Bruce Sterling posts Jeff Howe's comments on the brief history of the "crowdsourcing" meme, with comments. [Link]

Like Jeff Howe, I also believe that "crowdsourcing" is indeed a useful neologism. That's because "crowdsourcing" names part of the same elephant as "Long Tail," "Invisible Tail," "collective intelligence," "folksonomy," "search and publish/publish and search," "attention economy," "collaborative web filters," "architecture of participation" and "commons-based peer-production," among other such. New terminology is boiling out of this realm of activity practically every day now. It is being created because there is a pressing and demonstrable need for it.)

I could spend all day trying to explain how Jeff Howe's "crowdsourcing" has a different structure than "commons-based peer production." This would be no mere academic hairsplitting, either. You see, it's like mapping the mountains and finding two seams of gold. In one, a bunch of hairy-bearded *NIX prospectors are standing hip-deep in the water panning for lumps of gold, while in the other, Three Initial Corporation is data-mining vast spoilage heaps of almost-useless rubble.... I could go on. Others most certainly will.

Funny excerpt from Ed Ward's latest BerlinBites post:

The Sauerkrautmeister, taking time off from the delightful little bundle of cabbage he and Ms. Arpa brought into the world recently, noted my mention of the 30-foot (I checked yesterday) aspirin in back of the Reichstag, erected there as part of the Germany: Land of Ideas campaign that's got a truly hideous pile of books at Bebelplatz and a rather generic car somewhere else. "I love that," he writes. "Guess where they got lots of human pain data to refine the formula?" Why, volunteers from the S&M clubs which flourished here during the Weimar Republic, right? No?

I guess what George Clinton said is true: "When you have a big headache, you need a big pill."

The Dalai Lama presented the Light of Truth award yesterday to the Hergé Foundation. The Light of Truth Award is presented for contributions to the public understanding of Tibet. Hergé (Georges Remi), author of the Tintin books, wrote Tintin in Tibet as a sequel to Tintin: Blue Lotus, wherein Tintin visits China and meets a Chinese boy, Chang Chong-chen (based on a Chinese student the author had actually met). In the very personal book on Tibet, considered one of the best in the series, Tintin searches the Himalayas for Chang after a plane crash, and encounters Tibetan Buddhist culture. From the Hergé site:

Tintin abandons his daily routine and bourgeois life which he will describe in Castafiore Emerald. He penetrates a cosmic world, where only the chosen few may communicate, without words. He gets lonelier, as if he were trying to reach this nether world, as he was so doing in the desert or on the sea. Guides and porters abandon him. Part of the equipment has to be left behind. “All this is not strictly indispensable” (2) The tent flies off, the stove explodes, Tharkey gives up, Haddock refuses to move ahead. Snowy betrays. They will come back however and accompany Tintin in his quest.

Monks will consecrate his initiative by giving the heroes a new and poetic identity: pure heart, morning snow, rumbling thunder, thus revealing its religious dimension. The greatest friendship or the deepest love must be recognized in order to be confirmed, thus receiving the seal of authenticity.

I spent some time recently writing material for the WorldChanging Guide to the 21st Century, which will be published around the first of the year... but you can preorder now from Amazon! I hear it's pretty heavy (at 608 illustrated pages).

A piece of Sputnik crashed in Manitowoc, Wisconsin in 1962. It's displayed today in Manitowoc's Rahr-West Art Museum. It's actually a replica; the original was shipped back to the then-Soviet Union. [Link]

The local newspaper at the time painted a less dramatic picture. The hunk had been embedded three inches deep into the asphalt of 8th Street, just off the center line, for an hour before patrolmen Marvin Bauch and Ronald Rusboldt noticed it from their squad car. Piece of Sputnik.They thought that it was a piece of cardboard and ignored it. An hour later they noticed it again, stopped to move it, and found that it was too hot to touch. They then thought that it was a piece of slag from a local foundry that had fallen out of a dump truck. They kicked it to the curb.

It wasn't until noon that Bauch and Rusboldt associated what they had seen with the reported breakup of Sputnik. They returned to the spot and found it, still in the gutter, more than seven hours after it had fallen. A check at the fire department with a Geiger counter showed no radioactivity, so the lump was shipped to the Smithsonian.

