Cognitive Friction

Ever since I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink I have wanted a Herman Miller Aeron chair. I am a sucker for this sort of thing. After I read about the design of the OXO Good Grips range of kitchen utensils in Creating Breakthrough Products I had to have a Good Grips potato peeler. Sad, I know, but as soon as someone points out how thoughtful and clever a piece of design work is, the object becomes compelling in a way it wasn’t previously.

It’s viral too. The Aeron chair meme has spread to my colleague Brian, who actually phoned a local supplier to see if they had these pricey chairs in stock. We both read with interest a review of the Aeron chair that was blogged by a web developer in the UK. Seeing that he got his chair on eBay, we then checked out what sort of money they were going for online. This is bordering on fetishism.

So imagine my disappointment when my wife sent me a link to a review that says The Aeron Chair sucks. Worse, the guy provides video evidence to back up his case. It’s one thing to obsess about a toy or gadget, buy it, and then discover that it sucks. But to have your joy stripped away so cruelly, before I have even sat in one of these chairs, is just too much to bear. If anyone knows of any more positive reviews of the Aeron chair that will reinforce my initial prejudice, I’d be happy to hear about them.

I’ve been following the whole Web 2.0 thing over the last few weeks and getting quite excited by the sense that stuff is starting to happen on the web again. It’s starting to feel like a good field to work in once more. But a colleague raised a good question What is Web 2.0? There’s no clear definition of what it is. Of course, I tried to hand wave my way out of the corner – It’s social software…yadda yadda yadda…AJAX…yadda yadda yadda…gMail. But I was bang to rights, the whole concept is nebulous whatever the Wikipedia entry says.

Well, I just found a link to a great site through a post on Techcrunch that clears the whole thing up. The brilliantly named Supr.c.ilio.us solves the problem in true Web 2.0 style by providing the social software for people to vote on what sites are or are not Web 2.0. More than a little tongue in cheek, but interesting nonetheless.

It works just like the Hot or Not site, where people submit photos of themselves for the public to rate as Hot or Not. It’s got some great metrics for the sites you submit, such as ‘Buzzword Compliance’, and you can tag the sites submitted. Looking at the tags on Supr.c.ilio.us, it would seem that Web 2.0 is mostly about:

• tagging
• bookmarks
• social
• blogging
• AJAX

And, of course:

• Web 2.0

Nothing like a circular argument to muddy the waters. So there it is: Web 2.0 defined not in a nutshell, but rather in a tag cloud. Quite appropriate, really.

President Bush recently asked the United States Congress for a further 87 billion dollars to prosecute the war on terror. I have a hard time imagining that kind of money, but luckily an article on Crunchweb enables you to visualize what the President is asking for. Just as the article says, A billion here, a billion there… Pretty soon it starts to add up to some real money. Besides being flabbergasted by the amount of cash involved, I was really impressed with the graphics in this article. Simple, effective yet powerful. Edward Tufte would be proud.

I just came across a great site called IT Conversations, which provides access to audio recordings of the presentations at IT conferences. They have some great material there from such events as the Web 2.0 Conference or the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. These events attract an impressive list of speakers, including:

• Dave Winer, inventor of such technologies as RSS and the father of blogging and podcasting.
• Jason Fried, of 37 Signals, who talks about his approach to product development and how Basecamp was built.
• Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer, who talks about how he became an engineer and the early days of Silicon Valley.
• Clay Shirky, who gives a fascinating talk on why ontology, the design of categorisation schemes, is overrated as a way to organise digital content.

This last talk is especially interesting if you do any form of information architecture work, such as designing the structure and navigation system for websites. I promise that you will never approach this work in the same way again after you hear this presentation. I’ve listened to it three times now and I still learn something new each time. Expect more posts on this topic as the implications of Shirky’s talk start to sink in.

All of this content is available for free download in MP3 format. You can pick up an RSS news feed from the website or subscribe through the iTunes Music Store if you are an iTunes user. So if you, like me, don’t have the time or money to nip across the Atlantic to attend these conferences, you may appreciate the chance to listen to some of the thought leaders in the IT world during the commute to the office.