Sunday, September 15, 2002

I really like this message about doing the AT and it's tie-in to how our society is moving from individual creators to teams. Boredom. Boredom. "The inability to be alone with one's own thoughts and emotions is something that's been not only fostered but forced on us by the society in which we live." [Archipelago] 5:11:52 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

On Development. I often receive emails from people new to web and application development asking me how to begin. What direction to take. What things are important to know. How to get started! First things first. Developing is hard. Even after years of experience writing code, creating websites, and building web applications, it's still hard. Sure, as familiarity increases and experience grows, the tedious and tiresome parts fade away and things get smoother. Faster. But it never stops being hard. Carl, a good friend and colleague of mine (he has no website, so please look at this picture), is a programming veteran, database architect, and Java Guru. He knows development and enjoys teaching what he knows to his friends (to our constant benefit). If you asked him, he'd tell you: Development is hard. So then: What? Don't let that discourage you. The best things in life are hard, and many are actually worth the effort. The rewards of learning to program and develop websites are many. The value of creating something you're proud of, expanding what you know and changing how you think cannot be underestimated. Continuing your education and learning something new every day keeps the mind young. Where to Start If you already know about HTML or Flash, move into web application development. It will feel more natural to you, and there's a good chance that your ISP already supports all the technologies you'll need to get started building real applications. Look for things like PHP, ColdFusion, or even Perl. Both PHP and, to an even greater degree, ColdFusion, resemble HTML code. The new version of Flash integrates beautifully with ColdFusion, and built-in features can make a migration to this technology even easier. Developing a web application has its own difficulties (the statelessness of the web, for example), but the rewards are great and it's easy to get your web-app out there, fast, without the complications of cross-platform implementation difficulties. The Double-Click But what about actual application development? There's something magical about seeing that icon on your desktop and clicking it, watching the application you've labored over run for the first time on someone else's computer ... and working the way it's supposed to. Developing native applications with competent user interfaces is the most difficult of tasks. People with successful web development projects under their belt often muse about making a few cool tools for use on their own computers ... things they might even want to share with a few friends or release into the community. Many of these people become successful independent application developers, creating tools and applications we love, like LiteSwitch, Watson, WeatherPop, and jEdit. Learning languages like Java, C++, Objective-C (the tools of application developers) takes time, and the learning-curve is huge. But the payoff can be even bigger. It starts with reading, taking classes, and getting involved with people who can help guide you down the path of the application developer. I started out young and never stopped. But it's never too late. Bill Cheeseman began his career as a developer after 30 years as a laywer. Think about that. There's a big world out there, and there's a place for your applications (web or native). So get out there, wake up your mind, and start learning something new. [Hivelogic] 2:16:12 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Marc Canter's Broadband Blogging Vision: Set Text Aside.. Hear what Marc Canter, the father of multimedia, has to say about the future of blogging: The Vision is perfect, but the price is not.......  JRobb makes the statement: "We are rapidly approaching the day when it will be possible for a person to publish a weblog from a PC, with rich audio and video, that is read/heard/seen by 1 m people and have it cost under $40 a year (all in costs including software, bandwidth, etc.).  Now, that is a revolution." [JRobb's Radio Weblog] I love JRobb's attitude and enthusiasm.  But now he's ventured into 'our territory' - so I hope you don't mind the rant. All self serving aside, it won't be called a weblog.  Once media is disseminated into these tools, several other paradigm shifts and new 'features' will transform what we call weblogs today into something else.  I won't deem to entitle these tools, except to say - they'll be A LOT more than just weblogs.   The main reason for my first statement is the reality of using and 'creating' with media.  It's a whole new ballgame.  Yes we'll still have discussions, comments, permalinks, web links and other 'blogosphere stuff' - but those constructs just don't work with media.  Suffice is to say - this is where the innovation is gonna happen.   And what happens to communities - when they become media enriched?  What happens when you can go out with a camcorder, shoot a rally, demonstartion, bake sale or after-school activity, come home and 'post it'?   What happens if someone else was there, but posts something different - can we 'link' our footage tgether?  Isn't all this closer to being a pirate TV station that a blogger?  How do we encapsulate snippets of audio or video and 'permalink' them?  How do we hypermedia link instead of hypertext link?  How do we not simply embed media in our rants and raves, but truly create a distributed network of inter-locking news, entertainment, social, scientific and loving - media bits?  How will our communities change then?   We need to go beyond the current scope and capabilities of today's blog tools.  Putting it differently - it's text versus media.  It always has been for me.  Blogs are designed for writers to write (and perhaps attach an image or file - which can be media - yes.)  But that's the epitomy of a hack.  A kludge.  A temporary fix. That's NOT how to create a media based communication, publishing medium.  That's called patch quilting text based tools with media.   For this revoltuion to happen, we'll need a whole new generation of 'blog tools' - which not only integrate web services, communication and media jukeboxes - but also aggregate a lot more than just news channels and provide unprecedented levels of customization which is appropriate to who the user is.....(i.e. what's right for Grannie is wrong for her Grandchild or Daughter.)  (Or what's right for a regular user, is unappropriate for beginners or advanced users.)   This all leads to what Don Norman calls 'human-centered' designs - and trust me - humans ain't gonna hack their HTML templates or script a media publishing sequence.  As 'easy' as Radio is, we have to go A LOT further before these tools will be in the hands of many, who will become a Nation of One.  As easy as LiveJournal (or it's off-shoot DeadJournal) is as easy as these new tools need to be.   Finally the price.  Yes $40 a year is about for a blog tool.  But that won't include bandwidth access, which BTW should be different for folks who care about publishing out to their old college roomates and family, versus the entire, whole world.  Bandwidth costs money and video will never flow out over the 'free Internet'. This, in fact is one of the foundations of how tool smiths (like Userland and Broadband Mechnanics) will make our money - selling bandwidth, access and storage to end-users, in addition to offering to have them pay to turn off ads, or commissions obtained from selling digital download licenses. So yes - I love your vision, it's just slightly askew.  But I'm sure that, over time - you'll grok what I'm saying. :-) See also: Keyless klogging for the rest of us. Whither blogs?  Radio Wishlist - Hearing blogspace. Second puberty? [aka klogs] [Phil Wolff: technology] 1:50:36 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Emerge, already.. Existential blogging from Ray Ozzie: Clay Shirky on online community.  Clay's contrasting of "audiences" versus "communities" is also relevant in the enterprise environment.  "Employees", like "audiences", are intentionally gathered sets of individuals, linked by organizational affiliation and by the business processes within which they need to participate.  The bonds that hold communities together, however, are edge-based forces - the same forces that bring people together to solve problems, to innovate. Center vs. edge.  Orchestrated organization vs. self-organization.  Business process vs. business practice.  Fragility vs. resiliency.  Complexity vs. chaos.  Control vs. empowerment. Clay and Ray are right. Complexity science bleeds all over the social sciences. It is slow going and the math and empirical work are just getting started. But the thought, the approach is there. We're not decomposing organizations. We're going to their atomic components, people, and studying their interactions. Take a look: Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences: Foundations and Applications  Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences Weaving Complexity and Business: Engaging the Soul at Work by Lewin and Regine   The Edge of Organization: Chaos and Complexity Theories of Formal Social Systems by Russ Marion Facilitating Organization Change: Lessons From Complexity Science by Edwin E. Olson, et al Cities and Regions as Self-organizing Systems: Models of Complexity (Environmental Problems and Social Dynamics) by Allen And then there's the attempt to inform the management classes: Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge? The Paradox of Control in Organizations Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation  by Ralph D. Stacey Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change by Patricia Shaw The Emergence of Leadership: Linking Self-organization and Ethics by Douglas Griffin I can't wait for emergent project management: it's coming. A lot of it is balderdash, slogging through the bog in the dark. But then you come across advice to the atom. If you are a cell in a cellular automata, what are your rules? What works best for you? Bill Jensen's Simplicity and Work 2.0, and Cultivating Communities of Practice by Wenger, McDermott and Snyder are like this. Hell, I'll go so far as to say that the Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined belong in this cluster. This is part of why I like cyberspace. Our scribbling, pinging, messy stuff of human interaction, leaves spoor for academe.  I blog therefore I am. We link therefore we are. Our klognet melds with your klognet.    [aka books] [Phil Wolff: technology] 1:06:18 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

