can't succeed.
As expected, it all works together.
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RSS aggregators should automatically deal with read articles by clearing them away.
I've been thinking about trying a new RSS aggregator lately. It's not that I have any problem with
Bloglines, in fact I like it quite a bit, but they haven't really upgraded the service at all in a while and I'm always down for some innovation. I've been hearing some good things about
Rojo so I popped over and imported my subscribed feeds. The first thing I checked was to see what the default behavior was when you clicked a feed. You see, the feature that I like best about Bloglines is that after I click off a feed those new articles are automatically deleted. In other words, the default behavior is to delete everything after you read it with the option to save if you'd like.
Every other aggregator I've checked out works the opposite way. Most give you the option to "mark all entries as read." However, for someone like me, who has 300-and-some-odd feeds, I want things deleted automatically, if I need to find something again I can always search for it. This seems like it should be the default and I'm always surprised when it's not. I've also checked out Newsgator Online, which works the exact same way.
Now I'm not sure about everyone else, but this to me is a killer feature for Bloglines. With the amount of information out there, and the possibility of information overload constantly lurking in the shadows, why would people want to have an aggregator automatically save everything they've already read from visit to visit? The fact that you can't just click on a feed and make all the new articles/entries go away is one of my favorite things. If I ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of reading I have on my plate, I can just clear everything way and start over.
So, there it is. Rojo et. al can create the most kick-ass aggregator in the world, but if it doesn't automatically clear my read entries (or at least give me the option to make that the default behavior), then I'm not interested. I expect there are some others out there who feel the same.
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A link to ShaunInman.com: an incredibly well-designed blog.
I'm always looking for good looking websites, especially well-designed blogs since so many look the same. With that said, the other day I discovered
ShaunInman.com (the site of Shuan Inman, not surprisingly), which is as nice a blog as I've seen. It's a clean design, relying on grey and white with a splash of maroon for good measure. The homepage is well architechted with the featured entry appearing above the fold and recent entries, links, etc. sitting below. I also love the diagonal lines for the backgrounds, it provides just enough texture to make specific elements stand out.
Possibly the most impressive element of the site, however, is the navigation. Shaun has solved the problem of where to place the nav by tucking it away using some AJAX trickery. He uses a small tab at the top of the page which scrolls down on mouseover. The nav comes down to cover about 60% of the page and includes links to recent entries, categories, basic nav (about, etc.) as well as a search box.
All in all, the whole site is beautifully done and well worth a visit.
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How the internet opens us all up to world's of ideas.
A while back (about 6 months ago) I wrote about
the verifier approach. As I explained then, "Essentially the approach is a three-part process that can be used in nearly any field. It involves 'watching how they work and think, testing their logic, and uncovering ways to help them solve problems.'" Using this seemingly simple method, Gordon Rugg, a psychologist, cracked a code that's been a mystery for 50 years.
Who cares, you may be asking. For those of you who actually read every post you may be about to skip over this one as a repeat. But wait a few minutes, hear me out. I'm trying to do something here. There are connections to be made and I plan to try and make them.
First, let me help put into focus just how Rugg, the psychologist, was able to do what a whole bunch of mathematician and cryptographers couldn't: He stepped back from the problem. What he did was take an approach that examined it from the bottom-up, not the top-down. He didn't come at the problem holding any preconceived notions that those before him had. In academia, they call it the "expertise gap" and it basically goes like this:
It starts with the best of intentions. Institutions want top-notch people, so they offer incentives to attract and groom experts. Young grad students learn early that if they want to carve out a niche, they must confine their interests to a narrow field. It's not enough to work in spinal cord regeneration; it must be stem cell-based solutions to the problem. That's great if a researcher just happens to stumble on a perfect stem cell cure. But as specialists get further from their core expertise, the possible solutions - what's been tried, what hasn't, what was never properly examined, what ought to be tried again - get even more elusive.
Aha! Specialization, which brings me to another, more recent, entry I wrote titled
"The Big Idea of Growing Ideas" (
ding ding ding . . . connection number 1), where I wrote:
The more people that understand that big ideas do not appear out of thin air, the more people will be encouraged to think. It extends to nearly all parts of life. You don't need to understand everything about a topic. You don't have to understand every page of that book. Those people who are most successful are usually not the ones who are solely focused on one thing, but the people who have lots of little focuses that they can tie together. The 21st century is all about being a polymath.
Because of all the access to information, we, as individuals, are increasingly branching off into multiple places. Using myself as an example (which, to be honest, I already did in a thinly veiled way in the last sentence), have interests in far more areas than I can count. To name a very few of my current favorites: Design, music, CSS, football, interfaces. I bring absolute authority to none of them, however, I feel confident in my ability to carry on an intelligent conversation in any of them. I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, however, I'm trying to get to a bigger point: Without the internet carrying on the range of interests I do would be nearly impossible, or at the very least completely consuming. However, with the massive amounts of information available and the increasingly user-centric ways of receiving it, more and more people are able to approach more and more subjects.
