Regarding the iPad
My life at this point is basically a nonstop firehose of Skype calls, delicious links, SSH logins, and googlefests culminating in presentations in strange office parks. I live in the cloud. My music, my photos, my todo lists, my notes, my travel arrangements, my Christmas list, and my pants size are just chilling out there in a distributed fluff of XML. So, yeah, on that level the iPad with a copy of Keynote for presenting and a bluetooth keyboard for server wrangling sounds like the best thing since ever.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that people who write paragraphs like the one I just wrote should be punched in the junk, over and over, until they buy potable water for a village somewhere.
So, conflicted.
Dangerous Territory: The CMS of the Gaps
One of the recurring discussions in the Drupal community these days revolves around the issue of specialization. Today, Drupal's core download ships as a sort of generic "anything-builder."
What does that mean? Drupal has tools to create things like multi-user blogs, discussion forums, documentation archives, and so on. Thousands of additional plugins can add additional features, but by default the user experience of Drupal is pretty generic. On one level, that's a real strength: the flexibility that the 'generic' approach forces on the developer community means that lots of solutions can be built on top of Drupal. The downside is that those solutions have to be built on top of Drupal. Continue reading...
Collaboration, or collectivism? Joaron Lanier gets it wrong.
Jaron Lanier's piece in the Wall Street Journal this week is an interesting but ultimately flawed analysis of 'Digital Culture' strengths and weaknesses. He starts off with a bold statement, one that raises ominous questions about the article's accuracy and Lanier's own understanding of english:
All too many of today's Internet buzzwords— including "Web 2.0," "Open Culture," "Free Software" and the "Long Tail"—are terms for a new kind of collectivism that has come to dominate the way many people participate in the online world....
There's no escaping collectivism in our online world. If you search about most any topic online, for instance, you will likely be directed first to Wikipedia, a collective effort.
Hating on Wikipedia has turned into a pretty popular pursuit over the past couple of years: last year there was a nice run on "OMG I found an error that stayed online for several hours" articles, and I've had some harsh words to say about Wikipedia's devaluing of expertise in favor of citation. But none of that compares to Lanier's wrongheaded muddling of 'collaborative effort' and 'collectivism.' Continue reading...
