what drives history?

mcluhan suggested that technologies drive the evolution of media - agent modeling raises the possibility that the number of people in the world also have a significant effect on how we communicate. Specifically: would we have facebook or twitter if there were only 100 million people in the world?

bug list

1. delicious bookmarks - I've been using this for almost two years now, and it's finally dawning on me that it's not my fault that I always have to click the "tag" icon at the top of my browser twice. It's the program's fault that the first time, when I type in a few characters, and then hit the down arrow key to select the convenient auto-fill tag suggestion - it deselects it when I use any of the commands that normally confirm the selection. So press tab, right arrow key, or space - and then enter to confirm the whole tag - and as the window is closing I see that only the first few characters of my tag are saved!

2. this blog - as you can see I've been using this also for a couple of years (thanks to Ash Bhoopathy at yakshaving.net for getting me started on both!) but I still haven't been able to get the google analytics/tracking to work! I have no idea who is reading this, if anyone. If you are, tell me how to make this work.

patents

to add to John Seeley Brown's observations about the benefits of paper (his are that it's easy to add to, to share with others, and it doesn't run out of batteries): a paper lab notebook (that's permanently bound, dated, and with numbered pages) makes it easy to prove that one has made an invention.

Digital records are not so believable.

Paper isn't going away. It may be replaced in many contexts, but not in all contexts.

hyperlinks

is it reasonable to think that any noun or pronoun on the internet should be a hyperlink to its referent?
Obviously this will need some limits - it is most useful for pronouns that refer to something outside the current page/view, and secondarily for nouns that aren't proper nouns and don't refer to something so common that there's probably an example within ten feet of the reader.

distributed responsibility

How can we create a social network that will fund and implement a public health campaign focused on changing individuals' culture and behaviors?

IxD viewpoint

I've just spent my spring break distilling a portfolio out of a collection of my work over the past 2.5 years at the institute of design. I've got a clear story:

After growing up as an artist, I came to ID to apply my skill in creating compelling stories and visuals to the problem of creating communities. After learning about the basic practice of doing user research, analyzing it for design implications, and then communicating the solutions, I've found that new technologies are a powerful vector to support communities, transparency, and meaningful experiences.


Here's one page, demonstrating that "analyzing" part - feel free to
download the whole thing and give me your comments.

But I still have a lot of work to figure out how to demonstrate a more poignant vision I've been having wherein interaction design is a vector for self-expression. Inspired by McLuhan's assertions about the continuity of the place of media in relation to human society, this vision puts computer networks and interfaces in the same bucket with clay, canvas, and paper in terms of how people want to use it. Once their basic needs are met (which isn't the case in much of the world, but that's a separate discussion), people spend a great deal of energy instantiating and embodying their own culture and beliefs.
Now that legions of programmers and web designers can draw on vast libraries of patterns and guidebooks to reproduce some basic web strategies like distributing business processes and centralizing decisionmaking, companies and governments (is there still a meaningful distinction for us who hold high positions in neither?) find it valuable to make the technology available to every man, woman, and child. The effect of this is parallel with the development of printing with cheap moveable type and paper: it's now the most widely distributed carrier of meaning. To find out what's going on - whether in the past or the future, with the rich or the poor, in sports or in fashion, or (this is the new part) in small communities or in countries as wholes - one simply has to log on.
And because everyone is now going to the 'net to find out what's going on, anyone who wants to be part of that conversation has to go to the next to contribute. Thus, the limitations of web technologies are the limitations of cultural expression.

And now for something completely different:
Well, tangentially related really - watched a video podcast from the Santa Fe Institute where Lee Smolin asserts that emergence - in contrast to top-down definition - is The Paradigm of the 20th century. (was, at this point?)
For example:
Law - examining what makes sense to communities and individuals has replaced interpreting rules that took their authority from precedent and, ultimately, from God.
Literature & Art - examining the properties of the materials or words and understanding what can be built up from them has replaced a search for the infinite/eternal Beauty.
Physics - understanding the implications of the world we observe and how local rules can add up to global ones has replaced a search for the single overarching perspective (the Grand Unified Theory).

android bugs

Not sure which of these are specific to the moto droid implementation.

It needs a hardware key to select, copy, and paste text. Would be nice if it worked for other media too. The track button is a great start, but doesn't usually work as expected.

For some reason, the alt function of the delete key is to get rid of an entire line of typing. This shouldn't exist without being indicated on the key, and shouldn't apply with the alt-lock function (which should itself be described in some documentation somewhere).

Which naturally leads to the next one: there is no undo! Totally necessary for typing in the browser, would be useful anytime I suddenly look away from the device and have to pick up or hold onto anything.

Finally, why can't I send or receive any kind of files I want thru gmail?

And now for something completely different:
Someone needs to do some basic research on interacting with any sort of multiply interconnected sets, also known as tag clouds, lattice heiurarchies,or overlapping groups.