Nine days after the crash, satisfied that what they had was essentially just a hunk of metal, the Americans offered most of it back to the Soviets. The Russians huffed and puffed and finally accepted, carrying away the hunk in a box -- but not before NASA had made two replicas. One was given to Wisconsin's democratic senator, the other to Wisconsin's republican representatives, on the one-year anniversary of the crash. Neither wanted them, and so both ended up back in Manitowoc, even though Manitowoc itself only wanted one.

Some Christian hexakosioihexekontahexaphobics refer to today (6/6/2006) as "Devil's Day" and believe that Satan (or his minions) will be particularly busy today dancing the apocalypso. Leveraging the vibe, 20th Century Fox is releasing the remake of The Omen today. If you're undisturbed by facts, check out Wikipedia's article on 666.

I had a vivid dream that I was near an eruption night before last, no doubt because I'd been hearing that Indonesia's Mount Merapi was about to blow. Merapi's pretty cranky today, as noted by a CNN story about the evacuation of 11,000 folks from the area. The Merapi Observatory site has background info, and I found a video of Merapi from AP. Unfortunately there's no Merapi webcam (but you can book a Merapi tour.)

Last month I moved from Thunderbird back to Outlook because Thunderbird didn't seem powerful enough, and later I tried Gmail as my primary mail client, but noted a couple of deal-breakers, figuring I had to settle for Outlook after all, with Qurb added to block more spam than Outlook catches with its (generally good) junk mail filters. However Outlook takes forever to download mail, and it's slower still with Qurb installed.

I was blown away by Google Calendar, which I'm using instead of Outlook's, so it made even more sense to use Gmail. At the moment, I'm trying a Gmail/Thunderbird combination, plus Google Calendar. Contact management is still best in Outlook, but I'm seeing how well I can do with Gmail's approach and a few other utilities for other stuff (e.g. Backpack for reminders and for notes). Despite a low-level nagging concern about putting my data on machines I don't control, I'm getting into the web-as-operating-system thin client approach, and figuring if anybody can pull it off, Google and 37signals can.

Why am I also using Thunderbird? I still need something other than Gmail to correspond with email lists and to send rich-text (i.e. html) emails (unless I create 'em in Gmail).

This isn't over; I'm still not sure I have the right combination for my modus operandi, which includes a heavy and persistent flow of information, much of it in various email streams.

A massive wall of dust blew across the Arizona Valley Tuesday. "The wall of dust, which stretched from Apache Junction to Avondale, preceded a storm that dropped a quarter-inch of much needed rain in Tucson. The rainfall was a record for the date." One of these blew through my hometown when I was a teen, followed by a storm that turned the sky a dusty black color and spawned three tornadoes. Quite a show. Loud, too. In West Texas, they called it a duster.

After our One Web Day meeting, Cardozo Law School Professor
Susan Crawford had a quintessential Austin summer experience: bats and dorks!

Using "a very thin film made up of layers of metal and semiconducting nanoparticles flanked at the top and bottom by electrodes," scientists at the University of Nebraska have replicated human touch with a high level of sensitivity. Professor Ravi Saraf, one of the scientists behind the technology, stresses its medical value: "The hope is that if you have the resolution close to a human finger in applications like minimal invasive surgery, where the surgeon could actually 'touch' while he or she doing the procedure and tell if the tissue is cancerous or abnormal etc, that would increase the success of these surgeries." [Link]

An apparent meteor struck Norway Wednesday "with an impact comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima." [Link]

Cool bit of news from Ross Mayfield: his company, SocialText, is partnering with Dan Bricklin to co-develop wikiCalc, a "social spreadsheet." I'm already thinking of applications for this tool. Ross also mentions that the Open Source version of the SocialText wiki will be released soon. I've been using SocialText all along, and watching the wiki's evolution, and the company's. SocialText rocks.
[Link]

Just viewed a trailer for a new film called "Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul" by German/Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin and featuring Alexander Hacke of the experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten. The trailer rocks; I'm eager to see this one. From Wikipedia:

Hacke roamed the streets of Istanbul with his mobile recording studio and a microphone to assemble an inspired portrait of Turkish music — from classical Arabesque to indie rock and rap.

