Whoa. Quantum Information Architecture
Read this on train home yesterday – blew my tiny little mind.
“The Napster Crackdown” Written in
“The Napster Crackdown”
Written in September last year, this is a fascinating look at
intellectual property rights, the “attention economy” and
Napster/file-sharing.
Large as the major record companies are, music probably
accounts for less than one per cent of the world’s Gross Domestic
Product – a measure in terms of the old economy. But in terms of
attention, music certainly gets a far bigger share: most of us listen
to music a good part of every day. Instead of protecting the musicians,
adhering the old system of copyright and the old methods of accounting
denies musicians the economic power that is actually theirs. On
average, it is an enormous, though understandable, mistake for them to
side with the record industry against Napster and other innovations
that would help the new economy into power. Because they make music
more accessible these developments would also increase the percentage
of attention and thus of wealth flowing to musicians as a group.To put it another way, musicians along with movie
actors, video-game designers, writers and others who create whatever
gets attention, are in fact being greatly short-changed by the present
system. Even those who seem rich in terms of money, are kept far from
their just deserts, Rather than needing copyright, they are actually
suffering under the power that this legal form as presently handled
turns over to the corporations and their leaders. ”
“Wombling” Paul, who is director
“Wombling”
Paul, who is director of technology where I work sent the article
below round the company this morning, with some comments about the Wombles –
creatures from 70’s children’s TV in the UK, who “made good use of the
things that they find, things which the everyday folk leave behind” .
Paul called the tech product in the article something that used ‘the wombling approach to engineering’. Made me think that wombling is not just confined to smart engineers and product designers, but the user community also wombles
– finds the best ways to use your system, backdoors, forgetten
features, and spreads them through the community… SMS was wombled…
amazon’s wishlists were wombled into blog-content… wombling is consumer-hacking…
How to successfully design for wombles? Structure your design and build
and learn and adapt processes to leave good things around then let the
community use them, evolve them…?? How do you make that into good
business sense in these non-experimental times?? I think you can, and
that’s the case I’m trying to figure out at the moment…
“Elegance is the key. It is only maybe once a year that we at Interface
see something so beautifully conceived. This is one of those times. If
engineering perfection is found when there is nothing left to be taken
away, then Dr Dror Lapidot and his Israel-based company Decell are as
close as they come.”
Cutting a path through the traffic – The Times
More on wombling…
Raster wombling? Is that when Orinoco had dreads during his ‘experimental’ late-teens?
Or is it something far more magical…?
“You tell me what constitutes
“You tell me what constitutes an unusual event, and I will alert you if I see it.”
Words to live by.
Rather than being a 70’s gunfreak axe-hero , a ‘neugent’ is something else entirely. This news piece = neural networks for dummies. (me.)
Even [lead]better than the real
Even [lead]better than the real thing?
.dotcom backlash-backlash at cryptome.org:
What Leadbeater is pushing is what we may call New Voluntarism. Forget
the hackers story of Internet rooted in military/academic informatics.
Internet was born out of the Will to eBusiness. Shopping and
entertainment are the true nature of humankind. They are the one and
only source, engine and destiny of the Net.
“It’s insane to build a
“It’s insane to build a Web site for someone you never met.”
Written from a marketing perspective but a good concise justifiction
for user-research and design-particpation in new product development.
Methinks it could be useful in certain client situations… thanks Neil for pointing me to it.
ClickZ : eMarketing Strategy : The Right Time for Research: The Beginning
A cluttered sign is a
A cluttered sign is a bad sign
Article on the philosophy behind Manchester airports’ signage systems – thanks to Luke Scheybeler
“I didn’t know we had
“I didn’t know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective”
This from Cheskin:
Modernity, worldwide, essentially meant the freedom of communities from
aristocratic exploitation. This meant that the real money was to be
made by members of the community. The rapid emergence of P-to-P may be
the opening salvo in the virtual war to liberate communities from the
oppression of the overlords who want a piece of every transaction.
Point. Counterpoint. After reading more
Point. Counterpoint.
After reading more about the Thomas Frank book, ‘One market under God’, here’s a counterpoint from Doc Searls.
Consumers and workers are rhetorical relics. The Net is uniting both,
and they’re throwing off their chains. Industrial communism and
capitalism are both terminal. They can’t survive in a networked
marketplace, where We the People means exactly what it says.
I’m with stupid Over at
I’m with stupid
Over at the secret headquarters of the Neilsen/Norman Group, the
dogmatic duo have been getting in a flap about the backlash against
their packaged common sense.
Article in web design press here recently deliberately setting Jakob
against pimply pixel-art obsessed flashturbators for instance. He’s a
dogmatist, and annoying, but bless him, at least he can hold a cogent,
vaguely scholarly argument. Which is more than most ‘web-designers’ can
these days.
Here, Jakob answers the latest accusation levelled
against good design practice – that usable design reduces everything to
it’s lowest common denominator and that the perpetrat^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
– i mean practitioners of high design are actually spurring the
progress of human evolution with their 45 degree corners and 5 point
bitmapped text that slides-around-a-bit.
I think maybe:
[a] staring at a website is not the most desirable use of most people’s time.*
[b] therefore we click in haste and repent in leisure
[c] therefore we are all stupid sometimes
[d] so…. think a little.
* this is often cited as the ‘why don’t you’ position.
You’ll be receiving my invoice in the morning. In other neilsennews
– Jakob now seems to think that it’s a ‘usability movement’. Well, armed revolution may be the only solution.
