i want to be a visionary
On the inexorable march of history that will see the death of our current political situation:

No matter how powerful our political and religious leaders think they are, they are as dust before the immense and implacable forces of history and progress. I just hope that they don't make too much of a mess or take too many more people down with them.

Alan Moore interview at Salon
- posted by JIM @ 7/22/2004 11:34:00 AM

 
IA and CSS
First Things First: IA and CSS

Cool best practices presentation from Web Visions about doing good IA to do good CSS to make good, portable, usable, accessible web content.

Very helpful. Makes me wish I was going to teach that design course again soon. This would be two weeks.
- posted by JIM @ 7/21/2004 04:15:00 PM

 
dbf redesign
Andrei is redesigning Design by Fire, and he's making some pretty daring choices, layout-wise. It's got a lot of negative space, but I don't ever find myself scrolling sideways (though I keep assuming there's something just off-frame because everything seems so open).

Looks great, and I'm watching how he puts more stuff into it. Great content, and the old design was good. It's been fun to watch this one change.
- posted by JIM @ 7/21/2004 04:04:00 PM

 
comforting

"The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey - don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride..." And we... kill those people.

"We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real." Just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter because: It's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love."

-Bill Hicks
"It's Just a Ride" (video)
- posted by JIM @ 7/21/2004 03:03:00 PM

 
Manifesto for the Reputation Society
done applying for a job. will blog again now.

It's definitely a manifesto, but it's very sharp and I would have paid money for the lit review.

from the conclusion:

The ultimate aim is to increase the level of collective wisdom through sharing our separate experience and expertise. This will enable a "division of experience" — instead of each of us personally suffering through scams, cheats, and mediocrity, we will be able to leverage each other’s experiences. Collectively, aided by astutely networked reputation systems, we stand the best chance of overcoming our dark side and bringing out the best in us.

- posted by JIM @ 7/19/2004 09:59:00 AM

 
newmedialiteracy
Just Think!

I was reminded of this project when Lessig mentioned it in Free Culture.

Cool teachers doing good stuff with digital video gadgetry and busses. You can watch the video. Youth media.

Related (through Yanofsky, primarily... I think): Hidden Heroes Another video project, but not as broad.
- posted by JIM @ 6/29/2004 11:01:00 AM

 
wank: extended by F/911
I'm sitting in Cadillac, so I don't have much to think about now that I've seen Farenheit 9-11.

Necessary review disclaimers include:

1. I like Michael Moore just fine, but that's because I agree with him


2. In my uneducated opinion, Moore as a documentarian doesn't demonstrate a lot of respect for the people he's filming to make the political points I agree with, and that turns me off


3. I thought F911 was better than BfC, but only because it was a little more self aware and took more ownership over how ranty it was.

So, yeah. Watch it or don't. It's a moving portrayal of one man's interpretation ofwhat has heretofore been a pretty accessible section of the public record. No surprises.

What's more interesting is how this movie is going to come under fire for what it does with (and Moore will defend it according to) the facts. With the exception of the name of a business associate that was involved with the president during his military service, there weren't any real secrets told there that I hadn't ignored once or twice before. Moore arranges them in a really moving and filmic way that points a couple of very critical fingers and demands action from the audience in righting these wrongs.

What's interesting to me about this in relation to what I wanked about the other day is how little difference the facts make in this argument, and how little they'll come to matter throughout the whole controversy (unless Moore's critics have the foresight to shut up about the movie). If I remember the fallout from the last movie, arguments against the truth of Moore's claims didn't really involve whether or not Charleton Heston said something or didn't; they were more often about what montages Chuck was edited into while he was saying "From my cold, dead hands."

I now think about this in relation to stupid little things like my college buddies' last name and how I came upon it. The actual factual information that I possessed about them was pretty trivial and unhelpful, but it was enough for a savvy manipulator to fashion into a workable approach to a problem. There wasn't a lot of truth available in them, but it was easy to bring some to it with a judicious application of search string composition and leaps of faith.

I'm pretty sure Michael Moore proves this same kind of thing all the time: that facts are at best fungible as a source for authority and truth, at worst utterly useless except in service of skilled liars. I take the movie as proof that the facts themselves don't offer us much of considerable interest without some guiding opinion to help make sense of them.

