Michael Boyle's weblog
Yes, I am alive, but very busy. And I’m going away for a couple of days starting tomorrow – my brother’s getting married down in the US of A.
While I’m gone you should take a look at Wood s lot which surely features some of the finest weblogging around.
a couple of days in the country at a cottage without electricity, with a privy out back, and folks who make some lovely music. Anyhow I was half dreading coming back, as there were a couple of little nit-picky things I had to do soon, if not tonight.
One of them was to register my copy of Sig Software’s Drop Drawers, which gives me popup folder functionality in OS X. A good little app, and something I’m happy to pay $15 for through Kagi. And it turned out to be the easiest thing in the world to register the copy on my box. I just copied a long text block from the email they sent me and started the app. It read the clipboard, saw that my code was there and that’s it – the thing was registered. Beautiful in its simplicity. A nice way to ease into the week – other times I’ve had nightmares with non-functioning registration procedures and such.
xrefer subtitled “the web’s reference engine” via Phil Essing’s sector404.org. Could this be the Google of vetted reference works? Hope so.
has given birth to his book, Design for Community! Huzzah! Huzzah!
I’ve never written a book, but I have had the experience of holding a book I helped produce (I co-designed, layed out, and helped edit) in my hot little hands when it first arrived from the publisher. I have had very few more satisfying feelings than that one – so I can just imagine how great Derek feels holding his book having written the thing!
All of which prompted an expensive day at Amazon yesterday. I bought DfC, Jeff Veen’s book, and the new-ish edition of Rheingold’s classic The Virtual Community, in which I believe my name is mentioned (among many others, a testament more to Howard’s supreme graciousness than to any contribution I may have made) in the Forward.
is quick, that’s for certain. He’s already replied to my little missive and explains things a little more. And what he describes would drive me completely bonkers – in fact, it has done so many times in the past. I have a thing against all shadowy priesthoods, and the workflow priesthood in a web environment is one of the most frustrating things around.
It reminds me of the dark ages in Europe, where they developed this incredibly complicated system of monasteries and the whole Church structure surrounding, essentially, one issue: how to keep Aristotle hidden. OK, there was more to it than that – but make no mistake, keeping Aristotle unknown was a major driving force behind the European power structure for hundreds of years.
And then, of course, St. Thomas (you may know him as Aquinas – and there were others too all over Europe) let the cat out of the bag, leading (though not directly) very quickly to Luther and Calvin and the rest is literally history.
Point being that any priesthood, any dogmatic, centralized control of knowledge or process that goes beyond what’s very strictly necessary is a dangerous thing. It’s inefficient, and limits good people from doing interesting work. In that, TM, I think we are in agreement.
