Gnodal Journal

The ever-fresh quality of new economics arise in this 21FEB01 Palo Alto Online profile of Douglas Engelbart; “Computer visionary seeks to boost people’s collective ability to confront complex problems coming at a faster pace”

“Dr. Engelbart lays his hope for managing the compute future in the concept of bootstrapping — derived from the metaphor of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. “As soon as we make headway, we should be able to improve the improvement process. That is, the better I get, the better I get at getting better,” Dr. Engelbart says. “It’sccompound interest; it’s positive feedback.”
“We’re going full speed ahead with no headlights,” is the way his daughter Christina Engelbart puts it. “To solve the problems of today and the future, organizations need better ways to work together.”

Responding to Dave Winer’s “First Essay of the Year”, Jeremy Allaire asked himself, “whether weblogging as we know it will truly become a mainstream form of personal communications and sharing, rather than it’s current perceived niche as form of personal or independent Internet journalism.” His musings raise two major characteristics of blogs:

Interesting that the first paragraph thetwowayweb.com‘s homepage quotes Tim Berners-Lee, who said in December 1997: “The intuitive editing interfaces which make authoring a natural part of daily life are still maturing.” I’m pretty happy with BlogBuddy, but the frankly the actuality is just as the site’s title puts it: “We’re working on it!”

Davenet: The Two Way Web is a good backgrounder on this.

Refering to sources such as Cornell University’s Ergonomic Guidelines for User Interface Design, in OS Themes Are Only Skin Deep, Kelly McNeill of Platypus Creations and osOpinion.com (“Tech Opinion | Commentary For the People, By the People”) wades into that whole skins thang:

“Unfortunately, the latest trend in “user-friendliness” is allowing users to modify the interface of an operating system extensively by applying “skins” or “themes.”

McNeill wraps with a great line:

“Superior interface is defined not as that which gets one’s attention, but instead as that which keeps attention focused on the computing task at hand.”

Maybe browsing for fun is about entertainment, pleasant distraction … and maybe that’s got precious little to do with facilitating focussed productivity … maybe.

In a column dated 27OCT02, Tim O’Reilly makes and expands a whole series of good points on the subject of Successful Free Software Businesses. (He also includes a selection of pointers to other threads.)

“I’ve been saying for years that the shift towards commodity software (whether free or just open standards) would lead towards a new paradigm in which money was increasingly made on services. (At one point I was calling it infoware, now I’m saying web services and ‘the internet operating system’, but the point is similar. People don’t pay for the software, but for the services the software delivers.)

In his 2003/01/14, Tantek Çelik rolls out his view on XHTML. (thanks to Jeffrey/for this one.)
Also, in his 2003/01/06/ Tantek points to”Simon Willison: … semantic XHTML provides a powerful and well defined format for storing content in a way that is both future proof and instantly accessible.

Calling “Adaptive design for weblog software” “a great chewy chunk of stuff”, Matt Jones comments, “Welcome to the New Cambrian.”. Well, thanks, Matt!

“The spectrum of software development has two ends. On one end is the push model (yes, I’m going to lapse into the push/pull dichotomy again), which is the model where you set your sights on a goal, and build a tower to get there (like Windows). On the other end is the pull model, which is more like an ecology. Tiny steps, filling niches, each new piece of development just taking advantage of what’s already there, and creating new capabilities — like, life creates conditions conducive to life, in everything that it does . But it’s undirected, not goal oriented, and slow. It can’t be forced. “

Yaa yaa, nice pages that don’t use tables … shurr. No, don’t get me wrong, I’m headed there, but don’t expect me to say To Hell With Bad Browsers … I probably spend half my time using NS4.X, for a number of reasons (none having to do with pretty pages, of course). Any design domain that thinks of three columns as the “holy grail” has got some serious thinking to do. With a good bit of sloppiness, I got this page to display what I wanted: 2 columns, menu right, where the menu is not 100% height. Is that so much to ask? really!

must read: Box Lessons … there be dragons, indeed!