Shameless Self-Promotion
Check me out on today’s Gizmodo:
Question (is) Everything: Design that answers unimagined questions
Note please the Half-Life shout-out at the end (hi, Harry!).
If you want to read Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation, cited in the essay and a major inspiration for my own thinking on the topic, it’s available from his site under a Creative Commons license.
The essay began as some idle thoughts, while drawing several variant sitemaps for the same project, about everyone’s favorite theoretical trope, the problematic (defined by noted Marxist-structuralist wackjob Louis Althusser as “the system of questions commanding the answers given.”) There is no sign of Althusser in the final version, or indeed of sitemaps, in case you were worrying.
Decisions, decisions…
Random observations
Some entirely unrelated items of note:
- Stephen Metcalfe on rock snobbery. The article in turn inspired Belle Waring’s Crooked Timber post complaining about how the rock snob is always imagined as male, which of course turns into an orgy of rock-snobbery in the comments. I will admit in chagrin that my first thought on reading Metcalfe’s description of the true Rock Snob was not “too true” or “how apt,” but rather “The Mountain Goats covered ‘Dr. Wu’?”
- Yahoo! Maps new beta version: to quote the ever-useful Joe Keenan, it’s not an impersonation, it’s an homage.
- And this awful news from BoingBoing: Woman crashes into power station, killed by bees - which for me provoked far less awful memories of another space far less fatally taken over by bees at a certain editrix’s summer cottage. When we were awaiting the hordes summer before last, she put up a sign on the bee room that said “Keep Out!”
“Editrix,” I said, “if there was ever a sign guaranteed to get the people in this crowd to peek in, that would be it.”
“Well, what do you suggest?” she asked.
“How about ‘covered in bees’?” I said, doing my best Eddie Izzard. “Covered in beeees!”
Sadly, I spent the whole weekend giggling to myself about that, and I still do. But bees, clearly, no laughing matter. Editrix, you’re on notice.
Delicious ironies!
I discovered the private del.icio.us bookmarklet through my subscription to David’s del.icio.us feed, and then once I’d bookmarked it myself, I thought, I should blog this before del.icio.us posts the link to my blog. And I then I considered all the layers of public and private, of concealing and revealing, in the set of interactions that led up to that thought, and I had to go sit down with my head between my knees till I felt less faint.
All of this also reminds me of Terri’s post about Dodgeball, which I’ve been trying to write a response to ever since it was posted. The “ex-girlfriend problem” on Dodgeball — “the desire to list someone as a friend in the context of a social networking service, yet whose live appearance in a bar seems too close for comfort” — is a real-life analogue to the “I want to have a way to share my bookmarks, but not have to share all of them all the time” problem, with of course all the additional power that live interactions inherently have. Our social software doesn’t know how to parse these sorts of problems yet — as danah boyd memorably put it, most of this software relies on simplistic, even autistic models of rigidly controlled social categorization. Whether services like Dodgeball and del.icio.us can move into a more richly-articulated social model will, I think, be a lot of what determines their success beyond their early-adopter geek audience of today.