Category: Links

Joe McCarthy on the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium. He summarizes some interesting talks and then goes on to talk about permeability or cross-over effects between online and offline worlds.

“Mashups have no clear rules on what they can and can’t do with people’s details”

Danah makes a good argument for supporting as many browsers as you can when building social network apps.

Ben reviews We Media 2006: “Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the conference was the missed opportunity the conference had to move the debate forward into new territory.”

Metcalfe on web 2.0 in the enterprise: “if you want to add a bit of “Web2.0″, my quick and straight-to-the-point suggestion is to do your “Web2.0 stuff” in a satellite operation at arms length from the rest of your operation.”

Hilarious satirical children’s book on file sharing.

Seminal article by Vannevar Bush describing how then current science could be extrapolated into the future to envision ways in which man would enhance his knowledge production. It includes a description of the memex – one of the first visions of hypertext

Merholz lashes out at both Microsoft and the New York Times for a rather silly idea, namely the Times Reader. It’s more or less an eBook version of the newspaper, remediating the physical world paper Times experience.

A nice overview of W.L. Gore’s company structure: small teams, no titles, no hierarchy – how the hell do they get anything done?

Marc Canter gives an excellent overview of the ways in which open standards are changing the web into an even more open environment. Good stuff, via Jay.

Rich Ziade should check out Cooper’s IxD work for ways to quickly get users from being novices to intermediates.

According to Coates there aren’t any radical and fast paced changes going on in media. Companies that are struggling to catch up have just been ignoring the signs that have been there for a long time. “The only way that snails catch you up is if you’re to

According to Leisa Reichelt, designing a good UX isn’t just about usability. Designers should seek to include other appropriate cognitive pleasures. Includes a preliminary list of suggested pleasures.

“a utopian society requires a utopian people” — Ryan questions Jimmy Wales claim that online communities don’t need constraints to stay civilized. I don’t think that’s what Wales actually believes – his point is that the software should keep out of the w

Jimmy Wales talks about the vision behind wikipedia and the future of free culture at the Long Now Foundation.

Coates comments on Paul Graham’s XTech talk. Is his take on startups essenially a political one, or does it spring from experience? Coates thinks the latter is the case and goes on to explore suitable places for startups to spring up.

Danah Boyd worries about new legislation that bans youth from accessing social media sites. Are there organisations aimed at defending social software users’ rights?

Metcalfe objects to a New Scientist article focussing on the security problems with mashups. He thinks that mashups are too experimental for them to be concerned about hackers and such. Regulation would only stifle their development at this stage.

Malarkey wants you to upload examples of newspapers to Flickr and tag them newspapertypography.

Michael Arrington reviews Google Notebook and wonders why they haven’t included tagging. My guess is they’ve deliberately gone with a single category per post-scheme to set GN apart from the competition. However, I agree that this results in a far greater

Dan Cederholm talks about his recently launched project Cork’d – a social wine tasting site. Great idea, nice clear design, I’ve signed up and will give it a try soon.

A review of the new MacBook. People seem to disagree whether the following are improvements: shiny screen, new spaced out keys and matte finish on the black model. I’ll check them out myself soon.

“Dr Spock’s Baby Care is a best-selling owner’s manual for the most complicated ‘product’ imaginable — and it only has two levels of headings. You people have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven’t even stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it’s complic

Chris Heathcote will be demoing the Apache web server for S60 at Reboot 8. Looking forward to that one!

A report of the experimental gameplay session at this year’s GDC. Covering some cool stuff, such as a guitar playing game, a casual rhythm game, a game that lets it’s player up the difficulty while playing, a game that is calm and soothing demanding to be

Adam Greenfield talks about his book. Most interesting points: designing for everyware will require new kinds of deliverables (even though we haven’t even fully mastered the old ones) and designers will have to be increasingly emphatic and responsible for

Adam Greenfield summarizes the contents of his book. “The role of designer assumes a new importance in this context—a new responsibility for ensuring that, wherever possible, the ubiquitous systems we make together improve the everyday lives of their us

Weinberger asks wether with the rise of folksonomies, we’ll still need IAs for organizing content on the web. The answer is, of course – we do. Maybe they’ll become more like JJG’s algorithmic architects, but regardless, there’ll be plenty of demand for p

“The most important function for a manager is X = -Y, where X is employee brain use and Y is degree of management. To use the horse whisperer’s advice, The more you use your reins, the less they’ll use their brains.””

Excellent TV commercial for the Public Health Dept of Belgium on teenage mothers. It emulates the look & feel of a video game. Remediation, anyone?

There seems to be a Backstreet Boys meme going on at Google Video. This is one of the funnier impersonations of everyone’s favourite boy band.

A nice write-up of an IA Summit workshop on how to use comics to communicate the use of an interactive product.

Mitch Lasky comes across slightly pompous in this report of his talk for the GDC. He talks about Jamdat (EA’s mobile division), chances for small developers, how carriers are not helping to grow the mobile games business, the problem of too much games on

A cool story on the evolution of the Animal Crossing franchise. How it went from N64 to Gamecube to DS. Nicely illustrates the challenges game developers face when shifting between technology.

Excellent special on all things gaming. With special attention to consumer generated media, MMOGs and social impact of gaming.

“The [Doug Engelbart 1968 demo] has been so prescient over the decades because the research team used and adapted the NLS as they went along, inventing idioms as they went. We still have a lot to learn from what they made, but in particular it’s worth loo