otrops quotes

Aug
27th

Thu

Today’s young people learn how to be themselves via social networking sites. Depending on their generation, YouTube or MySpace or Facebook or Twitter will create for them a peer group, and establish parameters of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, in a far more reliable way than Big Brother ever could.

— Germaine Greer, Too much reality to bear.

Jul
7th

Tue

[E]very city begins as a slum. First it’s a seasonal camp, with the usual free-wheeling make-shift expediency. Creature comforts are scarce, squalor the norm. Hunters, scouts, traders, pioneers find a good place to stay for the night, or two, and then if their camp is a desirable spot it grows into an untidy village, or uncomfortable fort, or dismal official outpost, with permanent buildings surrounded by temporary huts. If the location of the village favors growth, concentric rings of squatters aggregate around the core until the village swells to a town. When a town prospers it acquires a center — civic or religious — and the edges of the city continue to expand in unplanned, ungovernable messiness. It doesn’t matter in what century or in which country, the teaming guts of a city will shock and disturb the established residents. The eternal disdain for newcomers is as old as the first city. Romans complained of the tenements, shacks and huts at the edges of their town that “were putrid, sodden and sagging.” Every so often Roman soldiers would raze a settlement of squatters, only to find it rebuilt or moved within weeks.

— The Choice of Cities, Kevin Kelly

Jun
30th

Tue

In our research, every time we found a site where the search results were doing what they should, we also found a team that had worked really hard to make it that way.

Those teams all have something in common. They’ve experimented thoroughly, trying out dozens of designs and repeatedly watching users. They’ve frequently scoured their search log data, studying the terms users employ and comparing them to the results the site generated.

They’ve ended up with great search result pages, but it has taken months (and in some cases, years) of constant studying to get to this point. There is no way, as far as we know, that you can produce a great search results page without spending the time and effort to build it.

— Jared M. Spool, Producing Great Search Results: Harder than It Looks, Part 1

Jun
28th

Sun

I submit that obsessing about celebrity is unhealthy for the single reason that it is also unproductive. Celebrity is to mentality as smoking is to food. It is an unhealthy waste of time.

— Doc Searls, Beyond celebrity obsession

Jun
26th

Fri

Uncertainty is inherent and inevitable in software development processes and products.

— Hadar Ziv, Debra J. Richardson, René Klösch The Uncertainty Principle in Software Engineering (via The roots of agile project management)

Jun
22nd

Mon

[C]onspicuous consumption” is being replaced by “conspicuous expression” as the driver of identity. This new paradigm emphasizes the conspicuousness of ideas, interests, and opinions rather than accumulating more stuff than your neighbor. This is not insignificant.

— Stephen Lino , Brad Bate , Michael Keating, Conspicuous, but not Consuming

What matters most, more than anything, is getting the right words in front of the right people. That’s what the Internet is for. Everything else is the icing on the cake.

— Tim Bray, The Internet’s Payload

Jun
20th

Sat

I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money.

— Ray Bradbury in A Literary Legend Fights for a Ventura County Library, June 19 2009, Jenniger Steinhauer (via Tim O’Reilly)

Jun
17th

Wed

[T]ools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn’t when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. It’s when everybody is able to take them for granted.

— Clay Shirky, How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history (TED talk)

I like the concept of wearing in instead of wearing out.

— Bill Moggridge, Objectfied