Melancholy Elephants: a copyright parable. Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants," a prescient sf story about copyright, is online for free. This is a hell of a story about the possibility that we will run out of works that are not in copyright, a kind of proto-parable about the demise of the commons brought on by the infinite extension of copyright. Link Discuss (Thanks, Adam!) [Boing Boing Blog]

I'm glad this particular parable is freely available. It's a powerful and scary story about the collision between art, economic interests, and time. Art works as a gift economy over the long term as does much of innovation. There need to be rich sources of material to draw on to fuel the creative process. But if you meter and control every source of raw material, you risk killing the system as a whole. Good systems have resilience and adaptability in them. They allow for the unpredictable and unexpected. Human systems that try to lock down every contingency are brittle. They shatter when they are stressed.

And lots of people get hurt by the sharp, jagged pieces flying around.

8:34:51 PM •  • comment  

BobF at 4:57 PM [url]:

Trapped by the Web!

If all you have is a hammer then everything is a nail.

How else can you explain why web sites are so incredibly painful to use? If I were paranoid I'd assume there was a conspiracy to assure that the Internet is kept lame. But perhaps it is a combination of ignorance and laziness.

[...]

To get an idea of how different things can be, look at Earthviewer (http://www.earthviewer.com). You do have to download the application and it does currently depend on the nVidea GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) but the demo should give you some sense of what is possible. You can quickly flit around satellite images rather than waiting for a map site to generate a small view and then waiting again for each change.

[...]

There is a vast difference between taking advantage of the Internet and protocols like the Web and being limited by them.

As users it's time to stop tolerating incompetence and demand real services.

As professionals we should get over web-fixation and rediscover the power of local computing. Sure, you may want to provide some downscale interface for those limited to old browsers just like you may want to support those silly WAP phones. Or maybe not.

[...]

Finding the balance between building highly tuned applications, between providing the complete service or the enabling technologies, and all the other choices is a challenge and there is no one right answer.

But there is a wrong answer -- limiting yourself to lame and painful web interfaces. The web is wonderful but you must not let it be a trap.

[SATN.org: Comments from Frankston, Reed, and Friends]

First off, go check out the Earthviewer demo and download the app if you have the hardware to support it. Way off the charts for cool/intuitive/useful interface into valuable data. Then spend time thinking about the design problems that Frankston poses.

We're in the midst of inventing multiple new ways to work and organize. While it's comforting to hew to the familiar, it's a dangerous strategy. One thing we'll all need to do is pay more attention to the notion of design. We can't afford to leave it in the hands of a few experts or to assume that design is something you can spray on.

Design in the business and economic settings I'm interested in requires the involvement of experts from multiple areas. We have the beginnings of good design thinking in areas like new product development (think Ideo for example or frog design ), but those techniques aren't yet it wide use or applied effectively outside of new products. We also have some beginnings again with folks like Don Norman , John Rheinfrank , or Clement Mok. But the notion of design is still too peripheral in mainstream business.

11:08:35 AM •  • comment  

Classification is the enemy of invention. Phil Wainewright: We cannot organize without shared definitions and classifications; but we cannot create without challenging preconceived ideas. This is the paradox at the heart of innovation (and indeed the flaw in any vision of canonical business semantics). [Sam Ruby]

Succinct explanation of the tension between inventing new things and communicating them into a market with existing categories and frameworks.

You can't simply choose to play one end or the other of this tension. You have to resolve it. If you try to stay firmly within the status quo you had better hope the status will stay quo for a while. I'm not betting on that option. If you strike too far off into the wilderness you risk starving before the rest of civilization catches up with you. Don't we live in fun times? Be daring but not too daring. Strike off in a new direction but leave a trail of breadcrumbs.

We know more about how to do this exploration when the territory is real territory. It's trickier to do it when the territroy is in your head. One part of the safety net is to become more mindful of the unexpected. Another part is to have more robust tools and processes for thinking quality thoughts.

It's a bit like skiing or snowboarding. In familiar terrain you want to do it without thinking. But, even if you're really good, you want to be mindful and conscious of technique as you get into more unfamiliar terrain. As we start moving off into new ideas and new ways of doing work, we need to become mindful of our thinking techniques. More so than we ever are (or need to be) when we're in familiar terrain.

10:24:10 AM •  • comment