Category Archives: Net Culture

Post-panel

Liz Danzico, Mark Boulton, Toni Greaves, Jason Santa Maria and I have just finished our panel, “Traditional Design and New Technology” here at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Frankly, I’m relieved; we spent a lot of time preparing for it, including an endless stream of email exchanges, many outline drafts, international conference calls, and a big, team-building breakfast here in Austin at 7:30a this morning, so there was a lot of build-up. In the end, I think the panel went pretty well — basically, anything that went well is owing to Liz Danzico’s masterful job of moderating the discussion. We had a pretty lively debate and several challenging questions from the audience; the festival management has recorded it, apparently, and will be posting a podcast sometime soon, which I’ll link to when I find it. Anyway, I enjoyed the whole experience quite a lot. If you were in the audience today, first, thanks for attending, and second, I’d be keen to know what you thought. Don’t be shy, I can take it.

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Citizen Journalists, Unite

NewsvineFor a while now, I’ve been playing with Newsvine, a news-driven community, Web 2.0 application that’s been generating considerable buzz since widening its beta program. Even though Newsvine, Inc. CEO Mike Davidson insists that, in its current state, the application is only a fraction of what it will be, it’s apparent to any beta tester that it’s an ambitious project.

Davidson and his team are trying to create a hybrid of citizen journalism and mainstream media news, allowing users to author their own ‘columns’ from the freely available Associated Press articles constantly flooding into the Newsvine system, or to ‘seed’ their own stories from virtually any outside source on the Web. While it may bear some superficial resemblance to community-driven news sites like Digg.com, Newsvine actually aims to be a news authority of its own, rivaling more established news sources. It’s an idea that has a certain amount of inevitability to it: an aggregated, community-authored news source that can stand as a peer to mainstream news outlets.

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Remember When You Said…

coCommentThis is either the beginning or the middle of a golden age for software, in which, almost literally, any feature set you could want (within reason, of course) is being worked on by somebody somewhere. And if you wait just long enough, exactly such a product will make its debut in the marketplace.

I’ve made this declaration before, and I really do believe it more and more every time one of my half-baked ideas for clever software products is unleashed onto the world in a more complete form by other people. The latest example is coComment, a concept that I wrote about nearly a year ago, but which recently entered a private beta period. coComment is a tool for aggregating all of the remarks that you, as a Web surfer and blog reader, might leave on other peoples’ weblogs. It uses a little JavaScript bookmarklet to almost transparently intercept your comments before you hit the “submit” button to publish those comments to a weblog, and then saves a copy of those remarks to a page of your very own on the coComment servers. The result is an archive of your remarks that might otherwise never be properly assembled into a single location.

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Remember When You Said…

coCommentThis is either the beginning or the middle of a golden age for software, in which, almost literally, any feature set you could want (within reason, of course) is being worked on by somebody somewhere. And if you wait just long enough, exactly such a product will make its debut in the marketplace.

I’ve made this declaration before, and I really do believe it more and more every time one of my half-baked ideas for clever software products is unleashed onto the world in a more complete form by other people. The latest example is coComment, a concept that I wrote about nearly a year ago, but which recently entered a private beta period. coComment is a tool for aggregating all of the remarks that you, as a Web surfer and blog reader, might leave on other peoples’ weblogs. It uses a little JavaScript bookmarklet to almost transparently intercept your comments before you hit the “submit” button to publish those comments to a weblog, and then saves a copy of those remarks to a page of your very own on the coComment servers. The result is an archive of your remarks that might otherwise never be properly assembled into a single location.

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Camino Es Real

CaminoThe scrappy, unwavering spirit of the Camino team pays off in a big way today with the version 1.0 release of that Web browser. In the wish list of browser features I wrote last December, I had unfairly disregarded Camino, even though I had it installed on my own system at the time. This is probably owing to past experiences with earlier versions that were a bit bumpy, but this latest release is smooth, polished and very solid. It’s a true Macintosh product, having painstakingly brought the Mozilla group’s refined Gecko rendering engine into Apple’s Cocoa framework.

