datacloud

Dean's Open Source Campaign

From metafilter.com who got it the pointer from slashdot:

Build your own Howard Dean website! The Dean campaign has released web site "kits" under the GNU GPL and based on the Drupal codebase, which allow web-based communities to quickly and easily build their own sites to support Dean's campaign. Last night, he held a conference call with over 3,500 "house parties" and individuals to spread the word. If Dean gets the nomination, he'll have technology to thank for it.

I'm not sure who I'm voting for, but at least there's someone who finally gets what Open Source is about (at least partially): when you provide useful open source tools and others adopt them, they're not diminishing yourself, you're enriching it. The trick here would be if competitors to Dean picked up Dean's Open Source code and distributed it to supporters to launch opposing campaigns: would that increase Dean's standings (because his campaign had generated a useful tool for public discourse) or diminish it (because the activity generated by the counter-sites competed for the some of the same voters Dean was after)?

(Is Open Source founded partially on whuffie"?)

The Guy Responsible For Ctrl-Alt-Del

On Slashdot:

Gannett News is running a story about David Bradley, the IBM engineer who, in 1980, coined Ctrl-Alt-Del. Interestingly, he meant for it to remain a developer-only tool, not something for end users, and certainly not to have Windows users change their passwords or logoff. He also says he chose those keys specifically as it's not a key sequence that can be struck by accident.

100 Documents That Shaped America

USNews.com hosts an interesting (if somewhat subjective) list of 100 Documents That Shaped America (by which they mean, I supposed, the United States). Ranging from obvious choices like the Declaration of Independence and the Marshall Plan to less commonly read texts such as National Interstate and Defense Highways Act and the Japanese Relocation Order. Each document listed includes an overview of why the document was selected, the plain text of the document, and digital images of the document itself. Oddly, the chronology stops in 1965, with the Voting Rights Act.

Open Source Democracy

From Doug Rushkoff:

I've got a short book coming out next week in the UK called Open Source Democracy. It's being released as a free publication, by a UK thinktank-network called Demos.

You can download the PDF version of the book, here. Please feel free to repost it anywhere you like, or to make an html version - whatever.

I'll be doing a public talk and fundraiser for Cybersalon in London, as well.

IM as the New Phone

Many decades ago, companies marketing the telephone struggled to find a market. The phone was pitched as the new radio in many cases--monthly subscription fees would allow customers to listen in to live events. At six pm on Sunday evening, for example, the familiy might gather around the telephone and take turns listening to a live symphony broadcast over the phone. In the case of Instant Messaging, the companies already have widespread adoption: millions of users regularly communicate over clients such as MSN's, AOL's, or Yahoo's client. The difficulty with this use pattern, though, is that it doesn't generate enough money. Initially started as free services to encourage subscription to various ad-revenue or fee services, their current ubiquitious use makes them appear as untapped markets to large (and small) corporations. In this c|net interview, David Gurle, former MS exec now working on collaborative technologies such as IM at Reuters, offers some insight into where corporations are attempting to head with IM. And, unsurprisingly, they're rearticulating IM back into earlier technologies with proven markets:

I'm saying that Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo will become the equivalent of phone companies of the future, and with a reach that will go beyond their reach today. That reach will be global and without boundaries. With phone carriers, they can only go where the wire goes.

All of which is fine, except that in the articulation IM = New Phone, users are discouraged from other types of uses and developers are discouraged from offering new potentials for the technologies. At one point, for example, Gurle refers to IM as "the perfect disruptive technology". This is a phrase I've used myself to describe IM use in classrooms and workplaces. But where I'm thinking about disruptions to the power structure of the classroom and workplace, where Gurle positions that disruption as a marketing opportunity: disrupting the telephone industry to allow information companies (Reuters, for example) to claim telephone market share.