Amongst the featured artists are Baba Zula, Sertab Erener, Sezen Aksu, Orhan Gencebay, Erkin Koray, the alternative rock band Replikas, Mercan Dede, Brenna MacCrimmon, Selim Sesler, and Müzeyyen Senar.

Jaron Lanier writes a spectacularly flawed essay on the supposed "hazards of the new collectivism," looking at collaborative projects like Wikipedia from the outside and equaiting them with the dictatorship of the proletariat. He so misses the point that he triiggers a set of responses far more interesting than his piece, though they have their own flaws. I think Howard Rheingold has the best response:

Collective action involves freely chosen self-election (which is almost always coincident with self-interest) and distributed coordination; collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist (tell that to Bezos, Yang, Filo, Brin or Page, to name just a few billionaires who managed to scrape together private property from the Internet commons).

Wade Roush in MIT Technology Review suggests that "Google fatigue" has set in because bloggers aren't wowed by Google's new spreadsheet. He quotes Michael Arrington at TechCrunch: "When is the last time Google released a product that really changed our lives?" In fact, for me, that was recently, and it was Google calendar, which is incredibly easy to use and shareable, despite a couple of issues (e.g. you can't display a calendar to anyone who hasn't signed up, and its ability to sync is limited).

Roush asks "Is the company searching for a strategy?" My sense is that the company looks for new ways for users to aggregate data and make use of Google's core search technology. And the spreadsheet, like the calendar, is shareable, consistent with the collaborative aspect associated with "web 2.0." And remember what Tim O'Reilly said about "data as the next 'Intel inside'."

Roush goes on to fault Google's use of the concept and word "beta," forgetting that O'Reilly lists "perpetual beta" as one of the design patterns for "web 2.0."

I put "web 2.0" in quotes because I have some issues with the label which I've addressed elsewhere, but to the extent there is such a thing, Google is supposed to be one of it's prime movers, and can't be faulted for continuing to follow the principles and patterns it helped define.

Fascinating cultural variation: the Aymara people of South America use a spatial metaphor for time that's opposite other world cultures - the future is behind them, and the past is in front. [Link]

There are also in English ambiguous expressions like "Wednesday's meeting was moved forward two days." Does that mean the new meeting time falls on Friday or Monday? Roughly half of polled English speakers will pick the former and the other half the latter. And that depends, it turns out, on whether they're picturing themselves as being in motion relative to time or time itself as moving. Both of these ideas are perfectly acceptable in English and grammatical too, as illustrated by "We're coming to the end of the year" vs. "The end of the year is approaching."

Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn't command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or waving over their shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past – by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones – only exactly in reverse.

"These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon," Nunez said. "That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn't have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.

"But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies – the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all – here we have a basic concept that is utterly different," he said.

Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years? – posted at Yahoo! questions, and answered at length by Leonard Lin. First he considers what's changed since 2001:

• No iPod/ITMS
• No Cameraphone
• No Satellite Radio
  
• Blogging not mainstream
  
• Very little social media (Flickr, YouTube)
• No social networking sites
• No Wikipedia
• MMORPGs just taking off
  

So what's hot in five years? Leonard has a good list (here with my own comments):

• Software as a service becomes more standard. This has actually been a long time coming – consider the experimentation with the ASP (application service provider model) in the 90s. One question: to what extent will we trust the SAAS operators to hold critical data. I already find myself depending on Google and 37 Signals quite a bit, and I know other early adopters who are beginning to build their information environment with external services rather than local software and databases.
• Global identity framework, referred to by some as "Identity 2.0." This is a standard way to manage your identity and personal data online, precursors of which were W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences and Microsoft's Passport. There's a bunch of people working on this.
• Digital Media – more and more of it, some cheap and some free, carried on many gadgets of many sizes, with wireless access to sync and stream effortlessly.
• Smart phones. Leonard says that phones will be the primary convergence devices in five years, though you might say that the primary convergence devices will includes voice communication of some kind, and increasingly advance positioning systems.
• RFID and spimes or network objects. These should take off once people get over the privacy paranoia... like it's threatening for the FBI to know where you've put your socks.
• Self monitoring or self instrumentation. Nike Plus is a good example: "tune your run." This is very cyborg, and we saw it coming in the early 90s (e.g. Menstat).
• Personal aggregators, or what Marc Canter calls Digital Lifestyle Aggregation. Marc notes that Apple and Microsoft are already moving on the concept.
• Shared everything... or online environments that promote sharing. I would add that the "consumer" is dead, replaced by the more active customer-as-collaborator.