The result is a browser that’s rivaled perhaps only by Safari in how native it feels to the Mac OS X computing experience. I’ve been using it for several days, and it feels fast and reliable — but what I like most of all is its integration with Mac OS X’s Keychain password utility, which is invaluable for convenience and peace of mind. Unfortunately, Camino is missing a few features that I’m becoming increasingly used to having at my disposal: session saving and the ability to force all new windows into tabs.

That doesn’t stop it from being an amazing piece of work though. It may be true that Camino’s open source cousin, Firefox is a wonder of coordinated, selfless efforts joining together to produce a surprisingly usable and elegant end product. But Camino is an example of similarly dedicated and truly passionate engineers and designers putting that same brand of selflessness to work creating something truly beautiful. It’s the closest an open source project has come to producing art that I’ve seen yet.

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Seen Any Good Designs Lately?

Along with a few other design figures — each of whom have much, much more impressive reputations than myself — I’ve been been invited by one of New York’s major art museums to help select pieces for inclusion in their permanent design collection. For now, I’m going to be a bit cagey about this and refrain from revealing the name of this museum. But suffice it to say that, to be selected for inclusion in this institution’s collection is a pretty prestigious affair, and I’m more than a little stunned that I was asked for my opinion.

That said, part of my responsibility in this matter is to submit a few possible candidates by, like, a few days ago. I’m late. I’ve been sitting on this for a good time now, and though I have some ideas I’m definitely a little stumped, so I thought I would open it up to my loyal readership.

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Four for Today

It’s fun to get tapped to participate in a blog meme like the one I’m about to lay on all a’y’all, but it’s distressing, too, especially when my new job leaves hardly any time for that blogging stuff I used to do more freely before. I blame Jason Santa Maria. Not for the new job, but for passing on the meme. And for other stuff, too, but I won’t go into it. For now, some lists of four…

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Get Shorty

You have no shortage of options if you’re looking to alias extremely long Web addresses into snappier and more email-friendly forms, converting URLs as long as three dozen or more characters and loaded with database and cookie values into a succinct form that even a human might be able to memorize without a Johnny Mnemonic download. The most popular of these seems to be TinyURL, but my favorite is LessLink, because it allows a user to create meaningful aliases by entering her own descriptors, which are then used to construct the URL itself. A typically lengthy link to an Ebay auction, say, might be easily condensed as lesslink.com/obsolete/already/. Other services even allow link tracking and other meta-services to track the traffic passed through your alias.

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Build the Better Browser

OmniWeb 5With any luck, this post will remain relevant for just about three weeks, when, hopefully, it will be made obsolete by a concrete announcement at Macworld Expo of OmniWeb 6.0’s imminent release. As a loyal user of that Quixotic Web browser, I’ve been waiting seemingly forever for a long-promised upgrade that will move OmniWeb away from its clever but problematic customization of Apple’s WebCore foundation and over to the more stable, more easily built-upon WebKit framework available in Mac OS X. I’m crossing my fingers that this will put an end to the memory leaks, imperfect page renderings and random crashes from which OmniWeb suffers (though to be fair, the OmniGroup does an admirable and timely job of continually hunting down and sorting out bugs) — even for all of those problems, it’s still my favorite Web browser.

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Fame and Infamy

Any publicity is good publicity, I keep telling myself, after getting unceremoniously Slashdotted for an editorial I wrote about Slashdot itself — my article went online this morning over at Publish.com. I thought it was a thoughtful opinion piece on Slashdot’s pending redesign and the seductive tendency of CSS to focus purely on aesthetics to the exclusion of architecture, but CmdrTaco disagreed, apparently. The comments thread quickly turned to excoriating the work I proudly did on redesigning The Onion, which is unfortunate and unfair, I think, but if the worst problem I have in life is raising the ire of Slashdot readers, then I’m doing pretty good. Anyway, I still think the editorial is worth a read; please let me know what you think.

In a more positive bit of notoriety, Dave Kellam of Seal Club asked me to participate in his 5Q project, in which he asks “designers, artists and other Web-monkeys five questions on earth-shattering topics usually unrelated to their field.” This was the easiest and funnest interview I’ve ever done, and it will take you less than five seconds to read if you’re interested: it appears here. Dave also did a nice job of throwing together a design expressly for my questions and answers — how can I not dig the Rauschenberg-esque use of Mister President as a design element?

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