It goes further, though, when we bring blogging into the equation, we give all these people an outlet. I just happened to be reading Kareem Mayan's most recent entry (a response to this piece), where he wrote, "The genius of blogging is not the volume of material that's thrown into the public domain . . but the *ease* with which anybody can now publish content AND reach an audience." Now I have to disagree with Kareem a bit. Nothing personal to him, but I don't believe the two ideas are mutually exclusive, rather, I think the genius of blogging is that "anybody can now publish content AND reach and audience," thereby creating huge volumes of material being thrown into the public domain. In fact, the material being in the public domain is how it reaches it's audience. In the end, however, it's that all that material being out there in the public domain that may benefit society the most.
I've actually written the 800 words above trying to get to this point. You see, today I was reading Steven Johnson's Emergence
(I know I've sounded like Steven Johnson's agent lately, forgive me) when I came across this quote:
With only a few minds exploring a given problem, the cells remain disconnected, meandering across the screen as isolated units, each pursuing it's own desultory course. With pheromone trails that evaporate quickly, the cells leave no trace of their progress -- like an essay published in a journal that sits unread on a library shelf for years. But plug more minds into the system and give their work a longer, more durable trail -- by publishing their ideas in best-selling books, or founding research centers to explore those ideas -- and before long the system arrives at a phase transition: isolated hunches and private obsessions coalesce into a new way of looking at the world, shared by thousands of individuals.
Now that's probably much more detailed than everyone needed, but there's a big point in there. Think of the internet as the system Johnson mentions, with all the minds plugged in. Now bring blogs into the picture. They allow people to publish their thoughts and create an even "longer, more durable trail" by providing each entry with permalinks, a place where it can exist for all time (which, while not very celebrated anymore, is a very big deal).
Anyhow, you put all that together and you have a lot of people talking and thinking about a lot of different things. While I don't necessarily know that all these "isolated hunches and private obsessions" have yet coalesced "into a new way of looking at the world" for the masses, I can say with some certainty that there are thousands. While they're still mostly just milling around like the slime mold Johnson continually refers to, you have to believe emergence is quickly approaching.
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Five questions for figuring out what people are into.
I wrote four questions on August 4, 2004 and then saved this as a draft. Just rediscovered it and added a fifth question.
- What's in your CD player right now?
- Prince, Elton John or Madonna?
- 80's synths or 90's guitars?
- Depressed acoustic or upbeat acoustic?
- Do you despise electronica?
What else can you ask?
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Vanity Fair believes kids today don't give a damn.
Vanity Fair is running a contest. It's called "What's on the minds of America's youth today?" and here's the description:
More than 30 years ago, young people across the country staged sit-ins for civil rights, got up and protested against a misguided, undeclared war, and actually gave a damn if the president lied to them. Although a lot has changed since then, there are still racial divides, and America is once again mired in a largely controversial war. Back in the 1960s and 70s, a similar climate motivated great numbers of young people to act, organize, and take to the streets in defiance. Today it seems as if younger Americans are content to watch their MTV, fiddle with their game players, follow the love lives of Brad, Jen, Jessica and Paris, and assume the hard work is being done for them by others. What has changed? It is simply that we do not have motivating factors such as a draft or Kent State to bring us together, to anger us? What is it going on inside the minds of American youth today?
Essays must not exceed 1,500 words of text (not including title, notes, bibliography, and other written materials).
Via GNN
Ummm . . . wow. I think this deserved to be torn into, however, I don't have the time to really do it right at the moment. I understand that this is meant to elicit reaction, but I really hope there aren't people at Vanity Fair honestly thinking this way. It's closed-minded and misguided. To compare the atmosphere of today with that of thirty years ago is unfair at best.
When I get a chance I will think more about a proper reply. Also, for those interested, here are the contest guidelines. There's a $15,000 prize. I guess they're banking on money being on the minds of America's youth.
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All of these "top lists" are simply creating a cycle where we celebrate the most influential outlets, thereby giving them more influence.
I was reading this
research paper about collaborative tagging (which
Arienna was so nice as to email me a link to) and I realized why I'm sick of all these "top lists." (For those that haven't been following, there's been a lot of hubbub lately about lists of top bloggers/blogs. There's been arguments from both sides about the relevance of these kinds of lists.)
Anyway, what I realized first is that these lists are not "top lists," in the sense that they're rankings. They are in no way claiming that these are the best blogs around. Rather, and I think this is what most people forget, these are lists which are speaking specifically to a site's influence. Boing Boing, for example, tops so many lists because it's reader base goes out and blogs the links they share, giving them credit in return.
