RailConf 2006

Friends come first and so I wasn’t at RailConf 2006.

abcedmindedness.com

After 3 plus years I’ve finally moved this blog to its own domain name: abcedmindedness.com.

Net Neutrality

Got home from vacation and watched the Rocketboom on Net Neutrality for 6/23/06. This was a great presentation on the issue and call to action. We all have to act against this extortion by the telcos. There television ad about Google server farms with their fake lobby name is a disgusting lie. So please Save the Internet.

User Experience Week 2006

Just registered for the User Experience Week by adaptive path. Design as a field of study has always interested me and adaptive path has really been advancing the subject. User design is what use to be called just design in 1969 when Victor Papanek wrote Design for the Real World.

Google Moves Close to the Resource

I grew up next to a new steel mill. It was built there because of the easy transport of raw materials: iron ore and coal. Then the people came. So it is very interesting to read in the NYT that Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) building huge server farms on the Columbia River close to the source of the most important resource: electric power. So instead of being on a waterway for transportation they are building on the waterway for the power generation. Different age.

650,000 domain names and counting

Now you know what to do with all those domain names you’ve been stashing. NameMedia steps out in boston.com article. Sure it is not April Fools day?

Happy TechCrunch Birtday

Congratulations to TechCrunch and Michael Arrington who I and my son had the pleasure to meet. He was very generous with his time for us on a very stressful day for him. A public thank you and congratulations. I read TechCrunch daily.

Good Enough: What is It?

It looks like in about 10 days that the Zlides editor will be far enough along to invite a few people to take a close look at Zlides. I’m not so concerned about the editor right now as I’m concerned that the simple format of the Zlides presenter is good enough.

Good enough appears to be a principle of web 2.0. So I’ll be on the hunt for a few days looking for posts and articles talking about ‘good enough’.

Distasteful Blog Pattern

Lately I’ve noticed patterns: Ajax patterns, design patterns, UI patterns and others. I’ seeing another pattern. I’ve noticed different lightning rods in the blogosphere and how people respond to them. I’m calling it the distasteful blog pattern.

Here are a few cases. The latest is the pile on O’Reilly about a cease-and-desist letter over Web 2.0 as a Service Mark. Prior to this were charges against Michael Arrington about alleged conflicts of interest and other incredible stuff. Both of these remind me of the ongoing noise level of negative comments about Dave Winer as discussed in WikiPedia (Relationship to the public). And Joel Achenbach and other Washingtonpost.com bloggers are continually being smeared in the blogosphere.

First, I think it is unfortunate. Second, all of these dust-ups involve complicated issues that require more that a screenful of text to explain. We use to hear print journalist complain about the sound-bite not explaining an issue. Now we have screen-text. So third, I think this is a matter of where the technology, in this case a (screenful) blog entry, is getting in the way. Now if you want to be a technology determinist, then that is the way it is going to be. But, if you think that our culture can rise about the technology, maybe will start reading more thoughtful responses built on the cultural wisdom of journalism, solid debate and common decency.

MochiKit Doesn't Suck

Probably when Bob Ippolito of MochiKit was born the word suck was still considered close to profanity. To him the browser sucks, JavaScript sucks, this sucks, that sucks. Anger can be a useful thing to get the energy to act. I don’t know him to know if really is angry, but it seems like it.

Regardless, he has a nice JavaScript library and if I was using Python on the server, I’d probably be using MochiKit. But I’m using Rails. I understand his issue with Prototype and namespaces and the importance of clean libraries. He has a point. But Fairchild built a better game machine than Atari but does anyone remember the Fairchild game machine? Great design is not always the winner in the marketplace.