Some of my Swedish friends from Razorfish are getting some attention for their work at Ocean Observations. I like this bit on their contact page: ‘You will find us in the western parts of Södermalm in Stockholm. In a former car repair shop on Heleneborgsgatan we sweat for our clients, try to make them happy with our solutions, and when visiting we bid them a great view of the island Långholmen which is our beautiful neighbour. If you give us some notice, homemade cakes and milkshakes will be served.‘ Sigh.
Author: Victor
The Killer, Open Search Engine
What the independent publisher needs now is a killer, free, open-source search engine for our sites. The Movable Type of search engines, with a plug-in architecture allowing individuals to add features. None of the free search engines currently available achieve what MT has in terms of simplicity, usability, performance, and usefulness. Lazy Web, I invoke thee.
Accountants and Visionaries
In David Stutz’s resignation letter to Microsoft, he despairs of the toll the downturn will take on management: ‘Being the lowest cost commodity producer during such a recovery will be arduous, and will have the side-effect of changing Microsoft into a place where creative managers and accountants, rather than visionaries, will call the shots.’
I expect that’s the situation in many places, it’s an economic necessity. The question is: when the economy swings back up can the company re-institute the visionaries or is the culture irreparably altered?
Link courtesy Mark.
Quiz: The Onion or The New York Times?
A Simplified Model for Facet Analysis
We republished an article by Louise Spiteri which attempts to boil down all the complex – and often confusing – original thinking on faceted organization into something managable.
Smart Mobs-Powered Snowball Fight in Central Park
Happening today.
Newish Wine in Newish Bottles
In the latest ASIST Bulletin (PDF) Andrew Dillon asks if, ‘research in information architecture is nothing more than old wine in new bottles.‘ Not unlike an < href="http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Dec-01/dillon.html">older column in which he asked, ‘I need more convincing that any one person could be described accurately as an information architect.‘ In this new issue James Kalbach itemizes the ways IA work is different than traditional LIS work: digital media, project-based time spans, not in physical space, and distance from the user. He points out how IA and librarianship can benefit each other and calls for more connections between the communities.
Two Feet of Snow!
Duncan Watts and Network Theory
WNYC Radio interview with Duncan Watts discussing network theory and his small world experiment.
Havel on Iraq
The recent New Yorker interview with Václav Havel is interesting for many reasons. Of timely interest is his comment on the Czech support for aggression towards Iraq:
“I think it’s not by chance that the idea of confronting evil may have found more support in [eastern European] countries that have had a recent experience with totalitarian systems compared with other European countries that haven’t had the same sort of recent experience,” he said. “The Czech experience with Munich, with appeasement, with yielding to evil, with demanding more and more evidence that Hitler was truly evil‹that may be one reason that we look at things differently than some others. But that doesn’t mean automatically that a green light is to be given to preventive strikes. I always believed that every case has to be judged individually. The Euro-American world cannot simply declare preëmptive war on all the regimes that it doesn’t like.”
Havel coughed and took a sip of wine. I asked him why he thought a policy of containment could not work in Iraq more or less indefinitely.
He put his glass down and said, “Civilization has changed. Today, any crazy, practically any crazy person can blow up half of New York. That was hardly possible fifteen or twenty years ago. That’s not the only reason. On the whole, the world has changed. There once was a bipolar world, a balance of two great powers, who made agreements on weapons reductions, so that they were capable of destroying the world seven times instead of ten. Now we live in a multi-polar world. . . . Of course, the question is: When is the best time for action? Should it have happened a long time ago? That is a political issue, a diplomatic issue, a sociological issue. But, generally, it’s a matter of the functioning of the world’s immune system, whether the world can deal with such a case of extreme evil before it is too late.”
Google Buys Pyra
Holy Shit! Google is buying Pyra! (and therefore Blogger). As one of the earliest Blogger users and beta testers I’ve seen for a long time how that crew, particularly Evan, has worked hard to keep Blogger up and running. Although I’ve graduated to Tinderbox and Movable Type it’s still a thrill when I see a friend start his or her first blog on Blogger, just as when they create their first hyperlink, there is such power of expression there. Good luck to Evan and Co.
Metadirectories
Fragmentation of the online movie ticket industry is frustrating customers who don’t know which service(s) to use to buy tickets at which theaters. Seems like it would be legal enough to build a metadirectory that handles the usual searches and then directs you to the right site. Hell, the ticket vendors might actually pay you to develop it as it’ll drive traffic to their site.
Venn Diagram
Why Corporations are Failing Individuals
Peter Morville reviews (PDF) “The Support Economy” by Shoshanna Zuboff and James Maxmin: ‘While individuals search for psychological self-determination, organizations sap time and freedom from employees and withhold service and support from consumers, all in the merciless pursuit of cost-efficient (read value-starved) transactions…‘
AIfIA, Come talk to us
Adam interviews some leaders from the Asilomar Institute: ‘… these are
the right people, organized in the right way, and appearing at the right
time, to proselytize on behalf of our young profession…If you’re
interested in arguing the point…all of us will be at the IA Summit in
Portland next month. We’ll all have those little nametags on. Come talk to us.‘