With that fact in mind, just creating these lists is pushing forward the very things blogging claims to be standing in opposition to: Mainly the mass influence of a few mainstream media institutions. These lists create a cycle. First you develop yourself as influential, then everyone touts your influence, thereby making you more influential and further separating you from the rest of the pack. Now I don't have a major problem with this because I believe that the number of voices available on the infinite internet spectrum has the ability to outweigh these few, increasingly influential, blogs. However, I do think that this stuff needs to be discussed. It needs to be admitted that these lists are propagating an ideology that many of us are fighting as outdated.
Am I crazy, or are too few people talking about this part of it?
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A look into the synonyms for knowledge uncovers an unlikely match.
I was doing some copywriting work today and I headed over to
Thesaurus.com to look up synonyms for the word knowledge. This is the list that it returned:
ability, accomplishments, acquaintance, apprehension, attainments, awareness, cognition, comprehension, consciousness, dirt, discernment, doctrine, dogma, dope, education, enlightenment, erudition, expertise, facts, familiarity, goods, grasp, inside story, insight, instruction, intelligence, judgment, know-how, learning, light, lore, observation, philosophy, picture, poop, principles, proficiency, recognition, scholarship, schooling, science, scoop, substance, theory, tuition, wisdom
When I read the list one word really jumped out at me.
I never knew "poop" was a synonym for knowledge.
Did you?
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A link to an article on viral marketing I wrote for AdBumb.
Just wanted to point everyone to the piece I wrote on viral marketing for
AdBumb titled
"Contagious Creations". It's all about how the real goal of so-called viral marketing is to create something that's contagious. An excerpt:
In fact, just calling it viral is problematic. After all, isn’t the goal of all marketing to be viral? When creating an advertisement, the hope is that the message will infect the consumer and replicate itself inside them, thereby connecting the brand and the individual. The only online elements considered viral are those that find success. That’s because, as every good virus knows, it’s either spread or be dead.
Go
read the whole article and let me know what you think.
Oh, and please ignore the picture, it somehow got stretched and I look like a doof.
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Last year's hilarious viral PowerPoint is finally dug up.
This thing is way to funny not to write about. Some of you may remember about a year ago a PowerPoint presentation of a guy breaking up with his girlfriend was posted and then disappeared, replaced with a very nasty image. Well, after searching all over and coming up with nothing I finally asked on
Ask MetaFilter if
anyone knew where I could find it. Lucky for me, there's some crafty people on MeFi who managed to dig up the original PowerPoint. I have since gone ahead and converted it to HTML and posted it (on some free space, just in case it really does get passed around).
So, without any further ado, I reintroduce:
PowerPoint Breakup
Hope everyone enjoys it.
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Thinking about the long term effects of people understanding that big ideas don't just miraculously appear.
As I was writing and updating yesterday's post on the
two new del.icio.us features, I started to think seriously about this idea of creating a social networking site from the ground up (for lack of a better term). This is what
Flickr did. As
Eric Costello, client development lead for Flickr explains:
Flickr was really envisioned initially as an organizational tool for an individual who has this huge collection of photos. The social network was built in just so that you could restrict access to your photos. But what has really taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, and not just with your small collection of friends.
This is huge. Enormous even. These sites are showing people that when you start small, by providing people with a specific service they want, there are lots of opportunities to get big. This is an essential idea that many people in the world (both online and off) fail to understand.
Big ideas do not hatch, they grow.
They evolve. They change. They adapt. They are affected by the environment.
In many cases prior to the web, this was not possible. You can't really slowly build a store. What are you going to do, but 10 square feet at a time? Are you going to slowly build your inventory and identity? Change your goods or services based on demand? Nope. Probably not. Can't afford it. Space is too expensive. At least real space is.
That's the beauty of the web, it's the long tail at work. Everyone has access to everyone else and there are million of niches waiting to be filled. You don't need to try and be everything to everyone because you can afford not to be. It's a luxury that didn't exist up to this point. Now we have an opportunity to grow organically. We can build something for a specific need, attract people who are interested in it for that purpose and then slowly add elements that add to their experience. That's why it's a great time to be an entrepreneur (I guess, I can't really say because I'm not one).
But this is bigger than just the web (as usual). This is about people beginning to understand that ideas evolve. The more people that understand that big ideas do not appear out of thin air, the more people will be encouraged to think. It extends to nearly all parts of life. You don't need to understand everything about a topic. You don't have to understand every page of that book. Those people who are most successful are usually not the ones who are solely focused on one thing, but the people who have lots of little focuses that they can tie together. The 21st century is all about being a polymath (a word I learned from Eide Neurolearning Blog that means "a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning).
Steve Jobs defines creativity like this:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they en up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.
The 21st century is all about interdisciplinary education and introspection. It's about recycling and
remixing. All of these notions become a whole lot easier to understand when people get that ideas don't just show up.
In other words, being open to the notion that great ideas stem from evolution lets all these other things in the door.
Together they'll push us all to new heights, both online and off.
