Dave Weinberger is blogging bits of the valuably fecund “Reboot” conference this week. Included is a nice summary of Jaiku-founder Jyri Engestrom’s talk. In the past, he’s been very influential among social design folk for pushing the idea of “social objects” — a powerful notion that helps clarify why people do what they do socially […]

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Within a larger, and more political, point in his column, George Will explains something about structuring systems so as to “nudge” people toward a particular behavior pattern, without mandating anything: George F. Will: Nudge Against the Fudge
Such is the power of inertia in human behavior, and the tendency of individuals to emulate others’ behavior, that […]

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Whenever I say that the Hyperlink changed the world, people look at me like “huh?” The lowly hyperlink is often overlooked as just a ‘feature’ of the Internet or the Web in particular. But I’ve always thought that was a bit backwards. The hyperlink is what made the web possible — it is for the […]

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I’d like to encourage everyone to attend IDEA 2008, a conference (organized by the IA Institute) that’s been getting rave reviews from attendees since it started in 2006. It’s described as “A conference on designing complex information spaces of all kinds” — and it’s happening in grand old Chicago, October 7-8, 2008.
Speakers on the roster […]

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In the closing talk for this year’s IA Summit, I had a slide that explains the various layers that make up what we use the term “Information Architect” (or “Information Architecture”) to denote. I think it’s important to be self-aware about it, because it helps us avoid a lot of wasted breath and miscommunication.
But […]

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Note: This is something I had embedded in a few very long presentations from last year, and I’m realizing it would probably be useful (to me if nobody else) to elaborate on it as its own topic. Here’s the first part.

There’s a lot of writing and thinking happening around the best approaches to designing […]

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There’s been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about a collective Eureka moment where we’ve all come to realize that the Internet, the Web, and designing User Experiences for those platforms, is “really about People … not products and information.”
I think it’s great that more folks are coming to this […]

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Kevin Kelly’s article Bottom Up is Not Enough is making the rounds, and rightly so. Here’s a snippet:
Here’s how I sum it up: The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than […]

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I haven’t written here in many weeks, but it’s not because I’m not writing.
Lately, though, my thoughts have been too fractured to coalesce into anything that felt like a real blog post. I’m now realizing, however, that they never will unless I unclog the cognitive drain, as it were.
So, this post, in a […]

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I’m sick of Facebook. The noise and annoyance, the confusing permissions, the beta-intrusions into privacy and the rest are bad enough.
But what really chafes me about it is the Facebook Apps framework. I’m in full agreement with this post about Facebook, except that I’m not going to blame the developers that much.
The developers […]

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Joi Ito, back in March, posted from the Game Developers Conference, where he is going to be doing a talk on the topic of “More than MMOs: Let Them Build It. How user-created content has transformed online games into a new web platform.” (Wish I could hear that talk! It’s one of my favorite things-to-obsess-upon, […]

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The lovely people of the IAI have arranged for me to give an abbreviated, Second-Life-friendly version of my presentation tomorrow at 3pm Linden Time (i.e. the time in Second Life), or 6pm Eastern US.
It’s abbreviated by necessity — the presentation has many many slides normally, that I go through quickly, but in Second Life […]

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