“We dig Optimus Prime and not Galvatron,

We dig “The Leader of the Pack” and “Da-Doo-Run-Run”

Spinderella and Bruce Lee, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”

“V for Vendetta” and “Into the Groovy”

PWEI Lyrics: This Is The Day…: Can U Dig It?

“The lesson that DoCoMo learnt early is the obvious one: that content and services sell. Technology does not.

It is the services – picture messaging, easy direction finding, finance, games, and hundreds more – which took i-mode to critical mass and beyond.

That, and a payment model which meant that independent companies automatically get a sizeable slice of the one-off payment which each service adds to a user’s bill at the end of the month.

That model stands in sharp contrast to
Europe’s Wap services, where getting beyond a “walled garden” of operator-sanctioned services was too complicated for the average punter.

That made sure that they kept most of the money. But DoCoMo and its peers saw that a smaller slice of the cake was fine – as long as the cake just kept on growing.”

» BBC News: The secret of NTT’s i-mode success

Read Jason Kottke’s musing on the blogworld (in as much as it can referred to as such) as an ecology displaying qualities of ’emergence’ – and be sure to follow through to the Stephen Johnson links he features, but there’s some real juice in the comments off this post, especially where the author himself gets to feedback into his own system:

“It’s important to note that weblogs are not acting in a vacuum in this process. Weblogs are but a part of a larger information network that includes public mailing lists, private mailing lists, Wikis, ezines, private email correspondence, instant messaging, IRC, Usenet, etc.

The primary roles of weblogs in the system are to tie all these other entities together and provide a record-keeping function for the network as a whole (i.e. information is being written down in a public place so everyone can read/use it).”

The ad-hoc collaborative filtering done by the tools Jason mentions above have been the subject of a lot of thought, conjecture, and maybe research in a limited way; but does anyone know of any research done on sites/businesses/entities that are the germs of such ecologies, and how they can best adapt to being integral and vital parts of such ‘systems’.

Obviously I’m thinking particularly of stuff I deal with at the BBC – the News site is already the spin of many a discussion forum, MeFi thread or /. story; but how to make other BBC content as central to community? Obviously there’s some… well, obvious stuff, like have a decent URL policy that identifies content in a suffciently granular way to serve as the germ of discussion or blog-piece – but what more subtle features and facets must content have to ‘go viral’ (ugh!) in the bloggerverse?

» Jason Kottke & friends on emergence and blogging

» Hollywood mourns cartoon legend

Roll over Tony Buzan, and tell Edward Tufte the news. Kermit’s in town, and he’s going to make your synapses shake.

More genius courtesy of Momus:
» Momus: Daily Photo: Ed Sullivan Show, 1970?

» NASA’s Visible Earth

Dan Hill holds forth on the parallels between real world store architecture and information architecture online. I know taking TOO direct a metaphorical relationship between them annoys some people, but there’s some food for thought here if not taken too literally, imho.

» cityofsound/blog/The Information Architecture of Liberty, London

“Socrates: Maybe McLuhan was right about artists being the only ones who really see the importance of context in communication. I came across a website about a Japanese laptop artist called Oblaat, a New York-based sound curator called Keiko Uenishi. Even the name Oblaat contains a reference to McLuhan’s insight: in Japanese ‘oblaat’ means the colourless, tasteless, self-dissolving gel which surrounds pill capsules. You can’t taste it, but it gives definition to the shape of the pill, helps you swallow it. It’s a perfect symbol of making defining, invisible contexts visible.”

and…

“This, then, was the sound of humanism. It shone like an exit sign in the palace of mirrors.”

» Momus: Thought For The Day:
The Electroacoustics of Humanism

What heartening news. The awesome Archigram take their place in the architecture hall of fame, if they hadn’t already, by being recognised with the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal.

Reading the following quote about the creative act of “dare” from the citation mind me to mind of a few current digital design threads around the place. Oh, And if you go over to heyotwell.com you’ll see that Andrew has spotted this nodal point too, and has summed it up eloquently in a post about “designer responsibility”.

“What Peter Cook has called “The Archigram Effect” is that of “dare” and of watching how other architects are sometimes encouraged to find it possible to innovate, to turn a programme on its side, to fly in the face of local traditions or inhibitions. The effect has been to instil a mood of optimism, so that, however it turns out, a piece of work will not actually worry too much about justification.”

» Judges’ Citation for the 2002 RIBA Royal Gold Medal Winner

» CHI-WEB archives — August 2000, week 1 (#84)
[thanks eleganthack]