Dave Weinberger is blogging bits of the valuably fecund “Reboot” conference this week. Included is a nice summary of Jaiku-founder Jyri Engestrom’s talk. In the past, he’s been very influential among social design folk for pushing the idea of “social objects” — a powerful notion that helps clarify why people do what they do socially [...]

The terrifically talented Kyle T Webster and cohort Andy Horner have completed the first full edition of their graphic novel Light Children. It looks to be gorgeous and enthralling. Go check it out! From the site: On the eve of graduation, six friends struggle with the fact that two of their oldest are about to graduate [...]

Within a larger, and more political, point in his column, George Will explains something about structuring systems so as to “nudge” people toward a particular behavior pattern, without mandating anything: George F. Will: Nudge Against the Fudge Such is the power of inertia in human behavior, and the tendency of individuals to emulate others’ behavior, that [...]

I don’t know how I missed this before, but I’m glad I ran across it. If you haven’t seen this very brief clip of Edward Tufte critiquing the iPhone interface, check it out. A couple of salient quotes: “The idea is that the content is the interface, the information is the interface, not computer-administrative debris.” [...]

Chris Brogan has a great post about 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media, with some helpful tips on creating that thing we keep hearing about “the Personal Brand.” I’ve always struggled with this, though. I’ve been doing this “blogging” thing a long time. In fact, my first “home page” was a text-only index file. [...]

Whenever I say that the Hyperlink changed the world, people look at me like “huh?” The lowly hyperlink is often overlooked as just a ‘feature’ of the Internet or the Web in particular. But I’ve always thought that was a bit backwards. The hyperlink is what made the web possible — it is for the [...]

When I first heard about the Kozinski story (some mature content in the story), it was on NPR’s All Things Considered. The interviewer spoke with the LA Times reporter, who went on about how the judge had “published” offensive material on a “public website.” I won’t go into detail on the story itself. But I [...]

Everybody’s linking to this article today, but I had to share a chunk of it that gave me goosebumps. It’s this bit from Leonard Kleinrock: : September 2, 1969, is when the first I.M.P. was connected to the first host, and that happened at U.C.L.A. We didn’t even have a camera or a tape recorder or [...]

I’d like to encourage everyone to attend IDEA 2008, a conference (organized by the IA Institute) that’s been getting rave reviews from attendees since it started in 2006. It’s described as “A conference on designing complex information spaces of all kinds” — and it’s happening in grand old Chicago, October 7-8, 2008. Speakers on the roster [...]

This is based on a slide I’ve been slipping into decks for over a year now as a “quick aside” comment; but it’s been bugging me enough that I need to get it out into a real blog post. So here goes. We hear the words Strategy and Innovation thrown around a lot, and often [...]

In the closing talk for this year’s IA Summit, I had a slide that explains the various layers that make up what we use the term “Information Architect” (or “Information Architecture”) to denote. I think it’s important to be self-aware about it, because it helps us avoid a lot of wasted breath and miscommunication. But [...]

The granddaddy of the Internet clarifies a popular misconception. Print What I’ve Learned: Vint Cerf Al Gore had seen what happened with the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, which his father introduced as a military bill. It was very powerful. Housing went up, suburban boom happened, everybody became mobile. Al was attuned to [...]

In the “Linkosophy” talk I gave on Monday, I suggested that a helpful distinction between the practices of IxD & IA might be that IxD’s central concern is within a given context (a screen, device, room, etc) while IA’s central concern is how to connect contexts, and even which contexts are necessary to begin with [...]

NOTE: You need to view this in “Full Screen” mode, which you can only do from the SlideShare page itself. Otherwise, the narrative text isn’t readable. (Or download the 6 MB PDF version.) | View | Upload your own (Thanks to David Fiorito for compressing it down from its formerly gigantic size!) Giving this talk at the [...]

So, only a few days after I posted the original version of this, I’m doing an about-face. I was keeping my feed locked, because Twitter is such an informal, impulsive broadcasting platform, that I like knowing only a small circle will see my brainfarts. Keeping it locked, however, means that anyone I “allow” to see [...]

The IA Summit is going fine so far. Miami is delightful. I set up a channel on Freenode so that if anybody wants to get their chat on during sessions, we can do it there. For those of you who just want to chat without much muss or fuss, go here: http://java.freenode.net//index.php?channel=iasummit2008 … and BE [...]