since i work in a software organization that subscribes to the capability maturity model , i'm always interested in exploring how to balance the demands from the various stakeholders involved in software development.

that's why i was happy to see peter initiate a great thread on the "politics of design":

"The politics of technology design are examined in the context of software design where there has been an emphasis on “user participation” as a solution to poor software design. However, in examining the realpolitik of design, our research shows that the process must be situated in an organizational and market context. Thus, traditional concepts of user participation tend to be limited and need to be expanded to incorporate a broader organizational model of how technology and work are structured. ."

"In summary, I think one key to success is to enable a very small set of folks to drive the design thinking. I would much rather have one product designer that has medium proficiency in information design, visual design, and interaction design, than three individuals each contributing only those independent perspectives. You want a small number of people to be able to go and iterate quickly, trying out lots of ideas without hoops, bureaucracy or design by committee, but balanced by input or contributions from all of the disciplines you need."

so, regular readers might notice that i'm fond of using an introductory so. i've never given a lot of thought as to why, where or when the affectation began, but david weinberger has an interesting theory :

"So — and, by the way, this is the proper use of "so", indicating a conclusion is about to be drawn — I speak with some authority when I ask why "so" has spread so quickly among the computing class. Could it be that the shortened attention spans, the need to have hyperlinked escape routes out of every paragraph, the fracturing of knowledge and story into bytes and sound bytes — could all this be taking its toll, so that we resort to a false connectivity, the equivalent of starting a conversation by saying "Well, anyway"? Or is the "so" playing a different role, announcing that what follows is going to take at least a few sentences, a way of holding off interruptions, exactly equivalent to our children's use of a rising inflection ... at the end of sentences ... to let us know ... that they're not done ..., they're not ready to relinquish the floor..., heaven forbid someone else should get a word in .... Or is it both: a false sense of logical connectedness and a brazen land grab of our attention?"

despite some indications that jabber.com might have to tweak their business model a bit, they still decided to release the source to a few components, including JECL:

"Jabber External Component Libraries (JECL), a set of programming interfaces for building Jabber server applications. JECL 1.0 provides a programming interface to build applications that take advantage of Jabber's extensible XML messaging platform. Examples are directory services and collaborative applications."

"In this article, we take a look at bots, those programs-with-character that hang around in chat channels and amuse, help, and generally make the day a little more pleasant for those people who talk to them. We'll take a close look at ChatBot, beloved of the participants in the Jabber Developer's room "jdev", which is hosted on conference.jabber.org."

great. just what i need. as dan gillmor points out, the new google newspage could become a big timesucker:

"Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, explained it to me yesterday. The spiders check a slew of news Web sites every hour, look for stories about similar topics and then rank them for importance in that specific time span."

well, the catholic altar boy in me sure likes the sound of prosperity through punishment:

"Cooperation can flourish if the public-spirited majority can punish freeloaders, say Swiss economists. People will pay to punish - suggesting that their notions of fairness outweigh selfish considerations. The work may help explain why people cooperate in society."

Man in the white suit:

"For all the promise and opportunity of these new technologies, we should be wary of pitfalls along the way to the new pervasive paradise. At the end of the movie, the white suit disintegrates due to a flaw in the formula. As our hero stands before a dissipating mob of workers and employers clad only in his underwear, he checks his notes and appears to discover an error in his calculations. With a knowing "I see!" the man in the white suit walks away toward the future with a spring in his step."

in contrast to a recent prediction of interoperability coming to im, those of us running a jabber server still have to contend with being blacklisted:

"This past Sunday, AOL blacklisted my public Jabber server, Theoretic.com , making it only the third Jabber server to be blocked from accessing the AIM and ICQ networks, after the two "official" public Jabber servers of Jabber.ORG and Jabber.COM.

"This story takes everyone from reasoning out my own options to ending up understanding my solution is easy, but the cures for the greater symptoms are much more difficult to obtain, and asks how prodigy projects can hope to face corporate titans and forces of nature."

what in the world has happened to chris langreiter? it doesn't look good.

all that and it makes a great ihat, too. kewl.

althought it doesn't really live-up to the hype that i had created in my own mind, that doesn't mean apple isn't onto something.

the best news is that the original imac is only $799, which is priced right for the education market.

in fire and motion, joel does a masterful job of tying together seemingly simple things into a nice, solid essay on plugging-away in a competitive field:

"I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn't matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side. Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can't move forward?"