That meteor crash in Norway that I mentioned last week might've been exaggerated, according to a professor at the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo.

Aksnes goes on to explain that a meteor capable of a Hiroshima-like impact would almost completely burn up as it entered Earth's atmosphere, and that the remnants would hit the earth far too slowly - though impacts of that intensity have of course occurred. He estimates the North Troms impact to have been comparable to "a powerful conventional bomb".

Everybody's doing it: now IBM's buzzing about "Web 2.0 in the Enterprise," with Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging Internet technologies, saying

Customers I talk to are abuzz about Web 2.0 and the creation of popular Internet services that seem to quickly appear out of nowhere, becoming instant global phenomena that are enjoyed by the masses, including their employees. They want to apply that new paradigm to make their businesses act faster and grab new opportunities. There's no going back.

New business model: hip-hop for the Enterprise!

In financial services, the Enterprise Mashup can provide a unique Web "radar" that enable users to create a dashboard based on the interests of friends, relatives or coworkers from their computer's address book. For example, a stockbroker can drop a list of client names into the wiki-based Mashup maker and get dashboard view of their interest areas with links to topical blogs, wikis and relevant news feeds from all over the Web. The dashboard shows which client interests overlap with other contacts in your address book. With this view, you can easily get up to speed on areas most relevant to your client's portfolios, read current news stories and find new resources on investment tips you can share. The view also shows how your contacts relate to one another in areas of interests (or investing), so you, or your clients, can make new business connections and expand your corporate network.

Smith credited early pioneers for their innovations in social networking technologies for driving this new capability, and suggested, "there is pent up demand for a new category of applications that until now have been unaffordable for businesses to build. We feel the Enterprise Mashup project begins to address this demand and will help evolve the way business collaboration is conducted in the future."

Tom Morin of The Robot Group dug up a web relic: a very old "unofficial" Robot Group page the title of which is "One of at least three Robot Group Home Pages," circa 1992.

The more I dig into the net neutrality debate, the more I get the impression that nobody knows what the *&%$# they're talking about, and that applies to my friends on the – I almost said on the consumers' side of the debate, but how can I use the c-word when I've also been preaching the end of the consumer with Web 2.xyz, where everybody is both/neither consumer and/nor producer. But you know what I mean: there are megacorporate telcos trying to save their skins by adopting a model that's new to them, but old news to the cable television industry, which has been piping (slightly pixellated) programming over digital networks for some time now. And there are grassroots tech.activists who want to keep the Internet safe for "the rest of us," so that bloggers will have the bandwidth to share their rants and youtubers will have bandwidth to share their funniest home videos.

I was feeling out of place in all this, because I know the incumbent telcos are going to get it wrong. Their day is over, and they should take a graceful exit, embrace extinction, stop fighting for life and profit. (But they won't, human nature being what it is; they'll fight, and they won't fight fair. They won't compete on a level playing field; they'll leverage their dominance and their legislative connections to win as much as they can as long as the can.

Is legislation the answer? I hear a lot of people say that "we've lost" because we didn't get legislation to ensure something called net neutrality, but I'm not sure such a thing exists, or that it's inherently a good thing. I think we all agree that we don't want the Internet to become another form of cable television; that we want a symmetrical high speed Internet, meaning you can upload as fast as you can download. All kinds of innovation will emerge from a network like that, but existing models will probably suffer. Multimedia content will be ported all over the place, shared and also sold, but the suits that have traditionally taken most of the profits will be selling their homes and working at Walmart. I'm pretty sure they'll fight to prevent that. But I digress – I was saying we can all agree that we want the Internet to be free and open, with low barriers to entry and umpty-tons of bandwidth to spare. But "neutrality" might be stifling in its own way, and legislation is probably not the best way to "save the Internet," if we can help it. And maybe we can't, considering the power of the telco monopoly-that-wouldn't-die, but I hate to see all focus on legislation and no thinking outside that box.