They why they call him CampinGuy.... Loyd Schutte:  "Found this great webam from Yavapi Point in the Grand Canyon that gets some spectacular dawn and sunset views..." Here's what it looked like at the time this was posted.  Come back later and click the picture again for an exciting difference... [jenett.radio] 12:54:21 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

American Invisible Radio As part of the Fall Season I'm proud to present American Invisible Radio, unofficially nicknamed WAIR. WAIR is a jazz audio station, available anytime, free of charge, over the internet. It plays the best of 'America's Classical Music' from early Louis Armstrong, through the swing era, blues, bebop, cool, hard bop, fusion, and then the fragmentation of the genre by a host of modern performers, as jazz abandons 'movements' and explodes in a hundred directions at once. This is the music I hear in my head when I'm writing, or walking around Manhattan. For me, jazz is the sound of New York City. I know it's the sound of many other cities too - WAIR will play a lot of west coast, New Orleans and Chicago music, for example. One early goal of this site was to experiment with multimedia, and WAIR is offered as a soundtrack for the book, something to listen to as you read. It works fine with a 56K modem. You don't need broadband. WAIR was created in collaboration with LAUNCHcast at Yahoo! Anyone can set up a station of their own, entirely free of charge, hosted on Yahoo! servers. I think it would be fun for other blogs to have radio stations. You can learn a lot about a person from their CD collection. WAIR was hard to program. I took great care, rating more than 2500 songs, 1100 albums and 800 artists, but the selection logic that Yahoo! uses is curious. So WAIR is still in an early stage of evolution. It doesn't sound they way I want yet, but it'll get better as time goes by. Jazz is all about risk, about diving into a solo, not really knowing how to get out again. The possibility of failure has to be present. WAIR employs a similar concept, unintentionally. Due to broadcasting restrictions, Yahoo! cannot simply play a list of songs I give them. That would be too easy. So there will always be something unexpected around the next corner. That's part of the fun. PS If you have a 56K modem, be sure to switch your player to 'modem'. This is essential: - Click the Listen Now link to start the player - In the player, click Options (top right) - Click Basic, and then OK [American Invisible, Inc.] 12:23:10 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Boxes and Arrows: Building the Beast: Talking with Peter Morville. Our biggest area of learning was bottom-up information architecture. The first edition was grounded in the type of top-down processes that come with building a new site from scratch. In the second edition, we were able to draw upon an understanding of how to redesign sites that already contain huge amounts of content and applications. [Tomalak's Realm] 12:10:43 PM    trackback []     Articulate []