2007

Three good, non-obvious answers:

• That we participate in it.

  Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

  Lev Grossman, Time’s Person of the Year: You

  You can use words like ‘platform’ and ‘web application’ and ‘Ajax’ and ‘desktop functionality’ but really in essence the most amazing thing about the web today is the concept of sharing is becoming increasingly OK. We are slowly coming out of our cocoons, testing the waters and sharing out things that we know, and things that we love or hate.

  Gagan, You call it Web 2.0

• That we can make (some) sense of it at all.

  People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs). In some ways I find this the most surprising of all. For years we assumed people had trouble with trees, never mind graphs. And suddenly hyperlinks come along, and as long as there is a Back button, they work.

  Adam Bosworth, Learning from THE WEB

  I would argue that the “back” button is one of the two or three defining constraints of interaction design. I’d even go so far to say that it’s more significant than the hyperlink.

  “Back” doesn’t just mean “go backwards”: it stands for the entire paradigm of user-controlled navigation, arbitrary hyperlinking, and back-as-undo that everyone has come to expect from the behavior of software.. The back button is a contract web design has with our users.

  Andrew, AJAX Summit (hosted by O’Reilly & Adaptive Path)

• That it is a universal namespace.

  The most important thing about the Web is that it is a universal namespace, something that has not been available before, not at this level of precision.

  Benny Gustavsson, On the Semantic Web language^PDF

My winners, so far this year, of the Keep the Web Weird prize.

• Susan Stepney’s Homepage. Swim around her factoids or her myriad book reviews—sci-fi and non-fiction being the two categories. And boy does she read good nonfiction. Check her rated non-fiction index for a good glimpse of it and notice how her book reviews tend to grow organically into full-fledged bibliographies [example].

• Luis Pabon’s Entropía blog (in Spanish). If you can only read one thing from him, let it be El hombre que hablaba al reves (The man who spoke the wrong way round)—it’s positively brilliant. Positively.

  There’s also a letter to his future self; oblique strategies; an elegant fable: El pez que se bebió el océano (The fish who drank the ocean); obscure calendar erudition: La abreviatura de los miércoles (Wednesday’s abbreviation); original music; a scanning of a (terrifying) dictation from a Spain under Franco: Libertad Dictada (Dictated Freedom); a reflection sparked by GTD^WP: Conocerse a sí mismo (Knowing Oneself); an absolutely amateur, yet interesting, physics experiment: Acústica de fluidos; and a beautiful, infinite poem. Even his profile is writing of the highest order.

  He has infodesign talent to spare, as he showed with his proposal in my calendar challenge, and he can sometimes use it for most amusing purposes. Like these two graphs here, perfectly illustrating why sometimes to go forward it’s better to get some distance first:

  
  

  Most intriguing is when he combines this graphic inclination with his (prodigious) verbosity to create amazing, longwinded plays with the ridiculous (think of that famous bathroom-tissue-distribution-units passage from Snow Crash^WP). There’s for instance the Messiah Project, his compendium of priorization strategies, and his “simple graphical and mathematical model for the analysis and assessment of situations according to a person’s capacity, responsibility, and will.”

  “Luis… estás como un cencerro!!!” says a legendary comment. Correctly.

Fuck, I keep thinking and thinking and thinking. And instead of stopping for a moment and writing some of it in this rather forlorn weblog, I keep reading and reading and reading—keep stoking the pyre.

This is getting scary. One of these days either I burn or I firework.

Tab Mix Plus is simply a pretty good Firefox extension that adds a lot of extra, welcomed functionality to your tabs. Today, lost somewhere within its not so easy-to-use preference pane, I found a little tooltip that is a wonder of clarity, of communication^EEM.

Now there’s a coining [link].

Is an essay posted by Steve Jobs two days ago [link] proposing to do away with DRM protection in digital songs. It’s a brilliant, persuasive pamphlet and easily one of the most surprising recent turns in Intellectual Property’s (IP) unfolding evolution—and with IP soon becoming the only property that matters, we are talking about a civilization-defining process here.

Now of course Jobs’s letter is self-serving, as The Economist clearly explains, but is he right? Is a DRM-free world better? With thousands of pirated songs in my library I could hardly make for a devil’s advocate now but I still wonder. If we renounce technological solutions, how will we reward creators? Will policing and empathy be enough? (Don’t be so quick to answer, we will all be creators soon.)

A technological arms-race between pirates and anti-pirates was bound to end in senseless wastage, but that doesn’t mean new structures are not hardly needed—economical structures (based on trade) not political ones (based on force)—if IP will prove ultimately viable.

Let’s see what we can think of—the problem just got a whole more interesting.

Time’s wheel has turned and there are tulips by my screen again^ELZR. Sad tulips, these. But still as beautiful.

It was interesting stumbling upon Jorge Wagensberg^ELZR in Daniel C. Dennett’s Freedom to Choose^AM. Interesting because Dennett quotes exactly that one aphorism^ELZR from Wagensberg’s book^ELZR I never could give any sense whatsoever—proof that you can never outrun your ignorance.

But also interesting because googling for the article where he coined the phrase I found out Wagensberg just published a new book of aphorisms: A mas como, menos por que. What is more, here’s an (Spanish) essay of his, selecting and commenting his 11 favorite aphorisms. Wonderful!

The article, btw, I found.. But it’s $32 and I’m currently bitching about the price. “Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life…”^WP

Butt-ugly as always, Edge never fails to be inspiring. Even more so now when Sam Harris has written a brisk, simple essay on 10 myths and 10 truths on atheism, and when the Edge 2007 Question has just been published—What are you optimistic about?.

Hope for the taking.