Assembling these kinds of lists is a low-cost way of adding value (and
providing extra exposure) to older pieces of writing. I should do that
too at some point.
Here are a few of my favorite picks in Ross's list:
I've written a
lot of code, a lot of software, some of which has been very useful to
others. I've written chat rooms, bulletin boards, calendars, task
managers, weblogs, member databases, mailing list managers, website
authoring programs, shopping carts, content managers, image
manipulation, DNS administration, server monitoring, and probably much
more I'm forgetting.
But I've never made a program open source. [...]
I'm considering changing my mind,
and picking one of my projects as something I can make limited and
solid enough that I can actually export it to other people. [...]
Ming, by all means please do! Based on what I've seen of your impressive New Civilization Network architecture, I think the world could benefit a lot from your open-sourcing the fruit of your efforts.
first there was danah, and today on my radar (by way of éric) comes u of t's monica m.c. shraefel, who's been focusing on "how to make web-based and (more recently) non-web-based hypermedia systems more tunable for user exploration."
In particular, mSPACE
("architecture and interaction design to support
exploration of information spaces for the domain-naive user.") seems ambitious and
interesting.
A
meandering essay that visits semantics, Darwinism and aesthetics,
professor at the Oslo School of Architecture Jan Michl argues for a
perspective on design that is less solitary and myopic and more
cooperative and historical. In other words,redesign.
The
concept of redesign has the advantage that it actually contains the
word design, i.e. the concept retains the individual creator dimension
of the word design while at the same time, through the prefix re-,
emphasising that the individual creative process has the character of
step-by-step changes in, improvements on, and new combinations of
solutions that already exist. In this way, the concept reminds us that
every complex product that is improved embraces a large number of
clever solutions that earlier designers have contributed, and which the
latest designer freely adopts, makes into her own, and builds on. In
other words, the concept of redesign underlines the fact that – both as
process and product – design always contains a collective, cooperative
and cumulative dimension.
Yup, we're not really doing this all by ourselves. When a design
becomes really successful, often the last person in the lineage is
celebrated while
the predecessors are almost forgotten. Of course, similar things also occur in
academia.
I really liked the quotes at the beginning of the essay, especially this one:
“ if anybody were to start where Adam started, he would not get further than Adam did…”
- Karl Popper, philosopher, 1979
Ed laments the absence of wikis that are easy to install and use. Well, I can say that Clifford Adams' UseModWiki
is easy enough to install that even I was able to do it, multiple times
even. It reached version 1.0 this fall, and now supports RSS feeds out
of the box. Freely distributed under the GPL license. Download here.
This worries the RSS geek in me a little bit. Gary writes about "the great sucking sound RSS can make when set out into the real world" in The End of RSS (304 link mine):
These can't be 30,000 unique requests, so why don't they all
just register 304 codes telling them I haven't posted a new story to
that site in days? Isn't that what RSS protocol is all about?
