Doing the 360

Just started a 360-degree-feedback-survey with a Credit Union in Alaska, it's the second one we've done. It's an effective demonstration of the power of database-backed websites: you almost couldn't do this with a non-DB site, but with the DB it's almost easier than a static data collection and processing system.

This is one of the cool things about the web: sometimes place doesn't matter. Without the web there's no way a (relatively small) Pittsburgh outfit would be providing boutique services to a (relatively small) outfit in Alaska.

Of course, the place-doesn't-matter perspective cuts both way; witness all the geeks displaced when the internet makes moving IT jobs and projects to India very cost effective, hoisting the geeks on their own petard.

In both situations, though, I think that what limits placelessness (new word alert) is that small-to-midsize business is done between people who have decided to trust each other. I don't think we'd have gotten the Alaska gig if it wasn't for a string of references that started with a contact in Coraopolis.

Every Website is a Snow Globe

We've had a variety of Web metaphors. We've had The Fountain vs. The Waterfall, comparing rapid-prototype, quick-and-dirty review and improve cycles, reiterative design processes (fountain) vs. traditional linear processes (the waterfall-- think IBM, Apollo). Personally, for web design, I'm a fountain / rapid - protyping type.


We've had The Cathedral vs. The Bazaar -- the Cathedral is a monolithic, best of technology, no rollout till it's perfect, multi-generational, long delay till rollout project management perspective, vs. the Middle Easter Bazaar, where we can give you something to get you going today, we'll have something better for you tomorrow, and over a short period of time we'll go through several versions each meeting more needs and getting closer to the target.

They each have their place-- when you're building Notre Dame you don't reasonably plan on leaving some features for v2.0, and when you're Open Source you go for incremental continual releases.

But now I would offer: Every Website is A Snow Globe.

Every website is a snow globe. It's an artificial construct, a set piece, a small world that encourages people to look into it. People have a concept of what to do with a snow globe, and you have to accomodate their expectations.

Within the snow globe there's a small artificial world, and a good snow globe has details presented in such a way that the user is drawn into it. A great snow globe, just like a great story, invites and then relies upon the user's willing suspension of disbelief.

You can't control the angle from which the user sees the snow globe for the first time, but you can provide clues to help them orient themselves. The best snow globes are visually delighting and offer an unexpected treat.

Some snow globes offer music, and although at times the added feature is effective, in general music breaks down the moment of magic, pulls attention away from the display, and reduces the presentation to a mechanical marvel. Music boxes are gratuitious add-ons to a snow globe.

A snow globe is a snow globe, and is evaluated according to snow globe standards; it's not a tiny television.

And a snow globe is just a snow globe; it's a technical product with a limited defined impact. It's not a substitute for a real-world presence.


So that's my "every website is a snow globe" web design metaphor. I should mention that Pittsburgher Joseph Garaja patented the process of constructing the snow globe completely underwater, thus avoiding the tiny air bubble which was a standard feature in all previous snow globes.

There's probably an extension of this line of thought that involves Faberge eggs, but I'll come back to that at Easter.

Constraints and Creativity

Here's a Slate article about video games that closes with the same message that Shannon gave me and Mark confirmed: sometimes the creative leap is best fostered by constraints. If you can do anything it's not creativity, Shannon told me; it's when you have a constraint and think about an approach to the goal within the constraint that creativity shines.

Convergence Transitions

Every realm or phase generally finds it's "sweet spot" or equilibrium for a while. Agriculture had a period of stability. Manufacturing had a period of stability. The Information Age will (someday) have a period of stability. But the transitions between realms can be filled with conflict.

This builds on my earlier post about how the workplace is about to be faced with the issues of employee-owned digital devices; what policies do employers have about cellphone calls, answering personal cell phones at work, etc? How does that fit with pager and PDA and web surfing policies - because now my PDA can be a cell phone, or I can check my phone calls over internet telephony. I've suggested that policies will need to be activity-based and device-independent- because the distinctions between devices are becoming meaningless.

Now employee cellphones are digital cameras and video recorders- so the next time the CEO calls in the troops for a motivating pitch to the headcount, one of they may be transmitting it live to the web, and -in general- there are no policies dealing with this.