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del.icio.us adds two seemingly killer features. Geeks shudder.
del.icio.us took two more steps towards world domination in the last two days without me noticing. First, by
recommendations and then by adding
site-wide search. Ummmm . . . wow.
The recommendation engine apparently works in two ways, either you can see similar tags to the one you've chosen, or recommended links. The search engine is pretty much what you'd imagine. Up until now you could only search your own links, now you can search site-wide. Sweet.
There's much more to say on why I care about this, but I'm really tired and I have laundry to get out of the dryer. I will leave you with one thought, however. Isn't it funny how del.icio.us is building a so-called social networking site from the ground up. First it's just this thing to add your bookmarks, and slowly more and more social features are added. Soon you've built a real community around things people care about and they actually have a desire to do the whole "Friendster thing," see the connections, meet new people, etc. I've said it before and I'll say it again, social networking is about content.
And now I'm off to the laundry room . . .
Update (8/15 -- about three minutes after I posted this the first time): First thing, I don't think I've ever said "social networking about content" and that's because it's a gross overstatement and doesn't make all that much sense. I have talked in the past about how social networking is not a primary activity, and is better off being built around the framework of a relevant activity. In the case of del.icio.us, that relevant activity happens to be collecting content, however, I don't think this is necessarily true across the board. I do, however, think it's time for me to go to bed before I say anything else stupid.
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By allowing anyone to tag their own content on their own site, people can organize in an informal and decentralized way.
I like to think that I'm willing to admit that I'm wrong (clearly not true). While I don't necessarily think I ever came out and said it, I have had trouble understanding the value of
Technorati tags. I never got how there was any value in tagging my posts for other people. While I still think it's a flawed system (especially because of it's spamming potential), I had an "aha moment" about it this morning.
While I was reading this IF post about "leveraging folksonomies" (paid subscription required), I realized that Technorati tags allow people to do the thing I find most innovative about tagging: Create impromptu, non-centralized communities without the need for any additional infrastructure (like creating a new group in Yahoo! Groups).
It was this seemingly innocent (and obvious) paragraph that sparked it:
An example this week was the 10blogs tag. A group of bloggers decided to suggest what 10 blogs they'd take to a desert island. Instead of emailing each other with a link to their top ten, they simply 'tagged' their blog posts with 10blogs. This allowed all bloggers to visit Technorati and browse through the whole blogosphere's top 10 blogs!
Wow. DUH! How the hell did I miss that? I kind of feel like an idiot.
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An attempt to answer one of the daunting music questions that still baffle us in the 21st century.
Over at
SimpleBits, Dan Cedarholm
posed a daunting question as part of a contest to win a CSS geek's dream pack including
both Dan's books as well as a t-shirt and an icon set. Since I was planning on buying the book anyway, I jumped on the chance to win it for free (as anyone who knows me will clearly understand).
However, this was more than just a raffle. There was a serious question involved; a serious music question:
Who is the present-day equivalent to Huey Lewis?
Dan continues:
This isn’t a trick question, but rather an attempt to clarify whether Mr. Lewis was an anomaly. Who, in 2005 is a middle-aged, awkwardly goofy, sports-loving rock star who, despite all that, wrote undeniably catchy songs? I dunno. Perhaps one exists, and perhaps one doesn’t. Feel free to look as deep into this question as you’d like.
So, after giving it some thought (and coming up with very little), I did what I normally do when I don't know what to say . . . I started writing. Although the final product is mildly (possibly more) offensive, I do think it's fairly amusing so I decided to post it here. This also marks the addition of a new section of the site I'm calling
Diasporic Comments (if anyone has a better suggestion for the name, please feel free to let me know, I considered "commented elsewhere," but I felt as though it required more explaining than a diaspora . . . which could very well be flawed logic on my part).
Anyway, now you can browse through comments I've made on other sites via the archives and see the five most recent on the Diasporic Comments homepage.
So, anyway, to go back to Huey, here's my response to just who his modern day counterpart is:
Hmmm . . . my first response was to answer simply with “who cares.� However, after some more thought, I believe there are two major issues here.
1. What current popular musician will turn into a middle-aged “awkwardly goofy, sports-loving rock star�?
If Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie can be considered a “popular musician� I am fairly certain he would eventually turn into an “awkwardly goofy� middle-aged man. However, based on the emotion in Gibbard’s songs I would have to believe he does not like sports (there’s simply not enough testosterone in there. Seriously, is there any question Kid Rock is a sports fan? How easy is it to imagine him on his couch on Sunday’s scratching his balls, eating Cheetos and rooting on the Lions? Very easy, but I digress.). That is, of course, unless Gibbard is a Chicago Bears fan, in which case he, like I, is only emotional because of the years of misery the team has put him through. However, that still leaves us with a major hole . . .
2. What singer writes “undeniably catchy songs�?
While Gibbard may write some catchy songs, I have trouble imagining there’s anyone that would call anything he’s written “undeniably catchy.� However, I would also argue that you would be hard-pressed to find very many songs written in the last five years that have been “undeniably catchy.� Justin Timberlake and Usher both seem to be spot on (if anyone here claims they haven’t had either “Cry Me a River� or “Yeah� stuck in their heads they’re full of shit). Usher owns a part of the Cleveland Cavaliers, so he’s probably a sports fan.
However, both those answers leave us with the issue of becoming awkward at middle aged. They both are smooth . . . maybe too smooth. It is quite possible that as they age all that machismo will slowly transform to awkwardness as they attempt to relive their days of dating supermodels while they sport pot-bellies and half a head of hair. Unfortunately, no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise, it’s a hard story to buy.
That leaves me with two possible answers. One is to return to my original thought, which is the answer of, simply, “who cares.� However, this is important, so I’ll continue. I conclude by offering up a singer/songwriter who defies nearly every norm. He’s a pop artist who writes explicitly sexual songs, including a 12-minute song called “Sex Me.� He’s a man who was caught on tape urinating on an underage woman, yet remains free and popular (although there was backlash, it has since passed).
That’s right ladies and gentleman, I am arguing R. Kelly is the modern-day Huey Lewis. “Ignition (Remix)� is an “undeniably catchy song.� I think we can assume he’s a sports fan, since he was in his 20’s an living in Chicago during Michael Jordan’s run and I doubt anyone who went through that isn’t a Bulls fan.
Which leaves us with one last criteria: Will R. Kelly be “awkwardly goofy� when he’s middle aged? That seems easy, just imagine your kid comes home from school and everyone’s talking about the tape where daddy is peeing on the little girl. Enough said.
R. Kelly folks, you heard it here first.
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What role will the web play in the future of education?
[My mother sent this to me in an email and I thought I might post it and open up the question to everyone. So read it, think about and leave some comments.]
By Barbara Rubin Brier
Trying to follow your thinking on web-related developments, I was pleased to see Richard MacManus ask some good/hard questions about down-to-earth explanations and projections of the future vis-à-vis interfaces. Out of curiosity, I clicked over to his site and found a number of references to web 2.0 and education and to differences in first year and fourth year student use and perception of the web. I was particularly curious about Gardner Campbell's quote concerning younger students living "…on, and in, the Web", and spent a moment or two on his site before I realized that I just didn't have time to follow that tangent right now… I have a report to write … about the increasing challenges and complexities of being a school principal.
There is a connection here, so hang on. The reason I was visiting NoahBrier.com earlier this AM is that I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by my report; the challenges of the principalship have become pretty overwhelming, especially considering that principals are being held accountable for improved test scores in an environment where they have no means of rewarding teachers for employing effective new instructional strategies, nor any way to impose consequences on those who refuse to step up altogether. Given the prevalent structure and organization of schools, the principal's challenge seems pretty intractable – which is pretty discouraging.
When I'm feeling like that, my mind wanders, and I seek distraction – ergo, my visit to your site. But what I read on Richard MacManus' Read/Write Web and briefly, on Gardner Campbell's blog, made me feel even more uncertain about when and how we can transition to this new world you're seeing. In a nutshell, it's hard to imagine RSS being an educator's best friend when librarians are still discounting web resources, and teachers continue to put a quota on the number of web references allowed on research papers (in spite of the fact that a blog exchange can probably be considered a primary source) … you get my drift.
I've recently been expounding the belief that 25 to 30 years from now, the people in our classrooms will not be teachers of content knowledge, but facilitators of learning that will be entirely web-based. We will still need schools and classrooms, as parents will still need to work, so children will still need to be attended to during work hours. But I don't think teaching, as it is currently practiced, can really continue. I still see 'professional' adults in the classroom, but I think they'll be more focused on 1)helping students learn to analyze, synthesize and connect content they access online, and 2) helping students to listen to one another, cooperate, collaborate, etc. ("Listen, Learn and Cooperate" as Carroll Lewis [ED: She ways my kindergarten teacher] always said!)
Anyway, I would love to hear what others have to say about this. I'd really like to look down the road, with others, and envision how these adjustments might occur. What do you think?
Barbara Rubin Brier is an educational change consultant who's incredibly passionate about the state of schooling.
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A new play set in Jersey premiering this weekend in New York City (ironically enough).
I'm not so big on plugging stuff, but Jeff Hughes, the author of this play owes me money, and as much as I like getting paid back in beer and bar t-shirts, maybe this play will help him pay it back in real paper dollars (which it won't).
Anyway, the play is premiering this weekend (it actually starts on Thursday) and it's running off-broadway. I've been to the reading's and the play is actually very good. As described on ShorePoints.org:
Set primarily in a single Jersey Shore beach town, Shore Points tells the story of how six people's lives are affected by a single event. Each character struggles to stay along their path as life just keeps getting in the way. They drink too much, they talk too little and the air isn't all that clean to begin with.
So go ahead and
buy some tickets and get yourself some real Jersey culture (in New York City, of course).
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Part one in what I hope/expect will be a multi-part series trying to bring thoughts about interfaces back down to earth.
How will interfaces evolve in five years? "When Johnson [in Interface Culture talks about "the unlikely secondary effects of new machines rippling out to transform the society that surrounds them" -- what sort of "new machines" do you think we'll start to see? Why are they an "art form"?"
These were the questions posed by Richard McManus in the comments of my "Art in the Interface entry. Well, well, well, nice to see someone calling me out on talking a little too much theory and not enough practice (although looking into the future is a fairly theoretical affair in itself). From Richard and company's comments, I'm getting the feeling that I've begun to go off the deep end a little too far. Is it really true that I'm not writing in words that make sense to everyone?
Let me take a step back and, as Richard asked for, give "a more down-to-earth explanation to the ones in Johnson's book." The irony here, of course, is that I found Johnson's book a far more down-to-earth explanation than I had ever read before. Guess it's time to take that a step further. So I'm going to attempt to start at the beginning and work towards Richard's question. This is the first part of the series.
Why You Should Care
Command line purists love it because there's nothing standing in between them and their computer. They type in just what they want to do and the computer executes it, no silly windows to close or icons to click. However, for the rest of us, who aren't so interested in learning a new language just so we can write a Word document and get online, visual interfaces are the answer. These interfaces (our operating system's desktop is a good example) allow us to use our computer without having to type in every command. When we want to close a program we just hit the little close button, no need to type in a string of letters and words to stop working on something.
Of course, the downside to all this is that there's something standing in-between us and the power of our computer. This is really only a downside in theory, however, because without that mediation 99 percent of us wouldn't be able to tap into the power of the computer at all.
It's the interface that gets us there. It allows us to drive the computer. Imagine trying to steer a car without a wheel. If you had to twist just a shaft back and forth every time you wanted to make a turn it might get pretty annoying pretty quickly. The wheel is the interface between you and the steering mechanism. Yeah, calling it an interface may be a bit convoluted, but it's fairly accurate. The whole mechanism is fairly simple, really, it's a basic, physical, cause and effect: You turn the wheel and the car turns in the direction you've chosen. While your wheel turning is being helped along by power steering, the interaction is fairly direct. Your motion is actually causing a physical response.
Now, take the whole thing digital. All of a sudden things aren't so cut and dry. When you move a mouse, you're physical motion is being translated into a virtual motion. What's really happening is that the mouse is charting your movements and telling the screen to redraw it's position accordingly. It's translating a physical motion into a virtual one.
Really, that's the story with all things digital. They're not "really" there. When you're typing on your computer, the letters you see are actually just pixels arranged in a certain order to create a letter resembling the one you typed. This isn't a typewriter where every key pressed creates a physical representation in ink on paper. Erase a word on your computer screen and you're really just telling the computer to get rid of those arrangements of pixels you told it to display a few seconds ago. It doesn't know they're words and, frankly, it doesn't care. It speaks one language (computer code) and you speak/understand another (presumably English/visual communications). The interface bridges the gap between the two.
That's why it's so important, without most of us would have a lot of trouble getting our computer to do anything. But it's also bigger than that. After all, looking at an operating system for example, it needs to communicate to users a vast realm of possibilities using mostly visual metaphors with a small bit of text. Interface designers are faced with the near impossible task of making users understand the incredible spectrum of operations your computer is capable of.
While many of these metaphors seem like a part of life today, at one time they were not. Someone had to come up with the 'trash can' as a place to put documents you no longer wanted. They also had to decide 'folders' were a good metaphor for a place to store digital files. We're used to this stuff now, but someone, at some point, made the decision to use a desktop as a metaphor for our computer and whether we're aware of it or not, it's had a huge impact on how we all understand computers.
Just think about the desktop metaphor for one second. Is it any wonder that people had trouble imagine the computer as anything more than a glorified typewriter? After all, everyone understood their desk. They had papers on it they could organize into folders and the only other things they need was some way to create those documents. The desktop metaphor, then, clearly sets forth document creation as its central tenet. Interface designers were translating visually what they felt was the most important application for your computer. They were telling users a story about just what a computer could do.
This is what Steven Johnson means when he writes the following in Interface Culture:
Organic, low-tech metaphors once belonged to those lagging behind the machinic power curve, the Luddites and the antediluvians, the poets and the novelists, the ones reaching for older analogies because the shock of the new had so overwhelmed them. In today's society, the task of translation has migrated to the technicians. In the age of the graphic interface, with its visual metaphors of trash cans and desktop folders, imaginative flashbacks have become programming feats, conjured up by high-tech wizards hacking away in assembly language.