The Revolution Will Be Prepackaged

Wired reports that Napster has launched a guerilla ad campaign in NYC. Like similar underground projects that hi-jack existing ads and turn them to other purposes, Napster reps plaster the Napster logo on other group's posters, a form of economic-political commentary that relates, I suppose, back to the idea that trading mp3s is a form of economic-political revolution. And I won't comment on whether or not stealing music is revolutionary or not--like most revolutions, there's a whiff of truth that's largely obscured by opportunists.

And do it goes with Napster's guerrila ad campaign: The posters to which the Napster logos are being affixed are actually also Napster posters, making the economic-political commentary a little hollow.

[via rushkoff.blog]

Computer Security (and Job Insecurity)

Dan Gillmor discusses a Washington Post article on a computer security expert who was fired from his job shortly after co-authoring an industry association report critical of Microsoft's complicity in allowing recent virus attacks. The report appears to have been written on the employee's own time, during his participation on a professional trade organization (the type of activity, that is, that we should encourage professionals to participate in). Daniel Geer, the dismissed employee, won't comment on his departure. @Stake, Inc., his former company, offered this explanation: "The values and opinions of the report are not in line with [AtStake's] views." A PDF version [880k] of the report is available. None of the information in the report is surprising--many industry experts have been warning for years about the effects of Microsoft's dominance of the desktop and laptop market, including serious design flaws (which remain open because they also allow Microsoft apps to do some things that are interesting from a marketing point of view).

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Architecture for Programming

Joel Spolsky's weblog has a description of Fog Creek Software's new offices, which were designed to support programmers' ways of working:

1. Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation.
2. Programmers need lots of power outlets. They should be able to plug new gizmos in at desk height without crawling on the floor.
3. We need to be able to rewire any data lines (phone, LAN, cable TV, alarms, etc.) easily without opening any walls, ever.
4. It should be possible to do pair programming.
5. When you're working with a monitor all day, you need to rest your eyes by looking at something far away, so monitors should not be up against walls.
6. The office should be a hang out: a pleasant place to spend time.

And so on. I'm amazed that people don't spend more time structuring their workspaces to make the workspaces allow--and even encourage--effective structures and processes for their work. Well, maybe I'm not surprised. As Joel points out, the people making the decisions about how a workspace is laid out are not the people actually using the space.

Quotes from User Experience 2003

After a week on the road (several thousand miles via American Air and Dollar Rental Cars, three hotels in six days, and a lot of interesting conversations with people at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign). Here are quotes from some sessions at Nielsen Norman Group's User Experience 2003.

"I'm getting email offering to enhance body parts that I don't even have. (Amazon.com information architect, I forget her name). "This looks like something in my gynecologist's office!" (Woman in a product usabilty video, holding up a really bizarre-looking corkscrew) "I'm not even Jewish. My friends and I bought this for a drinking game!" (Man in a product video, holding up a dreidel)

Optical Illusions

I ended up at this optical illusion site and it took me about fifteen minutes to realize I'd been staring, slack-jawed, at the screen for fifteen minutes. So you've been warned.

Quick Classification Testing on Prototypes

Donna Maurer has a useful piece in Boxes and Arrows on quick methods for getting user feedback on taxonomies during website prototyping: "It is simple, requiring little input from individual users (10 minutes from 20 users is not a significant amount of time for them, but provides me with a significant amount of feedback)."

Writing in 3D

Brown Alumni Magazine article on author Robert Coover (long influential in hypertext theory circles) and Talan Memmot's experiments with three-dimensional textspaces:

Separated as they have been by generations and geography, it’s a little surprising to see how well these artists fit together. Memmott is a high-octane urbanite. Coover grew up in Iowa and is still every bit the big-hearted Midwesterner. “Our backgrounds are rather different,” Memmott says, “but we’re both committed to the craft of writing, and invested in electronic literature and what it can become.”

"Stutter Things"

I headed to the University of Illinois -- Urbana/Champaign tomorrow, to give a talk on ... it's not clear what yet. I have a title and a description I sent them:

Stutter Things: Composing Time, Space, and Text in the Datacloud Johndan Johnson-Eilola Clarkson University

It's analog. It's right in front of you. They don't need a delay line; they're creating delays with a beat delay line or with moving the fader in certain ways to stagger things and to stutter things and to manipulate time with your hands.

