As usual, good comments on my last post that you should read. Anca picked up on my last point that one might be able to design the direction a community takes by designing the media interaction spaces for that community. But before trying to design something, I think it’s useful to observe my current and […]
Transmedia conversations
I had a minor epiphany last week after my friend Jocelyn posted a quote from our conversation at dinner on my Facebook wall. For those of you not on Facebook, the wall is a single-threaded discussion board, where people can write comments to you that are visible to others. One of the reasons I didn’t […]
Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986-2006, by Chip Kidd
Amazon link Do you recognize any of these book covers? Then you know of Chip Kidd’s work. I first became aware of Chip Kidd when I picked up a book with a striking cover at the library a few years ago. The book was The Cheese Monkeys, and I enjoyed the hilarious over-the-top antics of […]
Why social software
Why does anybody use social software? I talked about some possible uses in my last post about affordances, but there’s more going on. Grant McCracken wrote a great post about how social networks work where he describes the concept of “phatic communication”, which he describes as “communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of […]
Affordances of social software
Following up on my last post, let’s spend some time discussing what makes certain social software sites easier to adopt than others. I’ve written about technology affordances before, but I think the affordances of a given social software site have a huge impact on its adoption. We’ll start by analyzing why I found LiveJournal so […]
Generations of social software
A couple weeks ago, we had a discussion over on the nextNY mailing list about how to use social networking software such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. What was interesting to me about the conversation was how it broke down generationally – us older folks were struggling to figure out what we were supposed to […]
Blog comments and community
I’m a couple weeks late in commenting on the post where Joel explains why he doesn’t let people comment on his posts: When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that […]
Authority
My last post on advice for managers stirred up a great comment thread, so go read those comments first. The main subject of contention was my third point where I said “There is no such thing as authority”. What was interesting was that every commenter had a different way of interpreting the word authority. Jessie […]
Advice for managers
A friend of mine just asked if I had any advice for a person who’s just starting his first management position at a startup. Even though I have minimal management experience myself, I’ve been in all sorts of work environments, including a startup that grew from 40 people to 150 people and went bankrupt a […]
Remixing fields
I liked the career advice from Scott Adams last week (also seen at Seppo’s blog), where he points out: …if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point […]
