Peter Loats' Project Radio Weblog

Sunday, March 16, 2003

The Fast Company article below mentions software engineer Peter Norvig's Powerpoint interpretation of the Gettysburg Address. Peter's discussion of how he built the presentation is full of references to other articles on good presentations.

Among the links is an excellent article by Doc Searls.

Maybe I could have done the same thing with software," Bill says. "But it was easier to just do it. Software is useful, but for creating a design it tends to get in the way."
Which brings me to PowerPoint.

[Peter@Norvig.com]
8:26:42 PM

Fast Company: How Google Grows...and Grows...and...
Fast Company: How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows.

If it takes too long to deliver results or an additional word of text on the home page is too distracting, Google risks losing people's attention. If the search results are lousy, or if they are compromised by advertising, it risks losing people's trust. Attention and trust are sacrosanct.

A nice article that reminds you to focus on your mission and don't forget your customers. [Tomalak's Realm]
7:20:46 PM

Social Software's Emerging Norms
Clay Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups.

When the internet was strange and new, we concentrated on its strange new effects. Earlier generations of social software, from mailing lists to MUDs, were created when the network's population could be measured in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions, and the users were mostly young, male, and technologically savvy. In those days, we convinced ourselves that immersive 3D environments and changing our personalities as often as we changed socks would be the norm.

That period, which ended with the rise of the Web in the early 1990s, was the last time the internet was a global village, and the software built for this environment typically made three assumptions about groups: they could be of any size; anyone should be able to join them; and the freedom of the individual is more important than the goals of the community.
The network is now a global metropolis, vast and heterogeneous, and in this environment groups need protection from too-rapid growth and from being hijacked by anything from off-topic conversations to spam. The communities that thrive in this metropolitan environment violate most or all of the earlier assumptions. Instead of unlimited growth, membership, and freedom, many of the communities that have done well have bounded size or strong limits to growth, non-trivial barriers to joining or becoming a member in good standing, and enforceable community norms that constrain individual freedoms. Forums that lack any mechanism for ejecting or controlling hostile users, especially those convened around contentious topics, have often broken down under the weight of user hostile to the conversation

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
7:01:43 PM

Organizing with NoteTaker
My bias toward software increasingly goes like this: If it's not blatantly obvious in its user interaction, forget it.

One thing is obvious, after spending a day with it: I haven't begun to get very deep into this tool, and there's a fairly serious learning curve to get the most from it. But after spending some time with NoteTaker, I've tentatively decided to use the software to help organize a book I'm writing, and probably everything else, too.
A perfect product? Far from it. The user interface is fairly intuitive, but some of the menus aren't, for example, and I get confused moving around inside the various notebooks, tabs and outlines. But the company, according to a well-informed friend who's been using NoteTaker, is responsive to suggestions.

I've started to play around with this tool also. It took a little bit to figure out how to add a new page but it seems like a real good tool for a "pile" guy like I am. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
6:42:37 PM

Washington Journalist Tells of White House Quote Massaging
BuzzFlash: Proof That the Washington Post and the White House Press Corps Wear Knee Pads: Breathe Deeply and Swallow.

Not only do the so-called reporters have to get approval before including the quotes in an article, the White House can alter the quotations and demand that they be printed as though they were the original quotations.

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
6:39:56 PM

ISVs and Desktop Flash Apps

Here's a comment from Jeremy Allaire's blog that talks to using Flash as a Desktop app environment. The following are his words.

Kevin Werbach posted this comment in reply to [Jeremy Allaire's earlier post] about Flash as solution to cross-platform desktop apps:

So, why do you think these developers don't use Flash today? Lack of awareness, cost, performance, missing features, compatibility, bad associations from cheesy animated Website intros... or something else? I know Flash has significant support from ISVs and platform vendors, but not the boutique tool creators.

I'm pretty close to the issue and will offer up a few comments. Hopefully Kevin Lynch or others from Macromedia can chime in on their blogs, too. Here's a shortlist:

Yes, lack of awareness. Flash MX is a year into the market, and it definately takes a long time for platforms and brands to be established and re-defined. However, at the same time, Flash continues to gain awareness as a cross-platform app environment for browser contained applications, and industry analysts generally consider Flash the leading rich client today. Very few ISVs realize how deep the Flash runtime is in terms of its programming model -- for example, very few people realize that 80% of Internet desktops have a runtime that can do real-time messaging, and multi-way audio and video, APIs that are native to Flash Player 6.
Cognitive Dissonance. This is what Kevin calls "bad associations from cheesy animated Website intros". Like it or not, Flash cut its teeth in motion graphics and animation, and over the past few releases evolved into an application platform. That brand and association is widely accepted. As a result, software developers generally filter out Flash from their architecture considerations because of this history. But in the early 1990s the same could be said for Windows (buggy desktop shell for DOS), and through many releases, broader and better tools, and focused marketing it became established as the premier desktop software platform.
Deployment Limitations. Flash's primary runtime container is the browser today, and for ISVs building desktop applications that is a limitation. While there are many third-party products for building desktop-contained and integrated Flash applications, they are not well known in the ISV community. The original vision behind MX was for Flash to evolve outside of the browser, both on the desktop and devices. Macromedia continues to make great progress on that, so ISVs should keep a close eye on the Flash runtime container model.
Programming Model. Today, building Flash applications requires a hybrid left-brain/right-brain skill-set. That's reflected in the nomenclature and workflow of the Flash IDE, which uses concepts like Movies, MovieClips, Timelines, Symbols, Layers, etc. in addition to classic software programming concepts like Components, Objects, XML, ECMAScript, and Web Services. Macromedia understands the diversity of developer types, including pure ISV-style application developers, and will surely deliver the right range of products to better optimize development workflow.

In my new role at General Catalyst, I've had the opportunity meet with ISVs who've built Web application front-ends. Most of them have standardizead on Internet Explorer 5.5 on Windows and the DHTML object model therein. The apps look and behave OK, and I'm sure they had lots of pain getting it all to work. I invarably introduce the concept of Flash as a rich client, and it's striking how few are aware of what Flash has evolved into, but all are receptive to the opportunity.

[Jeremy Allaire's Radio ]
6:31:11 PM