Naut Human,
DJ/Media Artist
Scratch

The term "text" seems in danger of catching up with its postmodern usage, where any discursive situation became a text to read, resist, revise, and place under erasure. But our idea of what counts as "writing" remains, too frequently, bound to traditional sorts of texts: novels, user manuals, letters, essays. Although hypertext and experimental fiction, among other genres, have challenged some of the ground rules of textuality, in this talk I'll look at a wider range of media in order to think about how we might rearticulate textuality in ways appropriate to contemporary culture. Oscillating between "text" and other media, I'll work through analyses of avant garde and experimental music (ranging from the loop work of Steve Reich to the Parking Lot Experiments of the Flaming Lips) to turntablism (including work by DJ QBert and Cut Chemist) to construct new methods for thinking about textual production, consumption, and articulation.

Then I'm headed to the opposite end of information ideology, Neilsen/Norman Group's User Experience 2003. Should be an interesting transition: chaos to order (perhaps). Or leftists to logicians? Anyway.

100 years of design

100 years of design.

is a monthly installment of excerpts from a proposed book, 100 Years of Design--A Chronology 1895-1995 , by Carroll Gantz. "This table fan, designed by Peter Behrens, was introduced in 1908 by Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft (A.E.G.), the successor to DEG (Deutsche Edison Gesellschaft), a German company originally founded 1883 by Emil Rathenau based on Edison's light bulb. AEG was the German equivalent of General Electric in the US."

(via metafilter.com)

Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash died today in Nashville. Obits at Google News. Oddly, many of the stories include John Ritter's unexpected death today in the same story. Not that John Ritter's death isn't news, but I thought it was odd to have run both death in the same story, as if they were somehow linked by more than coincidence.

DIY (by Users) Redesigns

Matthew Somerville, the user who has undertaken his own redesign of particularly badly designed sites, is interviewed at luvly. Somerville's made the important connection between overall usability and accessability, the latter topic frequently being thought of, unfortunately, as a specialized issue.

Until last summer, I used an Acorn running RISC OS - a very minority system, whose web browsers are not the most capable in the world, so it often proved frustrating trying to use various websites that did not work. This meant that I wanted any website I created to be accessible to all, no matter what browser they were using.

The redesigns, partially because they began at the accessibility for all level, succeed in understanding information structure and browsing processes in a more fundamentally coherent way than the original design methods.

(via Blackbeltjones Work)

Blogs in Business

The Washington Post spins blogs as business tools: Making Blogs More Than Just What's for Dinner. (Not that this is really new, but having the Post cover the topic will generate some inertia.)

(via Megnut

pixies return

Completely off topic, but MTV News reports that The Pixies are reuniting. Cool.

Stupid by Design

Bad Designs: a Website featuring poorly designed products. Confusing vending machines, doors without discernible handles, a mop sink in a public men's room that looks like a urinal...

(via Cruel Site of the Day)

More on WIPO, USPTO, & Open Source

The EFF has additional information on protesting the WIPO's stance that Open and Collaborative Development Models (OCDM, which includes Open Source) have no place in their discussions of trade. Initially, WIPO appeared to welcome OCDM as part of their discussions, but shifted positions after the US Patent and Trade Office advised against discussing OCDM. (Tellingly, the USPTO's position on the issue suggests that "patent" and "trade" -- both of which are possible under OCDM -- have less place in the USPTO than "profit".)

Sleeping

Warren Zevon died yesterday. His long battle with terminal cancer was well publicized, but it's still a bummer. Everyone's got an obit, but see chartattack's 10 Reasons Why Warren Zevon Was Cool.

I called up my friend LeRoy on the phone I said, Buddy, I'm afraid to be alone I got some weird ideas in my head About things to do in Denver when you're dead - Warren Zevon, "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead"

image from the Rolling Stone obit

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