This is all great.

"...you can’t help but wonder if there was some genius in the aggregate. Like Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas”, perhaps Winogrand’s greatest work wasn’t in the brilliant moments or creative editing, but in the Complete Everything, in the performative act of making hundreds of thousands of images, of the people, with the people?" Michael David Murphy on Gary Winogrand, and the value of his work perhaps being in the entirety of it.

"anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment. " Yes.

"You might argue that an iPhone without connectivity is, well, an iPod, but its not. To state the (obviously overlooked) obvious - it is a phone without connectivity and that over time the ease and evolving practice of disconnecting fundamentally changes our assumptions of what we can expect from a phone, which in turn alters our expectations about the connectivity of other people." Jan Chipchase on pause buttons and understandings of what "social" means. Excellent.

An interview with E. Paul Zehr, whose book, "Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero", discusses the matter of the interview. (is it possible for a normal guy to become about as fit as Batman? And can you maintain it?) Some smart points.

"What I want to argue is that humans are uniquely talented at ‘thinking with our hands’, and its wrong to discard ‘intuitive’ engineering as a historical curiosity." Tim Hunkin, on fire, about the importance of making.

"...if you put those two ideas together, you get something surprising. Make something people want. Don't worry too much about making money. What you've got is a description of a charity."

Not quite sure what point Poynor's trying to make; in many ways, his list of examples at the end really is a list of design thinking examples - architecture, engineering, etc, seen with a design hat on. Lots of statements I'm uncomfortable with in this.

Yes. A healthy tonic to all the mind-numbingly irritating rants going around the place about making the web "prettier" and "more distinctive" and "more art directed" and whatever. It's a medium in its own right. Now work out what that means.

"Adventures in particpatory, interactive, rock'n'roll storytelling." Guy's talk in fulltext format. Nicely done, Guy.

"In this paper, I ... argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means"

"I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft."

"To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary." Ursula le Guin on fine form in the NS.

Read it a long while ago, but great to come back to - a fantastic piece of Clay Shirky on fuzzy classifications.

The big media companies shouldn't worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.

Lots of lovely free IxD pdfs. Better read them, then.

I didn't get to see Jeremy talk, which I feel bad for; he clashed with Julian and Nicolas' blogjects session. Fortunately, his prose is online, and a most enjoyable read

Joel on good form; essentially, why managers do everything in their power to let hackers hack.

Excellent Ellis piece on public intellectuals - worth a read.

Public - super-public - hyperpublic. Lots of interesting stuff in this essay from danah. Memo to self: it's all about the ablative case.

Yes, basically. A nice, tight, essay, about what happened to the promise of 60s/70s sci-fi (part of the answer: Star Wars, that's what)

Pointers tripped me up when I was 13 and trying to learn C. Flummoxed, I tell you - and put off programming for a while. Now, though, I appreciate Joel's point (even if I'm a lousy coder and not worthy of the title "programmer"). I think it's the fact I k

Quite weighty, so I'm going to come back to this later. A look at the goal of co-op FPS gameplay, taking Battlefield 1942 apart piece by piece.

The original essays that comprise Joel Spolsky's "Best Software Writing I"

David Foster Wallace on "Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage"