Wednesday, September 11, 2002

[RadioFAQs] Question: [Bryce's Radio Experiments] asks why he is only now finding out about Radio Express which is a Radio script and bookmarklet that will post the selected text from a web page, similar to BlogThis! and ManilaExpress. I found out about Bryce's question on [Dewayne Mikkelson's site], and in time, I will add this to my Radio Documentation Collections.  So many things to get caught up on. Answer: In my opinion, there is a disconnect between the talents that figure out how the software works, and the talents that do a good job of documenting how it works.  Plus Radio is a Huge package of programs that can do many different seemingly unrelated things.  The way the documentation is structured, and the way we learn about Radio, invariably we do not know the right questions to ask. Mike Krus is only the latest in a parade of people we have stumbled across who has created some tool for Radio.  There are needs for sites that are public directories of plug in tools and other stuff for Radio.  Radio Userland documentation needs to point people at those directories. [Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 12:05:11 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Meritocracy, Elitism, and Their Cousins. I just read an extremely good article called The Talent Myth. I'm generally a strong believer in the principle of meritocracy, but the article provides some strong counterarguments. I can't quite figure out how to connect some of the thoughts the article provoked, so here they are unconnected: The people who believe most strongly in meritocracy are generally those who believe - correctly or incorrectly - that they possess exceptional merit and thus would be rewarded under such a system. Relatively few can make a convincing argument that meritocracy is truly the best system overall (maybe I'll take a stab at it later just for kicks). The description of the "narcissist" manager type (about half-way down) matches a certain EMC VP perfectly. In fact, the whole psychological/management culture that the article describes at Enron is eerily familiar. I love this quote: "They believe in stars, because they don't believe in systems." I like to ponder parallels between coordination/communication structures used in computer systems and those used among people; this quote really makes me wonder how someone who believes in a flat/symmetric "peer to peer" approach for computer systems can simultaneously believe in so-called meritocracy and drastically asymmetric compensation structures among people. A browser that supported intra-page bookmarking, so you could find the part of a page that you wanted, would be really cool. [Canned Platypus] 11:25:28 AM    trackback []     Articulate []