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Cutting through the madness

October 19, 2000 by Michael Boyle

Cory Doctorow writes about [His] Date with the Gnomes of San Jose at the first P2P Working Group meeting, which looks like it might be a stillborn effort by Intel to coopt (or just to support?) the peer-to-peer community.

Really great quote from the article: “[peer to peer nets are] faery infrastructure, networks whose maps form weird n-dimensional topologies of surpassing beauty and chaos; mad technological hairballs run by ad-hocracies whose members each act in their own best interests.
In a nutshell, peer-to-peer technology is goddamn wicked. It’s esoteric. It’s unstoppable. It’s way, way cool.”

Of course, from

October 18, 2000 by Michael Boyle

The Onion: Discovery Of Oil Turns Peru Into Bunch Of Assholes. Best part – the picture caption: “A Peruvian farmer in the mountain village of Arequipa calls his broker.”

From Jesse James Garrett

October 18, 2000 by Michael Boyle

: A visual vocabulary. Diagramming for the web world. I wish I had something that good years ago. I’ve made due – but with my own inconsistent, incomplete version that relies a lot upon my relationship with the developers I work with. Complements his earlier Elements of User Experience [pdf] document.

Holy shit

October 18, 2000 by Michael Boyle

I appreciate the dot-com company I work for when I read stuff like this article about a failure in Canadian Business magazine. It’s bad though, this whole thing with the stories of doom and stupidity. Many old friends who I don’t see much look at me quizzically when I tell them what I do these days. Of course it doesn’t help that I can barely describe my job.

I think if I hear

October 17, 2000 by Michael Boyle

some quip like “Heh heh Gore said he invented the internet!” – or worse, some serious critic pointing to it as an indicator of some serious deficiency of his I’m going to hit the roof. Declan McCullough discusses it more in Wired News: The Mother of Gore’s Invention.