Erehwon Notebook
The Occasional Notebooks of Doug Miller
Tuesday, February 15, 2000
8:36:43 PM RHIZOME is a site for those seriously interested in digital media. This isn't your typical "go grab some cool wallpaper" site, but rather a place for serious artists and those interested in discussing digital media, it's development, theory, and impact. Depending on your orientation, the site will likely come across as painfully pretentious or completely fascinating.
Rhizome has an excellent text database of srticles on a mammoth array of digital media topics. This database can be search using traditional web search forms, or through what might be the neatest feature of the site, a java applet called "StarryNight." StarryNight presents the user with what first appears to be a random starfield. Mousing over one of the stars reveals, however, that each star is linked to a cluster of articles in the text database. Keywords pop up next to each star, and mousing over the keywords pops up lines linking to other stars, forming "constellations" of related articles and concepts. The relative brightness of each star is determined by how frequently it's clicked on. Even if you aren't all that interested in the subject matter, StarryNights illustrates an intriguing system for information mapping on the web.
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Monday, February 14, 2000
8:58:22 AM osOpinion: Tech Opinion commentary for the people, by the people.
A few years ago, Margaret Wheatley wrote a superb book called Leadership and the New Science in which she advanced a number of ideas about chaotic and self-organizing systems and how they impact organizational systems in companies. Wheatley's book wasn't the only one to advance such ideas; there have been literally dozens along a similar vein, and continue to be so (see Birth of the Chaordic Age below).
Articles like the one I've linked to above illustrate the growing proof that Wheatley and her ilk were right. The world is changing, and in a far more fundamental way that just enabling us to have endless "channels" of regurgitated commercial content. The Open Source Software movement is proving that chaotic, self-organizing, adundance-driven organizational models are in fact far more effective at getting things done than the old traditional, hierarchical models. Perhaps the business models we seen emerging from the OSS movement have yet to be fully proven, but there's little doubt that the organizational models are more efficient. One only has to delve a little into the history of the rise of GNU/Linux and the inroads it's made against the likes of Microsoft to see this.
It's still early in the process to declare victory, but I'm going to make a predicition: In twenty years, we're going to see beyond a shadow of a doubt that Microsoft was the last great successful hierarchically structured company. The writing is on the wall. I just wish other, more traditional companies (like the one I work for!), could read it.
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Sunday, February 13, 2000
9:15:20 PM What I'm Reading
I read a lot, and usually have two or three books going simultaneously. Here's what's on my reading list right now:
Midnight at Well of Souls #01 by Jack Chalker. SF is a staple of my reading diet, and what I generally read to decompress. Midnight at the Well of Souls is good escapist literature, but also not a bad adventure romp. It's the first of a series, and to be honest, I find the series a bit repetitive, but this book is a classic. The central idea is that the entire universe was created by an ancient race as an experiment, and while that ancient race is gone, the world-sized computer the used to maintain their creation is still very much in operation. The central character, Nathan Brazil, is certainly one of the better characterizations in SF. A good read if you're an SF fan.
Birth of the Chaordic Age. I've really not started this yet, but it looks interesting. Essentially, this is the story of the birth of Visa, as told by Dee Hock, "CEO Emeritus." Hock then uses the tale of Visa's start-up and success to illustrate and promote his vision of organizational structure and operations, claiming that traditional organizational structures are too inflexible to stand up to the chaotic forces of today's economy. Not a particularly new idea to anyone that's a 'net veteran or has read just about any book on organizational systems written in the past ten years, but maybe if there are enough of these books written, the "suits" will eventually get it. Personally, I think most of the "old school" is going to have to retire and die off before we see any really radical change, but then I'm probably a cynic from too long in the trenches.
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