I listened to the talk given by Brewster Kahle, a personal hero of mine. I've long been a fan of his work at the Internet Archive. I've made a lot of use of the Open-Source movie area and the Prelinger Archive, two of the projects he mentions in the talk.

A theme he keeps coming back to is the Library of Alexandria. We're going through a period where we could have a tragedy on the scale of that great burning. Kahle covers the technical, legal, and moral requirements that we must fulfill to avoid this catastrophe.

• MySpace
• The Essence of MySpace
• Can it pay off?
• Not making it feel like a big company

I'm listening to Malcolm Gladwell's talk at Pop!Tech. I'm blogging in real time as I listen, so this is straight from my head to the blog.

A chair maker decided to use mesh that allowed the chair to breath and yet does not pinch, as well as a bunch of other cool innovations. (I had one of these at my previous job--they're great!)

Anyway, the chair has to be comfortable and look good. It was very comfortable--an 8 out of 10. Still people didn't like the way it looked--in fact they thought it was ugly. Market testing, for this aspect, was abysmal! Even designers weren't keen on it. People said it looked like lawn furniture!

It's good to see that I have company. Here's my bathroom hack from fall of 2006, where I added audio triggered by the IR sensor on the 10th floor sink:

The best part was that I left a "record" button on the device underneath, so people could sample their own voices, music, sounds, whatever. Hence, audio graffiti.

In this class, we studied how people interact with the world around them. And we designed all manner of crazy things.

The Open Society Institute Collab Studio provided us with several fascinating projects. So far, we've worked on:

• Gadgets: blog/wiki software for journalists and NGOs
• Psiphon: Censorship circumvention software using social networks
• WordForge: On-line translation software for open-source projects