Just this week, I was in a discussion (with Mary Joyce et al) where we talked about how Google bombs for Alaa and other aspects of the Free Alaa campaign hadn't worked so far. Yesterday Xeni had a post that said Alaa's being released. Check out Manal and Alaa's Bit Bucket. (Still questionable whether Alaa's release can be tied to the campaign.)

Alex Cavalli

Last night Alex Cavalli spoke to the Central Texas World Future Society. His subject: What Will America Do Next? His thesis: the US has followed an identifiable cycle where some conflagration will occur, followed by commitment to some great endeavor. This has happened three times so far:

1. The Revolutionary War, followed by the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
2. The Civil War, followed by construction of the transcontinental railroad, and
3. World War II, followed by the space program and the lunar voyages.

Alex was thinking it was a response to globalization, and that seems likely: fundamentalists who are entrenched in their belief systems reacting violently to a postmodern global melt into a stew where no one belief system is paramount.

Alex said that it was never clear in any of those cycles that we would survive as a nation, and it's not clear now... but if we do, we can expect to take on some great enterprise when we're done. What would that be? A couple of folks suggested space travel, like a trip to Mars. My flip comment was that we could take on the search for intelligent life on earth, but I was actually thinking some inner exploration of human consciousness could make sense, and Alex said something similar. Global warming was another suggestion.

Someone said that the focus on the US as a nation is probably misplaced, that the nation-state may be a thing of the past, and that's a good point, resonant with the globalization issue.

This ain't no party, this ain't no disco,
This ain't no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey,
I ain't got time for that now....

This had me laughing... David Galbraith nails it (and I hope he doesn't mind that I've quoted his post in full):

A list of recent web design trends that are about to jump the shark:

1. Obsession with rounded corners everywhere.

2. Pastel colors.

3. Linear blends.

4. Fonts bigger than 15 pixels.

5. Avoiding tables, when they are the best solution.

6. Stretchable text columns that are too wide to read comfortably.

7. Ajax use that makes things difficult to link to.

These things are so commonplace now that sites designed this way seem like the web design equivalent of a fashion victim. When the bubble bursts there will be big pastel shade mess.

The British no longer have Top of the Pops, but many of the performances are recycling via YouTube. [Link]

Is the presentation completely accurate? Pretty much. According to the climate scientists at Realclimate.org, it has only a couple of questionable moments, and they're minor.

Can this be real? GenPets offers bio-engineered pets with a one or two year life span.

We use a process called "Zygote Micro Injection" which is quickly becoming a favourable method to combine DNA, or to insert certain proteins from different species. Most notably it was used in 1997 to splice mice with bioluminescent jellyfish (link) and has since been used to create glowing rabbits, pigs, fish, and monkeys (link). Since then, human DNA has been injected into rabbits, chimpanzees, spider DNA into sheep, and now, Genpets have arrived!

Read National Geographic's site for more information on human animal hybrids (link).

I've been looking forward to the publication of Henry Jenkins' book Convergence Culture, having discovered his work while putting together the digital convergence track for SXSW 2006. Today Cory posted a pointer to Jenkins' new blog, Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, which anticipates the book's release later this summer. (The blog is ordered in forward chronological order, which made me dizzy.) He's posted snippets from the book that'll give you an idea why you'll want to buy and read it:

In a culture which some have described according to information overload, it is impossible for any one of us to hold all of the relevant pieces of information in our heads at the same time. Because there is more information out there on any given topic than we can store in our heads, there is an added incentive for us to talk amongst ourselves about the media we consume. This conversation creates buzz and accelerates the circulation of media content Consumption has become a collective process and that’s what I mean in this book by collective intelligence. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.... Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day to day interactions within convergence culture. Right now, we are mostly using collective power through our recreational life, but it has implications at all levels of our culture. In this book, I will explore how the play of collective meaning-making within popular culture is starting to change the ways religion, education, law, politics, advertising, and even the military operate."

