Posts

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from friends again about what I’m using on OSX. A friend just had to switch over to a government provided Powerbook (yes, I hate her), I managed to switch several other friends to Firefox on a bunch of platforms, and another friend is thinking of retiring her ailing NT laptop for a shiny new iBook.

So, thought I’d better update the previous list , flesh it out, and structure it a little. Only desktop apps. If I’ve missed any categories or there is other stuff you think I should have in there (or apps I should know about), please let me know. Virtually all this software is free or open source.

I was kind of sad to read the review of the latest Carmen Sandiago game this morning.

First off, I remember the original game, Where in the World is Carman Sandiego ? from Brøderbund which I thought was a fantastic platform for teaching kids geography.

It was great fun and educational. It was not just a “memorize the capitals” flashcard type thing, but taught you some details about the country and culture there and allowed you to use deductive reasoning to figure things out. It also taught you the value of researching, going and looking up something, and in a lot of ways, was an inspired title educationally. You’d use the clues, research and storyline to determine where Carmen had escaped to in the world and then track her down there and recover the artifacts. OK, it was never that big a challenge to me (I am scarily good at world geography) but after having an adult last month ask me where exactly the Netherlands were, I definitely think that some people could use it even now. The things I loved about it were that it was engaging, played well and was chock full of educational content (I can still remember that is where I learned whose currency the zloty was).

Fascinating essay from the always insightful Danah Boyd on generational differences between rss, blog and IM. Particularly interesting after the Web 2.0 conference’s vision of the future of syndication.

apophenia: a culture of feeds

The difference, as she points out too near the end (I really, really wish she’d continued on with those ideas rather than obsessing on youth IM/LJ use), is really about content versus community. Resolving that issue is really the tension that syndication needs to deal with in order to leap into the business mainstream. People only being peripherally aware of a conversation without participating are really only eavesdropping on the train. Unless they participate the usefulness is really only about newsfeed neuroses (or take and use it in other ways). The point about youth culture using feeds is that they are more involved with the conversation. IM is their community. Because communities are conversations.

On the plane to DC I had a chance to catch up on some manifesto type readings from Change This which basically re-packages interesting essays from A-listers into pretty PDFs and puts them on the site. Short, compelling and thought provoking they are perfect reading for bumpy plane rides over hostile territory when you’ve only had 3 hours sleep. You can always pull something interesting out of each issue (one every 2 weeks) and often its pretty good, very applicable stuff. Certainly noteworhty..

Interesting weblog post on the design philosophy behind MarsEdit beta , which has become my blog weapon of choice (much better than ecto IMHO). Basically, the UI philosophy was blogging like sending email.

It’s interesting, but misleading in terms of actual usage, because I think of MarsEdit as a blog management tool though do use it for posting from NetNewsWire and Firefox> (I use MacJournal 2.6beta5 for writing and posting much of the time). I’m not necessarily a normal user, but still. MarsEdit is great for adding in pix though which is a feature still missing from MJ.

Following up on Social Software Interfaces , I’ve been looking around at different classes of software (blogs, wikis, collaboration spaces, social softs) to help self-identify, self-create and self-publish a large, de-centralized global community. While outsourcing to a “private label” Blogger, TypePad or LJ (if they had it) might be an option, it seems silly even considering it with all the amazing open source tools out there once you abstract infrastructure and admin.

They did it. Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne made a successful first Ansari X Prize rocketing to 100 miles and the limit of space before returning safely to earth.

Like the 1919 Orteig prize which spurred Lindbergh to attempt the first transatlantic crossing in the Spirit of St.Louis, the Ansari X Prize has managed to do what superpowers have failed to do: open space.

I think the X Prize competition is important, but not for the reason most people think I do (my father being an aeronautical technician, my brother an airplane mechanic, and my mom a trekkie). I honestly think the benefits to science and industry will be minuscule to the changes I hope it creates in our ideas about ourselves.

Joel on Software has a great usability article on the difference between designing social software interfaces versus user interface design. This is on my mind a lot right now as what my potential employer is asking me to, while fixing their corporate backend, is build software to power their society.

Whereas the goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it means one user has to fail.

Often, even useful software never gets used, because it does not align with the way people want to work together. Getting the social interfaces right is critical. Creating belonging is key. We’re really building communities with social software .

Since my plane buddies from the other night and I talked at length about what could be done to stop this slow, terrible erosion of democracy we all seemed to see and help resurrect public discourse about real issues :

Adbusters, the anti-consumerism culturejammers , have launched a legal challenge against the major Canadian media outlets which refuse to let Adbusters buy airtime on Canadian networks for airing their ads.

How important is this case? For a generation of people, and a growing social movement that sees the media as its main battleground, a victory here will change everything. Without media democracy - which means genuine public access to the most powerful forms of communication - we can’t raise healthy children, create good public policy or hold elections that are legitimate or that matter. We lose power to shape our consciousness, our culture and our future. We even lose the power to imagine what that future should look like.

Quick followup on the wikipedia authority challenge .

Ed Felten did a quick smackdown comparison ; the mighty Wikipedia vs Brittanica cage deathmatch.

Very interesting actually. Wikipedia seems to do very well against Brittanica when it goes toe to toe. Would be interested in seeing how far that actually goes though for a representative statistically significant comparison of entries.

Overall verdict: Wikipedia’s advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren’t for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica’s advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.