jennybee.net

I love the old school futurism of this poem:

16-bit Intel 8088 chip by Charles Bukowski

with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
five one dot five one zero five
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
minus zero dot one two five one four one
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

Confused? This should help you out.

The concept of ‘folksonomic interface development’ was discussed briefly at yesterday’s Creative Coffee Club.

It’s potential thesis juice so I thought I’d scribble down what’s in my head around the subject.

Folksonomy is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

It captured my imagination because I recently labelled the entire contents of my Gmail inbox (groan) and I struggled to define a useful naming approach. I’d have liked to have been able to select some off-the-shelf labels to get me started.

Either way, my labels are forever in ‘beta’ and there will be plenty more hours spent re-labelling everything when I come up with a new genius way of managing my mail (delete button is probably the best option).

‘Folksonomic’ doesn’t quite describe what I’m interested in however (which is a shame cos ‘folksonomic interface development’ sounds really good!).

What I’m interested in is the notion that users of software might be able to alter the user interface and then share their changes with a community. The key word here is ‘users’. I’m not describing open-source development by software creators.

Imagine if in your favourite piece of software you can re-arrange functions and buttons. You can add and remove functionality. You can skin the interface to make it look pretty. Then you can publish your version of the UI for others to use.

That’s about it for now. Most of that thinking was done on the 159 bus on the way to work this morning. There is much more to be done.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!

W. H. Murray

It’s Florence Nightingale’s birthday today.

She’s one of my a design heroes: she invented the polar area diagram.

Stowe Boyd recently invited startups to ‘Twitpitch’ him in order to arrange to meet with him at a conference…

1. All companies who would like to have a meeting with me, need to send me a Twittered description of the product. Yes, please Twitter it to me at www.twitter.com/stoweboyd. Yes, one tweet, 140 characters less the eleven used for “@stoweboyd “.
2. Optionally, send a supporting twitpitch with one link, and no other text. Could be to anything: website, video, press release, Rick Astley, etc.
3. Then, twitter me one or more suggested times/place to meet at the event, using the times on the calendar, and a location in the conference building I won’t have time to visit your nearby hotel or offices.

Nice. If you’ve got a brilliant idea it really should be communicable in 140 characters. And I’m all for using words sparingly and in a considered fashion. Any application that encourages that gets my vote.