The powers of ten.  Nice pictorial depiction of scale (thanks Steve). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

You might also want to check out materials from the original Charles Eames power of ten project. It appears to be available in a number of different formats

6:42:43 PM •  • comment  

RadioExpress: "I just did my first Radio Userland "extension". I wanted to be able to blog things I found around the web without having to copy/paste from that page to the R8 edit form. Blogger has a cool bookmarklet to do that. ManilaExpress also does that for Manila. However, R8 default form editor does not support receiving default text via external forms. So I changed it and repackaged it in the form of a new R8 page. It comes with it's own bookmarklet which you can easily install in your navigator's toolbar."

This is definitely in my must have tools for Radio. This clip is posted using it.

5:13:14 PM •  • comment  

Open Source Research Community (Home): "In the spirit of free and open source software (F/OSS), we are attempting to establish a community in which information will be freely exchanged, so that we may further the understanding of open source and its implications outside the realm of software development. We invite researchers to post their papers on open source and free software here, and to add themselves to the research directory, so that our community can become steadily larger and more comprehensive"

Found this site courtesy of Phil Agre and RRE. It looks to be highly academic in nature, but it is collecting papers from some pretty well-established researchers and institutions.

4:10:15 PM •  • comment  

IAwiki:EmergentArchitecture. Eric Scheid has been gathering some notes and thoughts on applying the theories and principles of Emergence within the field of Information Architecture. Read about it here: IAwiki:EmergentArchitecture [ia/ - news for information architects]

I haven't considered the evaluative question as yet: Is an information architecture which emerges from the system itself of value, as good as it gets?. I suggest that it is too soon to get embroiled in a debate such as that ... we must first endeavour to define what an EmergentArchitecture is, and we must secondly identify if the extant forms are par examplars.

I'm reminded of the discussions from pre-web days of how to create corporate data architectures that did a top-down design of all an organization's databases. Plausible, even persuasive, at the level of CIO-level presentations; next to impossible to execute in the real world.

What's appealing and intriguing about this site is the attempt to find a synthesis between the top-down design and bottoms-up emergent perspectives. 

This same argument crops up in lots of places. In the early days of AI research, there was a debate that Roger Schank nicely summed up as "the neats vs. the scruffies." Was it top-down design or bottoms-up evolution that was the right answer? These false dichotomies annoy me no end, so finding someone else looking for a pragmatic middle ground is reassuring.

4:00:38 PM •  • comment