from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball on the Apple switch to Intel processors: Bombs Away.
As you should have come to expect
Lawrence Lessig
has been doing his talk on copyright for about two years now, really leading the intellectual and the legal battle on this important issue of the digital world. It seems that he’s going to shift gears a little bit, but before he does, check out his copyright talk, “free_culture” as given at OSCON 2002 in July.
I followed a link from plasticbag
early this morning and took an interesting test: Battleground God. The basic idea is that it tests the consistency of your beliefs in god and such. As a long-time atheist, but one who has studied religion in various forms, I was particularly interested in seeing this thing in action.
I ended up being judged to be very consistent with my views, but I got one “direct hit” – meaning that I was badly inconsistent in one opinion. The site said,
Earlier you said that it is justifiable to base one’s beliefs about the external world on a firm, inner conviction even when there is no external evidence for the truth of this conviction. But now you do not accept that the rapist Peter Sutcliffe was justified in doing just that. The example of the rapist has exposed that you do not in fact agree that any belief is justified just because one is convinced of its truth. So you need to revise your opinion here. The intellectual sniper has scored a bull’s-eye!
This is wrong – similar to what Tom found, the site has judged something inconsistent incorrectly. In saying that it is justifiable to base beliefs on a firm inner conviction, it does not follow that any firm inner conviction is therefore justifiable or acceptible. I base my beliefs about the world on firm inner convictions but also upon other things, such what I feel “society” or my community finds acceptible. For me, it is the constant dialogue between my existing inner convictions and the demands of the wider world that determines my morality, not only firm inner convictions, unconnected to anything else.
Zeldman
: “Our stupid industry pitifully undervalues good web writing.” Bravo! In my experience this is completely correct. Sadly a lot of writers resist learning about the web as well, and so can’t transition to becoming good web writers in the first place.
Zeldman does repeat the old saw that people don’t read, though, which I simply don’t believe. They don’t read everything on every page. But if there’s actual unique content, they’ll read it. They do every day – millions of people read websites very thoroughly. But in general I agree with the proposition.
I approach this from the point of view that the workflow involved in developing sites is fatally flawed. Contrary to many, I don’t believe websites are primarily IS/IT projects, or that they should be managed by technical managers. Of all the activities that must be carried out to make a successful website, only about 30% of these are “technical” in the sense that a programmer, DBA, or other coder must be involved. Content development, graphic design, IA – all these are more fundamental to the development of a website than ANY technical function. The leadership of a web project should be done by a person who can speak intelligently to all of those folks: the editors and writers, the programmers doing any application development or DB work, the IA person and the graphic designer. And each of those functions should be done in concert with all the others on the team.
