Paul Graham, an essayist whose work I’ve admired for quite some time now, has written a brilliant piece: What Business Can Learn from Open Source. Don’t be put off by the title, the most interesting bits aren’t about business and they aren’t about open source, at least not directly. The best bits are about people becoming writers and doing what they love, and doing it better than people who get paid to do it.

Steve Rubel over at Micropersuasion writes:

“a new way of communicating is beginning to resonate with audiences. As blogging and other forms of consumer generated media surge, people will begin to expect the same tone of voice from all the sources they ‘consume.'”

As a result, he thinks more and more companies will go “all blog”. I like that term, it fits nicely into the Web 2.0 ideals of open source data, open conversations, and human voices.

There are lots of sites out there dedicated to the new UI approach dubbed Ajax, most of which relay interesting news on the subject. Few, however, actually talk about what’s going on behind the scenes. You know, all that Javascript stuff: creating objects, DOM manipulation, XMLHTTPRequest, etc.

A buddy of mine, Jeff Watkins, who has probably been writing Javascript longer than you or I have known about it, has launched a new site that fills this void called Nerd.Newburyport. He’s got several posts up so far, and reading through them I’ve learned a lot.

And yes, that kick butt Search function is Ajax…

(via Shaun Inman): Dave Hyatt posts that the Safari web browser supports multiple background images as specified in the CSS3 spec.

That means that you can change your CSS to attach multiple background images to a single element, one of the most desired things imaginable in the world of CSS. Presumably, there will be a way to write CSS to achieve the effect in Safari, while not breaking rendering in browers that don’t support it yet.

Rounded box corners will be a breeze!

I’m not in the habit of making predictions, although I really do enjoy seeing trends and wondering where they’ll go, but I do have a prediction about the upcoming IE7 browser, currently in beta.

Before I get to my prediction, I must say that I’m really impressed with the IE team this time around: they seem to be listening to developers, which is an area that they have been poor in during the last few years. The efforts of folks like Molly Holzschlag and others who are working on behalf of the WaSP are really great, and I think the eventual outcome is that developer’s lives will be easier, and MS will get much better publicity than they currently have.

OK, my prediction:

If IE7 supports the “table” value applied to the “display” property (as in display:table), then you’ll see a huge migration to using this instead of using either floats or absolute positioning.

In fact, I’ve used this technique on a production site, and it works fine even now. On Safari and Firefox it looks like a table. On current versions of IE (which don’t support display:table), it simply looks like one big column.

You can see my implementation here: http://uie.com/events/uiconf/articles/

Keith over at Asterisk continues the discussion on the various ways to subscribe to a blog.

Also, faithful reader Marilyn recently suggested the term “sign up” instead of “subscribe” because subscribe sounds like there might be money involved. I wonder, though, if “sign up” has similar problems.

As I put in the comments at Keith’s blog:

Google homepage now allows for subscription to RSS feeds and never mentions the words subscribe, syndicate, or feed. I found that very interesting, considering the reasons alluded to.

Also, Dave Sifry’s comment that RSS will succeed by disappearing seems to be spot on.

We shouldn’t need to know what technology we’re dealing with unless we’re the publisher.

One of my favorite authors is Jorge Luis Borges. In high school I borrowed a book by Borges from my English teacher that I’ve been thinking about ever since: Labyrinths. In the short parable “The Witness”, Borges contemplates what is lost when someone dies:

there was a day that extinguished the last eyes to see Christ; the battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of a man. What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

This is Borges at his best: asking questions like this. I wonder what is happening now, while we live, as we become so consumed with media and text and video games and all the things that fracture our attention. What are we missing? What have we overlooked? What miracle has occurred that we just haven’t noticed?

What people are in need who are being ignored? What innovation has been born that we haven’t acknowledged? What new genius is in our midst that we haven’t understood?

What we pay attention to isn’t always deserving of it. We could be missing the blossom of a wild rose.

There’s an interesting discussion going on between Kevin Marks and Stowe Boyd about tagging and decentralization. It’s a very important discussion because it involves the issues behind how we’re going to tag things in the future (if at all).

It was started by Jeff Jarvis, who was imagining a Semantic Web service for restaurants: Made for the distributed world

Stowe Boyd responded by agreeing that people would want to have their own content (in this case restaurant reviews) located on their own site and not on other sites. He makes the point that it is unfavorable to have to link to a proprietary site to look up a tagspace (e.g. Technorati): Jeff Jarvis on Made For A Distributed World

Kevin Marks responds by saying that tagging isn’t as proprietary as Stowe thinks it is, and that the freedom of being able to change tags over time makes it non-lock in: Understanding true decentralisation – the microformat model

Stowe responds by pointing out that people won’t change their tags over time, and that right now we need to link to some tagspace and so at some level it is lock-in: Kevin Marks on Tag Decentralization

I highly recommend reading this stuff if you’re interested in tagging/decentralization. I learned a lot from it…

Update: Marc Canter adds his take on the discussion, pointing out that the goal is to structure microcontent, and that the microformats way of doing things is only one of the possibilities.

If you haven’t heard yet, Google Maps has added a hybrid view to their mapping service, allowing you to overlay the street names on top of the satellite images.

This is truly useful because you can see individual buildings (even houses) as well as the name of the street they are on.

Perfect for stalking.

Here’s my town of Newburyport, MA.

Faithful reader Len responded to my last post by pointing out that tryability is akin to the Paradox of the Active User, a concept originated by John Caroll and Mary Beth Rosson.

The “paradox of the active user” is the persistent use of inefficient procedures in interactive environments by experienced or even expert users when demonstrably more efficient procedures exist.

In other words, people don’t take the time to figure out how the thing works before they go ahead and use it. They don’t read manuals, they don’t work through tutorials, they don’t always adapt when the interface changes. To get optimal efficiency with the application, they would do these things first, saving them a whole lot of time in the long run.

Here’s an excerpt from one of Carroll’s books: The Paradox of the Active User.

The paradox has something to do with ego: “I can figure this out without help”. But it’s also got an attention factor: “I don’t have time to figure this out”. Both are incredibly interesting symptoms of modern computing, and with both we end up trying to keep from being distracted by applications that could potentially make things much better for us.