I still kind of wish I'd gone to see Riddick.
- posted by JIM @ 6/27/2004 07:57:00 PM

 
lobe wank 6.22
freewrite. don't follow.

Interesting experience during working vacation:

A dear friend of mine from college lives in Madison now, and since we were going to go through that town I thought "Oh, shit. I have no idea what Andrea and JP's phone number is." When I say I don't remember a phone number it means that the number in question isn't stored on my phone.

Things were more complicated by the fact that after I don't live in the same town as somebody for more than 6 months their last name disappears from my brain. Andrea Alexander (who I now remember became Andrea Nichols when she married JP) had no phone number in my phone and no name in my brain that I could use with a dead tree directory to find that number.

My solution was simple: sit down in a coffee bar with free WiFi and use my laptop to Google around with the data available to me:

1. Andrea is married to JP


2. they both went to Michigan State in Lansing


3. JP plays the violin

What I eventually came up with was a cached copy of an article that Andrea wrote freelancing for a Lansing alternative weekly about JP's band. That gave me his last name, which I could use as her last name, which was enough to get me her cell from Wisconsin's student directory.

No one can hide from me and the Internet.

More interestingly, I don't think I learn anything anymore. All I learn is a bunch of minimally related memorables that I can use the Internet to find intersections between. That gets me what I want, but it minimally takes the constant presence of my laptop and at least my cell phone too.
- posted by JIM @ 6/22/2004 08:53:00 AM

 
Good reasons to use web standards
This stuff is all still way up for debate I think, but here Andrei Herasimchuk outlines some reasons to use web standards.
- posted by JIM @ 6/14/2004 08:39:00 AM

 
educated blogger
I think I swore off blogging about blogging a couple of months ago, but I'm doing it now.

Curses.

Anyway, the thing currently within my focus (2 inches in front of my face) is finishing up the Dreamweaver course. Once that's complete, I start figuring out how I can help put technology into the Minnesota Writing Project's summer institute. Current idea is to use the UMN's new bloggy toy as part of their required reading and writing exercises.

The point of that institute, however, isn't just to push a bunch of crap down the throats of teachers. Anybody familiar with the NWP knows it's about teachers teaching each other by sharing spiffy and creative things that they've come up with for their own classes and schools, so we're taking a pretty open approach in working this into the institute. My plan currently stands as follows:

1. Get all the teachers signed up for x500 accounts (which they have because they're students at the U while they're signed up for the institute), and Uthink


2. Get everyone comfortable with posting, managing accounts/posts


3. Tell them "Blog!" and see how they handle it.

I can see there's kind of a hole there... There's only 15 or 16 people involved in the institute, so I'm praying there'll be enough creative humans to come up with fun ways to blog a reading group. We'll see what happens.

Reading:

• The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom by David Huffaker: New. Nice and review-y. Too academic for people looking for practical lit?


• Writing with Web Logs Again, nice intro. Not as deep as the Huffaker, which might be good


• Reflective Collaborative Learning on the Web another FM piece, so it's academic and dry, also too old to have access to the word blog. Nice examples and illustrations of online collab, though.

Note: any teacher reading this that thinks they might know what 12-16 K-12 teachers might find interesting about playing with weblogs for three weeks should email me.
- posted by JIM @ 6/10/2004 09:35:00 AM

 
Spiffy bunch of CSS
Stu's CSS Repository

Bunch of really great CSS demos here. Most of them are pretty bleeding-edge, so browser compatibility is iffy, but lots of great tricks for framing and page layout.
- posted by JIM @ 6/05/2004 04:11:00 PM

 
smartmob the vote
They don't mention Rheingold, but the NYT has a short feature today about get out the vote efforts that are focusing on getting cell phone numbers of young voters that they can use for mobilization efforts on election day.

I have some experience with this from my only previous effort at political involvement. At the state house district convention that I was helping do data logging and analysis for, when our candidate needed extra support we worked extra hard to contact people on their cell phones. Unfortunately most people in Northeast Minneapolis are old, so that didn't get us as far as it might have in, say, Uptown MPLS or Manhattan, but we were doing the kind of just-in-time network leveraging.