Adam Greenfield just gave an Everyware talk at the Institute for the Future. [Link]

How to design systems that respect prerogatives of civil liberties, privacy, etc.? AG suggests five ethical principles:

1. Default to harmlessness. Everyware "should default to a mode that ensures their users' safety." It's beyond graceful degredation, because everyware takes so much responsibility upon itself to take care of people.
2. Be self-disclosing. You should be able to see what systems are operating in a space, both to geeks and to people who aren't wired up. This requires "a new universal vocabulary of signs" for everyware; and the ability to look under the hood.
3. Be conservative of face. Everyware should not "unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate or shame their users." Nor should it completely dissolve the boundaries of privacy that people expect.
4. Be conservative of time. Don't "introduce undue complications into ordinary operations." Having physical equivalents of Clippy the Office Assistant would be a pain.
5. Be deniable. Everyware "must offer users the ability to opt out, always and at any point." If ubicomp systems offer some functionality and benefit, opting out should just turn those off. (How do you opt out of being photographed by surveillance cameras?)

Mike Kuniavsky talks about the relationship of technology art to design (and has some good info about technology art in the Bay Area, as well). [Link]

Technology art is a key incubator for ideas in interaction and industrial design. For me the chain of influence is clear: if design is the practice of making technology more human-centered, then art is the most pure expression of that idea. This doesn't mean that art is user-centered (it's not), and design shouldn't be treated as an art medium (as I've criticized critical design for doing), but art is made for people without the typical constraints that normally define the technology design process*. This makes it much more free to explore people's relationship to technology in ways that commercial products rarely can. I believe that it's critical that industrial and interaction designers look to art and artists for the results of their interpretations of the possibilities of technology and how they use art to identify important social and cultural phenomena.

Digg is launching a new version, which is a redesign and more. [Link]

Powerpoints from the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute's May workshop are online. What's this about? "The field of AI is poised to make a transition from a focus on highly specialized "narrow AI" problem solving systems to confronting the more difficult issues of 'human level intelligence' and more broadly artificial general intelligence. This workshop will focus on AGI issues in general, with a non-exclusive focus on the theme of grounding linguistic relationships in nonlinguistic reality."

Musical savants may not know left from right, but they sure can play. (Check out the video in the right column.) [Link]

"As a composer I've had dreams where I went through a complete concerto that was impeccable, and it just rolled off, as a dream. Obviously, that means that it's inside of us. Well, these kids can do that dream. There's just nothing in between it," he said with a snap of his fingers.

Here's an eye-popping thought: a web site can be both ugly and well-designed. The opposite is also true: someone once referred tp an e-commerce site we were trying to fix as "a beautiful crappy site" - it was graphically wonderful, but you couldn't find products or get reliable information about shipping costs, and much of the time you couldn't even check out.

The converse is that you could have a site that's butt-ugly, but is very well designed (as in architecture) for what it's supposed to do. Joshua Porter at Vitamin argues that this is the case with Myspace.

To the people who use it, the visual design of MySpace communicates one message loud and clear: MySpace is your social life. Every feature, every design element, serves to reinforce this. It may not be pretty, but as long as people can easily hang out virtually with their friends, it doesn’t have to be. So in terms of communicating value to its users, MySpace actually does a very good job.

Granted, the visual design of MySpace is simplistic, brutely exposing its content. But is that a knock against it, or a compliment to it? Sometimes as designers we feel the need to repurpose and restyle content out of its raw form. MySpace, however, shows that simple exposure might be all that’s needed. danah boyd, who researches MySpace, writes about designing to allow for personal style: “Don’t design for perfection - design for reinterpretation. No matter how perfect you see your design, it will be modified, altered or manipulated in use.”

When you ask the musical question, you get the musical answer. [Link]

Google's released its Account Authentication Proxy for Web-based Systems, compared by ZDNet's Garett Rogers to Microsoft's Passport, though I'm wondering if Google's influenced by the work of the Identity Gang and the "Identity 2.0" conversations...

"Shiver Metimbers" of the scambaiting web site 419 Eater successfully scammed a Nigerian 419 scammer (this is hilarious!). [Link]

The shark in Damien Hirst's concept art piece The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living is beginning to rot, evidently because it was preserved with formaldehyde rather than alcohol.

All things are subject to decay and when fate summons, monarchs must obey. ~ John Dryden

[Link]