antikoan

 |::| Wednesday, April 24, 2002

 |::| Experience design link...  1:28:45 PM 

Boxes and Arrows: AIGA Experience Design--past, present and future. Q&A with Terry Swack and Clement Mok. AIGA Experience Design is the community that brings all types of Experience Design practitioners together to focus on larger issues of business value and collaborative practice and methods. Because of this, AIGA ED members are designers who are interested in exploring new boundaries of their professions as they are evolving across multiple disciplines. [Tomalak's Realm]

Nothing really new or terribly interesting -- but basic background on where the field is at right now, from a couple of people who ought to know.

 |::| Lest there still be any doubt...  1:21:18 PM 

... that the recording is full of amoral crooks who are only in it for the money, here's the story of Joseph Byrd's battles with Sony, who've yet to pay a penny of the 25-plus years of artist's royalties they owe him

Salon: Musician to Napster judge: Let my music go Byrd is hardly the first artist to express his distaste for how record companies do business. But Byrd's letter comes at a time when the music industry is in a crisis. Record sales are down for a variety of reasons, and consumers are in open revolt. [Tomalak's Realm]

 |::| But what about random executions?  1:13:47 PM 

Ridge Pushes Fast-Track 'Trusted Fliers' Screening (washingtonpost.com). Random checks of passengers in airport lines do little to bolster security, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said yesterday, maintaining that the government and the airline industry must do a better job of identifying travelers who pose the greatest risk. [Daypop Top News Stories]

 |::| More what-x are you? stuff...  1:08:27 PM 

"What High School Stereotype Are You?" [Daypop Top 40]

Take the What High School Stereotype Are You? quiz, by Angel. Great. I'll probably just get hit by a car, anyway.

 |::| Taking The Peterbuilt Out For Milk?  12:40:08 PM 

Scott Johnson: "Write a renderer in PHP." |::| [Scripting News]

Great idea -- if that's all it amounts to. But Scott Johnson goes on to say:

Do something with the "Karma Points". Have a pot luck supper or something. Who cares. We'll do it because we're a community and we believe. The karma is just an idea.

What he's talking about is a great, distributed PHP-driven OPML rendering machine. Which would be used for... what? Why?

Wouldn't a better approach be to whip up a client app? Make it FlashMX; make it DHTML. Either way you could host it on a server as static pages with no server loads and you would absolutely not even ever have to bother with anybody's processor cycles. Hell, you could run the pages locally. I even made some sketches (with a real pencil and paper) the other day of how you might do it with DHTML on a local system (only slightly sticky unresolved issue being how to save the local file to disk -- but that's resolvable).

It's not that I'm opposed to distributed networks. I think they're great. But aside from the fact that this is too complex, it smacks of a doctrinaire solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. The solution is really, really simple, and that's to make more client apps and make them do the work. How they present the outline is irrelevant, though Dave Winer will think it's not. Instant Outlining won't ultimately be about outlining anyway, it will be about narratives, which are basically hostile to outline format -- though, of course, they can certainly use (read: subvert) outline format well enough as the need arises. Narrative is willful that way.

(Side note: I don't know, maybe it's just me. But I find it interesting that people who are so interested in doing things "for the community" are so often so interested in letting other people know how the world feels about them.)

On a related note, Phillip Pearson asks a similar question to mine, above: "Why not just render them when they're generated?" |::| [Scripting News] Why, indeed. His way is much more in the Radio/Manila paradigm of putting the rendering at the client, and will almost certainly be adopted. But it's contrary to the "semantic web" approach, which holds that the user should decide what to do with the text.

 |::| Quote of the Moment  10:32:26 AM 

"I never said half of those things that I said." -- the Yogi

 |::|   10:30:25 AM 

From ScriptyGoddess.com:

Blog surfing.... Not sure if this is really in the same theme of a scriptygoddess post... but who cares. Sue me! LOL!... [scriptygoddess.com]

Story gives two links: Daily Browser is a JavaScript-based tool that lets you browse through a list of sites you like to hit. What would be interesting is to figure out how to populate the list programmatically.

Bloglet.com lets readers get informed of updates via email. Not sure how useful it is for dynamic pages...