Consider key-fob memory; what are the implications for corporate security when an unhappy employee can walk out with 2GB of files on their keychain?

My revisit of this topic is prompted by this link talking about a new law prohibiting cell phones in gyms because of their photo capability. Inevitably, in the absence of an informed discussion, skirmishes will happen in locker rooms, homes, and workplaces, and people will get upset and act like.. people, and this is really just the sort of conflict that happens in a phase change.

Remember that when the Owners and Management (two new species) tried to automate the textile mills in England, the workers revolted, burning the mills and following their mythical Ned Ludd into battle. In France, the workers threw their wooden shoes (sabot) into the machinery and ruined it.

To this day, somebody who rejects new technology is a Luddite, and spiking the machines is called sabotage. Very little is really new, I guess.

Politcal Parties in the Third Wave Era

Wonderful Wash. Post article by Everett Ehrlich in which he argues that the major political parties are Second Wave institutions driven by the information-managing processes of the industrial era. He says that the Web drives the cost of information to near-zero, which lets others (Howard Dean) mount effective campaigns without the party apparatus. If you read it, hang in there till the closing paragraph and his predictions.

OBE 'd : Overcome By Events

One of my top ten all time favorite expressions is: OBE'd, or Overcome By Events. This came from my great friend Ray, who is dead now, but he was the finest sailor and the best leader I ever knew. But anyway, it's used in conversation like this:

Q: Ray, how come you didn't (insert task) like you were gonna?

A: Man, I was OBE'd.

OBE is a non-actionable response. You only tell somebody you've been OBE'd if it's somebody you trust with the truth, and it's somebody who understands how events can grab you, and if the events are truly serious. It's a statement of respect and truth between equals that precludes any follow-up.

What brings this to my blog is I just found OBE'd (which I always thought was Ray's word) in an online dictionary. Take a look at:
OBE.

Screen Widths: It's in Pixels

Three times this week I've had this conversation with bright people so I thought I'd have to blog about it. The issue of computer screen widths, website design widths, personal photos on the web, all involve either a great frustration or an understanding of pixels.

The web does not care what size (inches) monitor you have, or even if it is a monitor- it could be a cell phone or PDA. But the browser you're using cares about what pixel width your screen is set for.
Your screen could be set at 800 (wide) by 600 (height), or 1280x768, or any one of a dozen settings. And your browser will try to present the web within that setting.

But the web specifies images in pixels. So (bear with me) a picture that's 400x300 pixels will take up a quarter of an 800x600 screen, but it'll only take up 1/8 of a bigger screen. And this has nothing to do with the number of inches on your monitor; it has to do with the number of pixels you've told your computer to utilize. It doesn't matter how many inches are in your monitor.

The general conservative practice in web design is to build sites that fit within an 800-pixel wide screen. Allow for a vertical slider bar on the right margin, and now you build a website for a 770-pixel wide screen. And if you do that, your website will appear within the screen width of 95% of the computers out there (some older machines are 640x480, and we're not focusing on them).

Now some sites (Slate, NYTimes, Kennywood is my fav example) will present non-essential content to the right of the 800-pixel point. Then people with the wider screen settings will see the right-margin info, and the people with the smaller screen settings won't, and that's okay because there's no essential content in that right-margin space.

You might target a bigger screen setting is if you're in an intranet where you're absolutely certain the computers are all set to a certain point.

But the dark geek secret is that when a high-power executive gets a "boss box" - a new computer with all the capabilities that they'll never tap - the geeks generally leave it set at 800x600 pixels for two reasons- 1) it's standard and it'll work, and when somebody swaps the monitors it'll be ok, and 2) if the 45-year old executive is on the normal curve, they suffer from O.G.S. (Old Guy Syndrome) and they won't be comfortable reading the screen at a higher setting.

So the affluence of your audience and the size of their screen doesn't matter. The screen settings measured in pixels is what drives the day, we can't control what people set their screens at, and we build websites that target 800 pixel wide screens unless there's a special circumstance.