In the old days, it was writers who translated our complex world for us. They helped us understand culture by using common metaphors we could easily comprehend. Today, though, the most important task of explanations belong to interface designers. That's because we have this incredibly powerful tool in front of us (the computer) and there are very few of us who know how to actually unlock it's potential. Without them, we'd all be left with the task of learning an entirely new language just to use this tool and at that point, it seems like the work required may outweigh the benefit received.
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What happens when you drop a lot of bouncy balls onto a San Francisco street? If I had a dime for everytime I've asked myself that . . .
Photo by sem via FlickrBlog.
That, my friends, is what it looks like when you drop a shitload of bouncy balls onto the streets of San Francisco. Apparently it's for a Sony commercial. Archive.org even has some video of the event (I recommend watching the high res downloadable version which is 31 megs).
You see, I'm not a total dork. I can write non-geeky entries too! (Although, I'm not entirely sure this counts as non-geeky.) Jury?
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Two writers, two quotes, one theme. Thinking about just what's in the "middle."
I highlight every book I read. It's partly out of habit and partly because I've got a shitty memory, but it's not something I'm planning on stopping anytime soon. Anyhow, I'm in the middle of reading
Snow Crash and couldn't help but highlight the following passage, not because it's overly interesting by itself, but because it brought me back to another book immediately:
Now that the concert is up and running, it will take care of itself. There's not much more for Hiro to do. Besides, interesting things happen along border -- transitions -- not in the middle where everything is the same.
Like I said, not over fascinating, but when I went back and found this highlighted section in
The Crying of Lot 49, things got a little more interesting:
She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
I'm way too tired to get into connecting both of these at the moment. To be honest, this entry is just a poor excuse for me to write down two quotes I'd like to talk about later. So all is not lost, however, let me leave everyone with this word of wisdom:
Highlight your books, you won't regret.
With that I am off to bed. Goodnight and watch out for middles.
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A giant quote about the future art of interace design and an introduction of the new NoahBrier.com glossary.
Tonight my mom called me up and asked me to tell her what I meant by "interface." She explained to me that I need to remember that "there are regular people reading your page" and proceeded to call me a geek (can you believe it?). Anyway, after explaining for a while in lots of different ways (from elevator buttons to the trash can on your desktop), I finally got to a point to read her this paragraph from
Interface Culture which I had been meaning to share with everyone anyway (especially after my
long conversation with
Josh Porter):
The most profound change ushered in by the digital revolution will not involve bells and whistles or new programming tricks. It will not come in the form of a 3-D Web browser or voice recognition or artificial intelligence. The most profound change will lie with out generic expectations about the interface itself. We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form -- perhaps the art form of the next century. And with that broader shift will come hundreds of corollary effects, effects that trickle down into a broad cross section of everyday life, altering our storytelling appetites, our sense of physical space, our taste in music, the design of our cities. Many of these changes will be too subtle or gradual for most people to notice -- or rather, we'll notice the changes but we won't perceive their relationship to the interface, because the various elements will appear to belong to different categories, like so many aisles in a grocery store. But the history of technolculture is the history of such interminglings, the unlikely secondary effects of new machines rippling out to transform the society that surrounds them.
Wow.
Instead of commenting on this (which I'll reserve for another time), I would like to inform everyone that in response to my mother's recommendation, I have also added a glossary to the site. I will try to define any words that I think are less than usual there. If you run into anything you want defined, please just let me know. Thanks.
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If we're primed to enter the Era of the Interface, what's after that?
I've now written and deleted the start to this entry about ten times (I know it's
cliched to start that way, but
whatevs). I'm trying to write about the
debate I got into over at
Bokardo. Joshua Porter wrote this seemingly innocent paragraph:
You know you have trouble when people start calling something a “buzzword� and a lot of folks have been calling “Web 2.0″ a buzzword lately. I don’t think it is one, or rather I think that what it refers to is a real thing. If we end up calling it something else, that’s fine, but I believe that we’re seeing a huge shift right now: to the Era of Interfaces. (which may or may not be a buzzword in itself).
Of course, I wasn't going to let Josh
get away that easy. So I asked:
Is it really an era of interfaces or is it an era of interface awareness? Maybe you’ve answered it elsewhere, but interfaces have existed for ages, we’ve just normally been content to let them fade to the background. What’s the big difference now?
Joshua was nice enough to engage my comment. He responded:
Noah, excellent question. I would definitely agree that whatever we are in has caused us to have more awareness of interfaces than before. In fact, awareness might be how you could define an era: what are people aware of? If it is interfaces, then we might be in an era of interfaces. You may have gotten close to what an era truly is…
We’ve had iron since the Iron Age, but there was only one Iron Age: a period of intense development when iron was the center of attention…perhaps we’re in an analogous age or era with interfaces.
