Tuesday, September 17, 2002

Collaborative work. Kevin Werbach : Jeremy Allaire ruminates about metaphors for social computing.  He's on the right track.  Jeremy's thoughts about how Flash Communications Server could be used are strikingly similar to some of the concepts Ray Ozzie has expressed in connection with Groove.  Not that they aren't original, or that Macromedia and Groove are doing the same thing.  There's a deeper trend here.  Whether you come from visual creativity tools or document-centered collaboration, you quickly realize that the next big thing is what I'm provisionally calling Collaborative work (until I find a better term). [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog] 9:01:55 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Analogy Sep 15th The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can’t help it. – Leo Rosten Reading is like relationships. You once allowed yourself to be undermined by theory – by Barthes, Todorov, Genette, Lacan et al. Humbled to near silence by the knowledge that little of this had ever crossed your mind and, to compensate, even had a brief and trying fling with the deconstructionists (you broke up when it all began to sound like nyah, nyah, nyah). And still you wondered whether there was something you missed – all that talk, my god. (Later, you got a job in advertising and thought, ah… ) You still furrow your brow when artists cry that there is a revolution going on; you hope there is an evolution ongoing, and mourn deeply the demise of sincere intellectual debate. You realize then that your relationship with literature for a time was a lot like early love affairs, i.e. agonizing. Analyzing every strand to shreds, questioning your ability to discern, forever measuring it against some ideal. How does it compare? Do I want to be seen in public with this? Still you did it, got the notches, even if sometimes you faked it. Fuming at many opening nights and standing ovations, letting yourself be bullied into hushing the conviction that wild passion over a work, dissent or concurrence, cannot be equated with stroking a chin blandly, with intellectual understanding of what the artist was attempting to achieve. It seemed so naïve. Art is a moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television. – Rita Mae Brown Now you’ve come through a fair quantity of all that life has to offer, mind and soul. And, well, it took you long enough but you can finally say with conviction what you’ve suspected all along: just shut up and enjoy it. 8:30:15 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Twisted instructional design.. Here's a good example of instructional design for building your own Powered Model Aircraft. It's equally well illustrated as it is twisted.... [In My Experience] 2:11:34 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

You'll have a job. This excellent post presents 12 reasons why a good programmer should not worry about employment. It comes from the "I couldn't say it better myself" department. I remember discussion with other programmers where they claimed that because VB and other such tools make programming easier, there will be less work and less demand for programmers. To which I say: bull. Those tools make some programming easier but at the same time a lot of programming becomes harder (because our software gets bigger), there are tons of new software that begs to be written and every year we tend to come up with a new, uncharted territory waiting to be filled with new software (web servers anyone?, IM systems, weblog software, native XML databases, web search engines - the list goes on and on). There'll be plenty of work for good people. [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog] 12:34:31 PM    trackback []     Articulate []