…with apologies to Erik Spiekermann. Here’s the always-excellent Joel Spolsky on what “just enough design” really means:

“Incremental design and implementation is good. Frequent releases are fine (although for shrink-wrapped or mass market software, it drives customers crazy, never a good idea — instead do frequent internal milestones.) Too much formality in design is a waste of time — I’ve never seen a project benefit from mindless flowcharting or UMLing or CRCing or whatever the flavor-du-jour is. And those huge 10 million lines-of-code behemoth systems Linus is talking about should evolve, because humans don’t really know how to design software on that scale.

But when you sit down to write File Copy, or when you sit down to plan the features of the next release of your software, you gotta design. Don’t let the sirens persuade you otherwise.”

» Joel on Software: “Nothing is as simple as it seems”

Whoa. Whoa. WHOA. Have they won yet?

“Google is pleased to introduce Google Compute, a new feature for the Google Toolbar. By turning on this feature, you allow your computer to work on complex scientific problems when it would otherwise be idle. The work it does is automatically sent via the Internet to researchers who combine it with information sent by thousands of other users.”

» Google Compute

Flash moves towards the rulespace of the web with it’s new version: with embedded, exploitable information about it’s structure.

Named Anchors
Develop usable user interfaces and applications that ensure the best experience for your viewers. With named anchors, Macromedia Flash MX content can now be bookmarked, allowing for the use of the browser Back and Forward buttons.

» Macromedia – Flash MX : Top 10 New Features

‘Nick ran his hand across his forehead. “I’m not quite following you.”

“Granularity,” Randy said suddenly breaking the thin column into even more columns with a red marker pen.

“Y’see, the problem with the Boho Melting Pot segment is it doesn’t have granularity. It’s too vague. But adding granularity means we can now add more texture by creating granules. In this case we can add, Boho Woho, which is your urban miserable cash-poor artistic sort so we can strike them immediately. Boho Wahay, your hedonistic but cash-poor artistic sort, who are just ripe for alcohol guerrilla. And Boho premium, which is a rock-star granule, because they are the cash-rich ones who like to think they are arty which gives us a huge opportunity to focus our luxury goods push.”‘

» Nick Best is unwell…

Yup. It’s all here, and more:

“Hemp wearers might hate to hear it, but in terms of energy use and consumption of green space, a person living in Trump Tower is already doing the planet more good than an organic farmer in Vermont.”

» The Village Voice: Features: Sky City Fantasies by Erik Baard [via Glish]

Great American TV is better than almost any other pop-media in the world. Especially when it eats its own tail, ingesting old formats and formalae only to be born again a more formidable story-snake.

Example: “Smallville”
2 parts “Dawson’s”, 3 parts “X-Files”, 5 parts “Superman”.

Example: “Alias”
3 parts “mission: Impossible”, 3 parts Tarantinoesque Banterfest, 2 parts “Felicity”, 2 parts Bond-franchise-but-by-Bruckheimer.

“24” started last night here in Britain. Not particularly orginal in content, but formally it’s incredible.

Hyperlayered and frantic from the off, it’s going to become a regular fixture for me – and it’s on a Sunday night, which our colonnial cousins have long-known is the best night to put good TV on. Over here, we’ve only had Antiques Roadshow and Heartbeat to round off our weekends with a whimper.

Hopefully the BBC will wise-up and not fool-around with the scheduling as they are prone to do.

Or even better, someone over here will start making smart, incredible TV again.

» FOX Broadcasting Company: 24

“To all our questions”, as Col. Abrahams once intoned. Dan’s finally posted his magnum-opus on Echo.com and the promise it holds for media brands, the exploration of music and musical community.

“it’s radio that learns. Learns quickly too… …Watching it learn is fascinating. M’colleague Chris Jones described it as a ‘musical tamogotchi’. Hearing it play your favourite record unprompted is almost akin to witnessing a childs first faltering steps. Almost.”

» CityOfSound: Echo and the future of radio

Matt Haughey recently wrote something about digital music I’ve been meaning to point to:

“Imagine if you couldn’t ever buy a DVD movie on disc, and the only way to get content was to use cumbersome software tools in your PC, with an attached VCR as input. Now where would DVDs be if that were the only way to get new content? Looking at the world of mp3s, you see that even despite that daunting hurdle, they are everywhere.”

» Matt Haughey: The future of music

Scott Andrew has started to add a ‘google it’ link to each of the posts on his blog, allowing each to blossom into as many related ‘user-journeys’ as Google will allow. What an awesome little idea, that I’m sure will soon get taken up by others.

“Here’s something fun: see the “Google It!” link following each post? Click it to initiate a Google search on the topic of that particular post. Since the search text is based on the title of the post (something you don’t see here, but appear in the syndicated XML and JS feeds) I’ll have to be careful and make sure each post title is descriptive and makes sense.”

» scottandrew.com

Is it another example of the growing glue-layer of stuff that Jason Kottke was writing about? Or as Steven Johnson refers to it – the web’s “neo-cortex”:

“I was thinking that what the Web needs is a big neo-cortex. There are all these very specialized smart, focused tools being developed, and data that’s being mined, and collective intelligence on specific problems. But we’re not as good yet at, not just filtering all that stuff, but figuring out what belongs connected to what else. Google is, in a way, the beginning of that. It’s letting the Web solve that pattern itself, looking at patterns and links of what should be connected to other things.”

Discussed earlier here…

Okay okay, even I’m getting bored with this debate, but last word (here) goes to the inestimable Mr. Eric Zimmerman, who seems to have a pretty good grasp on the matter:

“I don’t think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a designer. For me it has to do with the fact that, and here comes an arbitrary definition, design is more about problem solving and art is more about expression of idea or self. On the other hand, if I’m doing work for a gallery space then I feel obligated to engage with the idea that what I’m doing is art because that is part of the context towards which I’m designing. To put a game in an art space could be just a game in an art space. However, it is also an interesting opportunity to explore a game in a new context. The whole cultural context that you’re designing for is part of the design problem. I’m extremely interested in context of reception. Maybe that’s why I see myself as a designer.”

» Interview with Eric Zimmerman and Jenelle Porter