Come to think of it, it seems a shame we didn't buy a bunch of bulk SMS for the campaign to send out at hourly intervals that morning... Damn. That's a good idea.
- posted by JIM @ 5/28/2004 03:53:00 PM

 
pausing to celebrate fiery, fiery music


Toys that Kill are FINALLY available on the iTunes Music Store. I bought both albums and am listening to them and loving them as much as I knew I would.

I see all kinds of music live, but I BUY it almost exclusively from either shows or iTMS, and more frequently from the latter because when I'm at shows I need money for beer. Record stores are an artifact of my past, and every time iTMS get something that I love as much as Toys That Kill, I make a little sound.
- posted by JIM @ 5/28/2004 12:19:00 PM

 
distributed intelligence among cars
This reminded me of the bit about pathfinding behavior in ants I posted a couple months ago...

Honda electric concept car that networks between machines to share traffic, obstruction... other data

Mmmmm... cars that become an Internet of knowledge about the road ahead... Driver responds to immediate threats or situations, while the car makes the turns to get where it's going. Bit of a leap of faith there, but it's fun to think about.
- posted by JIM @ 5/28/2004 09:52:00 AM

 
structure and behavior
I don't read DWM enough. Last month I missed a great article about separating structure from behavior in a way similar to the way we separate structure from presentation. Great article about using pretty complicated parts of CSS that I haven't really learned yet.

Peter-Paul Koch: Separating Behavior and Presentation
- posted by JIM @ 5/27/2004 09:14:00 AM

 
explicit design
Peter Merholz is working on what looks like his consultancy's mating call: Explicit Design.

I like what he's saying there a lot, and in a later post he applies this little ethic to explicit labelling.

Best part: explicitness has a way of managing user expectations, which means that if you can really make evident what you're trying to do, your users' expectations for function and signal will be more in line with you.
- posted by JIM @ 5/24/2004 09:48:00 PM

 
design eye for the usability guy
A couple of web heads gave Nielsen the Queer Eye treatment to redesign his godawful (but totally usable!) page, step by step.

It's funny how they do it, and I love to watch people take shots at Nielsen, just because he hasn't changed his line much in the five years I've been reading his stuff, but the article is actually a really good description of a step-by-step revision of something multimedia.

Talking about this stuff is going to be fun in 3270, considering 3 of my 5 students are graphic design students, some of whom have done web work before. They're going to think I'm acting like Jakob Nielsen when I tell them to stop using Flash and tables for visual flair, but I have to try not to be him. This article is a great way to approach that challenge.
- posted by JIM @ 5/24/2004 06:20:00 PM

 
RSS gets UE torture it so richly deserves
Matt Jones does some thinking of his own and points me to Robert Scoble doing some more thinking about RSS and how people use it and how it's designed.

I haven't read them very closely (yet), but as I understand RDF specs, they're written to keep site description and syndication very brief and easily machine readable. XML does that pretty well, but now that we've got a handful of RSS readers and people seem to be adopting the technology for lots of useful tech (Winksite, anyone?) it's time to take a look at the way we're designing RSS.

Partly that's just a design issue. I love the way I can read a full post from boingboing with the images and all in NetNewsWire. On the other hand, I hate the way the BBC News RSS gives me a title and a lede. That's me and my readers though.

More research, please.
- posted by JIM @ 5/21/2004 12:50:00 PM

 
tables my ass
It amazes me that people still think this is an interesting conversation to have, but in the Tables v. CSS debate there's always been the "tables are easier" argument to fall back on when you insist that semantic validity, document structure, and backend flexibility aren't enough to make tables obsolete.

Patrick Griffiths makes a good pitch for CSS in addressing all of these in a nice, brief, convincing blog post.
- posted by JIM @ 5/21/2004 12:28:00 PM

 
surfacing
oh yeah. I'm getting ready for Designing Websites With Dreamweaver (Rhet 3270), so designy linkage will be flying here again.

Praise Jesus. Praise Him!
- posted by JIM @ 5/20/2004 05:56:00 PM

 
jeremijenko
And the prize for baddest ass in data viz and informatics apparently goes to Natalie Jeremijenko.

Is it art?

Is it the future?

Is it the future of art?
- posted by JIM @ 5/20/2004 05:08:00 PM