Adding Jim Kunstler to my reading list

Buzz is now the third or fourth person I trust who’s told me I need to go see what Kunstler has to say. This, of course, is the risk of following people you trust in the blogging world. Your reading list grows well beyond anything you can possibly hope to complete no matter how fast you can read. Instead, you have to exercise your own judgments about how you are going to manage your information world. Of course, thinking about how you are going to do this explicitly is far better than doing it by default, which is what most of us do.

Talking to Jim…. One of the very bright guys that I met at PopTech! was Jim Kunstler. Jim is a critic of things that I care about. I am trying to get him into the blogging world, but in the meantime, go read… [buzzmodo]

New insights from Tufte

More fascinating examples from Tufte about how to squeeze more meaning into data displays. The interesting tradeoff to be managed here is between design time to find compelling and meaningful representations and interpretation/decision time by those who will use the representations. As a gross generalization, design time gets short shrift at the expense of increased problems with interpretation and decision. A bad cost/benefit tradeoff.

Spaklines. Edward Tufte: Sparklines or Wordgraphs–some draft pages from Beautiful Evidence… [Emptybottle : Coasters]

Strange Harmonic Convergence

Although I only took a handful of classes at MIT while I was in graduate school up the Charles river a bit, I did get this one since I frequently walked across the Harvard Bridge and was naturally curious about the markings along the way. Strange harmonic convergence indeed.

Strange Harmonic Convergence. This is a bit of MIT arcana that I expect only some of you will get, but it is something that I did not know that gave me pause today: Unit of measurement elected head of standards board [Via Everything Burns] Oliver Smoot is one of the quintessential pieces of … By furd (mailto:furd@mit.edu). [Furdlog]

New Gadget Site – Engadget

Not being as disciplined as Ernie, I have both gadget sites in my subscriptions list.

New Gadget Site. Gizmodo’s Peter Rojas has started a gadget weblog of his own called Engadget. I’ve replaced the blogroll link for Gizmodo with a link to Engadget, which will give you some indication of my preference between the two sites…. [Ernie The Attorney]

Most people can't handle more than a couple hundred feeds

If you’re going to be in the tail of a distribution it helps to be in the tail occupied by interesting folks like Scoble. I certainly don’t entertain plans to surpass his subscription count. I’m hovering around 300 feeds now and that is probably a but beyong my practical capacity.

Most people can’t handle more than a couple hundred feeds. Andrew Grumet has computed the distribution of subscription numbers among Share your OPML participants. Here’s the cumulative graph, which highlights how much of an outlier Robert Scoble is with his (at last count) 1296 subscriptions:
The image http://radio-weblogs.com/0110772/CumDistSubscriptions.png cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
[Seb’s Open Research]

Reinstalling Radio – possible breakage ahead

I’m having some internal software problems with “Radio”. The simplest solution looks to be a reinstall. It’s possible that will lead to some breakage, so I wanted to give both my readers a heads up. I believe that one side-effect of reinstalling is that Radio may choose to republish the entire 2+ years worth of posts here and that might cause some odd trackback pings to long ago posts.

The newest Berkman Fellow: David Weinberger.

The newest Berkman Fellow: David Weinberger. We're delighted that David Weinberger will be a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School this coming academic year.  His writing and leadership on the Internet & Society phenomenon puts him in the top rank of thinkers and do-ers in this space.  Very good news for our community at the Berkman Center.  I have high hopes for our work together. [John Palfrey News]

Congratulations to David. Interesting things continue to happen at the Berkman Center. I'm hoping to get to the next BloggerCon scheduling permitting, even if my name isn't Dave 🙂

No silver bullet

No Silver Bullet.

I’m working on my weekly InfoWorld column (this one will run in print and online on March 8) and I’m referencing an essay from Frederick Brooks (of “Mythical Man-Month” fame) entitled “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering.”

You just have to read this. I’ve read it many times before and referenced it in a column on web services two years ago, but the essay continues to amaze me. Although it was written eighteen years ago, the content still rings true. Just a sample:

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: data sets, relationships among data items, algorithms, and invocations of functions. This essence is abstract in that such a conceptual construct is the same under many different representations. It is nonetheless highly precise and richly detailed.

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.

If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.

Amen. Be sure to read the rest.

[Chad Dickerson]

A nice reminder from Chad about what is, indeed, one of the best essays on why software is so hard. While it might be a little bit of a stretch for your average knowledge worker who isn’t a software engineer, it’s a worthwhile stretch.

I often think of software engineers and programmers as one of the earliest examples fo modern knowledge workers. You could do worse than to spend some time thinking about how to benefit from what software developers have learned about doing and managing knowledge work. This article from Brooks is one excellent starting point.