The Talking Leads To Touching

Let me tell you about some interesting things. I saw that Malcom Gladwell had written an interesting long article on Rick Warren, Christian minister and author of the ‘purpose driven life‘ a book that I have read and that was most certainly ‘not for me’. More Adventurous by Rilo Kiley is a cracking album (and where the title of this post comes from). emusic is actually rather good, who knew? There are prize nominated SF short stories available to read in many places. You could learn about the Development of the Genre Concept, then you can see how genres hamper the mobile internet, possibly almost as much as they hamper mass aceptance of SF as a ’serious’ medium. The discoverability of most of the new ajax features in WordPress 2.0 is approx 0. This doesn’t stop it being a cracking and very polished release, bonus tip, this is now a very good CMS to customise for making websites. TinyMCE is good work. This is just the sort of way designers of all stripes should be engaging with open source projects. The IBM Linux ad from a while back still inspires. As theses go design improv is quite a good one, I’d quite like to try this on a project. Although we seem to be able to get most of what he thinks it should add anyway. Just because it’s something I need to go back to every so often with everything I do a reminder that I’m always supposed to be designing for the sandbox. If people can’t enhance, customise and add value then you haven’t done it right (especially in mobile). Tom says that the territory will soon be the map, not totally sure I agree but he sure writes it nicely.

In decades to come, I think the time will live in now will be understood as the moment that the real and the map started the final stages of a merging that has been going on for hundreds of years. In this future world, all of our discrete objects (physical or conceptual) will be annotatable, or linkable to, referencable. Each ‘thing’ will be built upon in non-physical dimensions of data. And that final process of merging must start with addressability. It must start with identifiers. And it’ll need individuals and collective projects and business and government to undertake taht work, because it’s the foundation of everything that follows. The true power of our technology will not reveal itself until we know what a ‘thing’ is. We will not be able to work with concepts until we have pointed at each new thing (and like Adam in the Bible, I guess) given it a unique identity. From birthing concept into language, we’re now moving from moving concept into data. This is an age of naming, it is an of age of pointing at things.

And that’s your lot.