Today the good mailman arrived. He demanded $8.32 but had no change to offer (is that even legal?).
However, he also brought with him a big bag of goodness containing Sam Brown’s (of explodingdog.com) new book “Wish for Something Better”.
I suspect that you do not own a copy and that I am cooler than you. Buy one, they are beautiful. It’s a small square book (about 6″ x 6″) and the printing looks great. It will make your coffee table way cooler than it was yesterday.
I’m all about doing whatever it may be that’s the latest “thing to do”. Where I am these days, using XML-RPC to ping Weblogs.com is the thing to do (odd, I know).
So, I’m doing it. Actsofvolition.com now pings weblogs.com whenever it’s updated.
Props to the good people at Userland Software on their work with the XML-RPC protocol. For an Adbusters subscriber, I’ve always been quite sympathetic to Microsoft (I even like Clippy – seriously), the work being done on the SOAP and XML-RPC protocols by Dave Winer and the other folks at Userland may well save us (and Microsoft) from the Microsoft world.
What the hell does this mean? Well, in of itself, not a whole lot. It means that every time one of the geniuses around here makes a post, Weblogs.com will be notified and show our site on their list. Then, other sites can sort-of syndicate that list – for example, they could have a ’10 recently updated sites’ list that would grab its content from the master list at weblogs.com.
This is not a big deal, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. The more important thing is that I called a procedure on another web server and passed information in an understandable format – a simple, but powerful concept. Hopefully this simple experiment will be the begining of some more interesting and useful applications of this technology (more to come as I experiment further with this).
I often complain about the use of acronyms, so I appologize for this post. XML-RPC stands for Extensible Markup Language – Remote Procedure Calling. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.
The latest from the good people at Google: catalogs.google.com
The wacky folks at the MIT Media Lab have created BlogDex, a system that maps and monitors the connections between web logs. Their latest creation is particularly fun to use. The Social Network Explorer lets you browse the web sideways, sort of, by showing you similar/related sites as you browse. Try it yourself.
It is usually a good practice to have your house in order before start shitting on your neighbours, lest you be shit upon yourself (I know there are more appropriate analogies, but they all seem so cliché). Criticizing writing can be a dangerous thing to do. If you do so and make a typo (something I may well be doing right now) then you look like an idiot. As haste and sloth often trump good editing in my writings here on aov, I am in no position to criticize. However, if we all just stood around waiting for someone without sin, some much needed stones would go un-thrown.
What follows is a collection of words and phrases that, after noticing how dumb they make people sound, I am striving to avoid using myself:
For a more intelligent and less derivative position on clear writing see George Orwell’s article Politics and the English Language where he declares that “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
I love it when people say plainly and clearly what has been ambiguously bouncing around in my head, slightly beyond my ability to structure and articulate. This is how I felt when I read Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things and C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity (for those who only know Lewis from the Narnia series, I strongly recommend looking up some of his grown-up books – The Great Divorce is a good place to start).
I had this feeling again today, when I read an article by Adam Greenfield in this week’s double issue of web-design-weekly A List Apart. Adam explores and contrasts the art and science of design as problem solving against the art of style as expression. Without shitting on anyone, he draws a line between the designer and the stylist.
The article, The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes: and Other Notes on the Distinction Between Style and Design expresses, better than I could myself, how I feel about design. Design and style are not mutually exclusive, but they are different.
Also worth a look, dicovered via v-2.org (warning – this site breaks your Back button), a site by the author of the aforementioned article, Gasoline Signs: corporate identity in the real world.
Great story at The Register about a 15 year old reporter for the BBC’s kids news show who asks some solid questions to Bill Gates.
She actually asked him: Does your computer ever crash? Gold! Bill’s total bullshit answers were actually a bit disappointing – she’s 15 Bill, not stupid.
You can see some of the interview in RealVideo.
This is what I found on the front page of the CBC website today.
Note the earth-shatteringly improtant three main headlines. Everything they say about Canadians is true.
I was thinking today about getting new envelopes printed. In itself, it is a trivial matter. Since I bask in trivial matters, I was thinking about how we could have much cooler envelopes if the printing shop had more selection and options. Then in occurred to me that there are probably loads of good print shops that could produce our envelopes that would offer loads of options – they just aren’t on PEI. Not problem – I think I dealt with the local printer completely via email and phone anyhow.
Then the thought comes – as I’ve been programmed to think – I should probably keep my business local. Then – out of nowhere – another thought: why? Why is it any better for me to spend my money in the town or region where I live than in any other town or region? I’m sure there’s a printing company in Chicoutimi (randomly selected town that I don’t live in) who would love to have our business (and may offer a cooler selection of envelopes).
At my business we don’t expect people to go with us because we are ‘from here’. We are also glad that our clients don’t ‘shop local’ – since many of them are not from this fair Isle.
I know there’s an environmental cost of shipping goods unnecessarily. But doesn’t that only apply to things whose raw materials are produced locally? For example, if I buy my turnip from Uzbekistan (randomly selected county that I don’t live in and whose existence have only discovered recently) then I cause an unnecessary plane trip that pumps all kinds of bad stuff into the atmosphere when I could have just grown the turnips in my backyard or bought them from my neighbour. However, when it comes to goods where the raw materials come from elsewhere, does it even matter? I mean, the local print shop is probably getting the envelopes from Malaysia anyhow.
It seems that you only want people where you live to buy local. If our clients did it, we’d be out of business. I learned in philosophy 101 that a good way to test a concept is to see if it applies universally. This doesn’t.
I suppose it has a lot to do with which groups and regions you associate yourself with. I’m from Charlottetown, I’m from Prince Edward Island, and I’m from Canada. Trouble is, I don’t really identify myself with any of those groups in any strong way. I’m glad I live in a country where you don’t get shot at and you can think what you want – but it was just dumb luck (or a cruel and vengeful god, for the religious types) that I was born here and some poor chap was born in Somalia. I don’t feel any more connected to the guy at the local print shop than I would do the print shop in Chicoutimi (again, randomly selected).
So tell me, why should I buy local?
AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Arts has a site on User Experience called Gain. Ironically, it takes quite a bit of patience to navigate. If you do manage to find your way around, you might come across an interesting graphic illustrating the distilling of the many pioneering web-firms into the few struggling behemoths we have today.
Because their site is based in flash and pop-up windows, I can’t link to it. How’s that for #$!@ing user experience. They do have a PDF version of the chart, but it obscures the interesting data in its own totally X-treme way (note to graphic designers, most of you suck).
Since I can’t link to it and even if I could, you’d be annoyed by the flash interface, I’ll sum up the most interesting info with words (they can be so handy sometimes).
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Razorfish Avalance CHBi Spray Network Sunbather I-Cube TSDesign Lee Hunt Assoc. Medialab AG |
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Studio Archetype Sapient Adjacency E-Lab |
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Rare Medium i/o 360 Circumstance |
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| = | Razorfish | = | Sapient | = | Rare Medium |
Oddly, Sapient also designed the website for AIGA. Hmmm… They should read some Edward Tufte.