The Time Economy

Had an interesting discussion with Dorothy about an executive coaching program she's invested in, it contains a lot of cool aspects but it's built on the notion of the economy of time. Sort of a cool idea. They build their analysis of prioritization around their basic view of an economy of time, the notion that there are transactions, value judgements, and tradeoffs that should reflect rational economic decisions- and where they don't reflect rational decisions, there's room for examination and improvement.

I love the notion of different economies- for instance, in one of his books the Pope refers to "the economy of salvation" - and although I've really focused on the information economy it may be that the time economy is the one that we're all living (and dying) in.

Dorothy's talk (which I really appreciated when I realized that a person treating her time as an economic unit was spending some time with me) reminded me of my friend Mark, who has said that his epitath (and the title of one of his books) will be "The Time Bastard".

Later on I realized that time spent performing stupid but essential tasks was really just a tax on people that can't delegate.

Obligatory Matrix Revolutions Discussion

Okay, I've seen Matrix Revolutions for the second time. Here's the meager thoughts I can muster:
The Last Minute. In Matrix1 and Matrix2, the entire movie takes place in the last minute - which is probably true of all great presentations. In Matrix1 we saw Neo as the flying superhero who goes to a phone booth for his superpowers, able to leap tall buildings, able to stop bullets- which when combined with the cultural references (black cats) indicated that we are in the matrix and that there are artifacts from previous iterations - pretty much set the tone for the next move.

Matrix 2 developed those themes and explored of duality - order and choas, good and evil, the ambiguity of duality (machines & humans), uncertainty about intent, all summarized in the last minute: Neo and Bain/Cain, two sides of the same coin, good and evil, who are they, why are they here what do they want (the primary philosopher's questions,also repeated in the Neo/Architect scene). And the last minute of Matrix2 set the tone for Matrix3.

In Matrix3 we see Matrix characters trespassing into the real world and Machine world entities breaking into the Matrix, machines that behave like people {(the Indians, Mr. and Mrs. Merovingian - why would an AI omniscient indulge these tastses?) and people that behave like Machines (the Commander)}-- there's something about boundaries in this , there's Choice and Dharma, Male-Female, etc.

Gender plays out: let's point out that the only good drivers are Trinity and Naobi, the winners are the Oracle (it was the Oracle that beat Smith by implanting the verbalization of ending within Smith) and Sati; losers are Smith and the Architect. All the bad guys are, well, guys. Morpheus is somewhat emasculated after his loss of faith; Neo is, well, blind.

So I propose that, consitent with M1 and M2, the last minute of Matrix3 bears examination. Sati survives and makes the colored rainbow. The Oracle asks the Architect: What About the others?
A: What others? O: The others that want to get out. A: They can leave.

On first view I assumed they meant the people in the Matrix- but they never say people. After risking the world the thing that the Oracle wanted to confirm was: what? Could it be the freedom of the programs who want to get out of the machine world? Is it possible that the humans are not her alpha-goal? Anyway, I think I can say that this whole movie took place in the last minute also, although I don't have clear thoughts on where it's going.

Other small gleanings: Apparently the AI's can't/won't lie. Meringovian honors his deal to let them go. Smith pronounces his mortality and then dies. Architect uses "human" as a sterotype for lying. And: What's up with Smith calling Oracle "Mother"? Why was this segment called "Revolutions"?

It is quite possible that the Matrix persists, that Zion will continue as a QA catch basin for aberrations - straight out of chaos theory's strange attractors, by the way- and that the root story is not about the people. It's possible that the uberstory is about what the Oracle wants- which would be an inquiry into the ethical behavior of a free moral agent, returning to the level of discussion that critics mourned as missing in Matrix3.

And finally, a curious Slate article about a historial Merovingian and his Priory of Sion (Zion?). Could we possibly stick just a little more Christian imagery in this, beside the scene of Neo being carried off as the sacrificial offering for the ancient sins of others, his body aligned as if crucified, in front of the AI host that looks like a monstrance?

I thought it was an interesting movie. It was different from Matrix1. That's okay.

Just Rolled Out
Just rolled out MBM-Law.net for a Pittsburgh law
firm.