Also, there was a tremendous amount of work done in the interface arena back in the 80’s during the PC revolution. I would say that the era we’re currently in is different from that because now we’ve added public programming interfaces, which allow for shared data, and thus allow interaction interfaces built on top of them that anybody can use. Quite a startling difference, I think, and that’s why I used “era of interfaces� to describe today’s environment.
Joshua raises some interesting points. What makes something an
era? Is it that which we're most aware or that which has the largest impact? Was it the iron age because it was the center of attention or because it had the largest impact? Is there necessarily any difference between the two? Are you sleeping yet? With some of this in mind, I replied:
I’m not sure that an era is defined by awareness, I think an era is typically defined by the tool which makes the largest impact. It’s quite possible that with the massive amounts of data floating around and the ubiquitousness of digital technology that the digital interface could become the defining tool of a generation. On the other hand, mobile technology (the real stuff, not the laptops of today) may be a serious threat to the era title. Although interfaces may play a more important part than the tools (you could argue that for almost any age probably), mobile technology could end up overshadowing it in the future.
You know, the more of this entry I write, the less I think anyone else will be interested in it. But I digress. What I'm trying to get towards (slowly) is that what we are most aware of is not necessarily that which has the biggest impact. It's the medium/message thing again. What we notice is often not the effect but the cause. What's interesting in this case, however, is that I think Joshua is a bit ahead of his time (as usual) and has noted an effect as it shifts to a cause.
Let me explain (better): Most people would call this the digital era. Computers, mobile phones and iPods are everywhere. Data floats around the world at astounding speeds and we need ways to deal with the onslaught. Interface design is becoming increasingly important. People are starting to notice it with things like the iPod. However, if you asked them, the vast majority would most likely still talk about the device itself, or the ease of use, not the interface itself. As we move further into the future, however, these interfaces will further emerge, especially as the price of digital goods plunges. What will separate the good from the bad will increasingly be the interface that powers it rather than the device itself.
Add this to the interaction interfaces of Web 2.0 and you've got a lot of people thinking about their point of contact with their data. With that said, I'd like to raise another challenge, that requires looking further into the future. If, as Joshua and I have posited, the interface does take a more prominent role what becomes the effect of that? If interfaces are the medium, what's the message?
Mmmmmmmmmm . . . (Thanks for the conversation Joshua, and sorry for stealing all your comments and posting them, hope you don't mind.)
Update (8/4/05): I unlinked the word aware (from terrorism) and the word impact (from George W. Bush) because I'm not prepared to make that kind of political statement without any explanation. That's for another post at another time.
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If things look funny, do not readjust your screen, just refresh your browser.
Just as a warning, if you experience any strangeness on the site (things not loading right/looking funny) just hit refresh. I rearranged some things and split up my style sheets a bit, so now when a page tries to load a cached version it may not find the sheet it needs. This is part of my never ending quest to find the right design for the homepage (and the rest of the site). Those who visit will notice it has been slightly tweaked again. I hope this will last more than a week or two, though I have to assume it won't. Anyway, enough rambling, you've been warned, please
let me know if there are any issues.
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A look at how we use links in the most expected way possible.
After reading
this incredibly lengthy
history of
Suck.com and the chapter on "links" in Steven Johnson's
Interface Culture, it seems that what
many found to be most interesting about Suck.com was the way it used hyperlinks. Rather than just using links in a
boring way, Suck.com used them to actually add to sentence meaning as opposed to just using them as footnotes. Johnson explains:
Whereas every other Web site conceived hypertext as a way of augmenting the reading experience, Suck saw it as an opportunity to withhold information, to keep the reader at bay. Even the sophisticated Web auteurs offered up their links the way a waiter offers up fresh-ground pepper: as a supplement to the main course, a spice. (Want more? Just click here.)
It's actually quite a
challenging task, but a fascinating one at the same time. The hyperlink has the ability to
completely transform the way we write, yet we tend to just use it as a we would a footnote, doing things like connecting someone to the
Apple homepage when we mention the name of the company.
Suck.com was doing something that very few have been able to grasp since: Abandoning language conventions and embracing some of the power of this new medium. Instead of writing out a joke, why not just use the power of links to tell it? The Big Fish explains:
“It’s important to understand that up until then, to the best of my knowledge, people had just used hyperlinks in a strictly informational sense, simply as online footnotes,� says Mark Dery, author of Escape Velocity. “With Suck, you wouldn’t get the joke until you punched through on the link. Then you found out that it set the keyword to which this new source was linked in an ironic light.�
Part of the reason Suck.com could do this was because they had an audience who
knew the deal, but also because they just didn't care. They don't seem to have been interested to bowing to the
lowest common denominator and for that they deserve some credit. I know from personal experience that "click here" shows up because there's a belief people won't know what to do otherwise. Shouldn't we have a little more faith, though?
I'd like to think so. I'd also like to think I can take better advantage of the hyperlink. At least it's worth a shot. Right?
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Hi, I'm 
