Monday, April 4, 2005
A common debate is raging across the web. It is a debate about credentials and who is allowed to provide and distribute information. Should bloggers be considered journalists? Is wikipedia a trustworthy source of information? For that matter it is a question of who should tell us about our wars, the Pentagon or our soldiers? This debate is also about who can provide what services. Can a loosely-knit group of programmers provide software of equal quality to large corporations? And can independent artists and filmmakers and musicians gain the popularity of the mainstream entertainment? This is largely a debate about expertise and it won’t likely be settled by a debate at all but by the rules of an emerging medium.
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Monday, March 28, 2005
If anything could be construed as a meme it would have to be a name — not as in names for things but names for people. Names are concepts without a basis in perception, they get copied and mutate a lot and they’re relatively common. Obviously some people think that there’s more to a name that just a label (apparently existing on an abstract plane of conscious intelligence). But if you’ve ever wanted to see how memes trend, here’s a great piece of software to do just that.
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Tuesday, March 22, 2005
I won’t pretend that the idea that neural networks operting like markets and vice verse that I threw out in my last entry) is at all original. I think I first got some glimpse of that concept in Steven Johnson’s Emergence. But no sooner do I throw it out here then I pick up an article in Wired (literally an hour after my post) that posits that network models exist in cells as well. (Excerpt below)
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Thursday, February 17, 2005
Steven Johnson recently pointed to a review of his book Interface Culture (a groundbreaking text and still a frequent reference for my own writing). In his review, William Blaze, questions the existence of an interface avant-garde subculture that Johnson discussed in his work. Blaze claims that there seems to be a microculture(s) but nothing that could constitute a subcuIture. I have to leave the distinction of microculture and subculture up to the cultural critics simply because I don’t understand it, but I do understand what constitutes avant-garde and I think a lot of innovation in interface design and art has already happened. I think part of the reason for a lack of awareness of this fact however, is do to a general misunderstanding of what constitutes interface design and what defines media.
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Sunday, February 13, 2005
Chris Anderson of the Long Tail blog identified a trend in commerce that he calls the Long Tail some issues ago in Wired Magazine. To summarize his observation, most (offline) stores have a limitation of physical capacity that keeps them from selling everything under the sun to you. The problem is, you didn’t know that some of the more “nichy” things out there under the sun were things that you wanted. Online commerce is allowing this situation to change. Netflix is giving you access to movies that Blockbuster can’t store on its shelves. Amazon.com is getting you books that Barnes & Noble can’t store on its shelves. And ebay getting you stuff that your neighbors can’t store in their garages.
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