I had a great time at ASIST IA Summit in Baltimore. A weekend crucible of ideas and people and chickens. Here’s the case study on BBCi Search that I presented [ powerpoint, 3.6megs] Seemed to go down okay with people I think even though I over-ran hideously… I’ve had to chop out a couple of things from the talk about our future plans but hopefully there’s some useful stuff in there.

Boxes and Arrows is live…!
Well done to all involved!

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Yup – leaving Airstrip One for a week or so, as I’ve been lucky enough to be able to attend a couple of conferences on the East Coast of the USA. I’ll be doing some of my old acoustic crowdpleasers, but also trying some of my newer experimental electric material.

If anyone wants to meet up, have a beer and reconfirm that I am indeed, full of shit, then I will be in:

• Baltimore: Thursday 14th -17th March: Asis&t IA Summit: “speaking”
• New York: Monday 18th – Thursday 21st March: “Mooching” (and hopefully, seeing Qbert, Dilated Peoples and Ash)
• Washington DC: Thursday 21st – Sunday 24th March: AIGA “Voice” Conference – Milton Glaser, Naomi Klein and Matt Groening – Together at Last!!!

So anyway – I’ll be in Dubyaland* for a week or so mail me if you’re around and thirsty.

*to be honest – last time I was in the US it was booming with Bill, and I’m a little nervous of going there now… should I be worried? Will I get lynched for being “a european peace-loving pansy?”??? Answers on a postcard.

Following the threads that erupted after Peter Morville’s discussion of social networks – here’s what my man Josh ON of They Rule fame did back in 2000.

» josh on report | Royal College of Art | Computer Related Design 2000

Groan. Sorry. Commercial GPRS and UMTS/3g will probably both have payment models that revolve around the consumer shelling out for the data they download and consume, rather than the time they spend ‘online’ – as you’re always on…

This post at Subterrane discusses the implications for designing user-experiences in such conditions, and how less will be more for most consumers once they realise how much they are paying for each extra branding element or design-doodat…

“When a wireless user requests data, just what are they getting in return? How much extra baggage is getting sent with NTT DoCoMo’s video conference feed? I’m willing to bet that these technologies are based on current systems that were designed to use wired networks. Over the years as bandwidth got cheaper, extra features were piled on until it no longer mattered how small a file was, it only mattered that it could be viewed correctly. When people start paying for every byte, this attitude is going to change.”

» Subterrane.com: 3/1/2002 : Do you know what your handheld is receiving?

Just noticed the formal resemblence between “24” and “Timecode”.

How much do you think this was part of the high-concept elevator pitch for the series:

“…it’s like, Tom Clancy meets Timecode…”

…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?

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