mattdiaz.org

Daniel Bachhuber on why he missed Twitter during a hiatus and the importance of publishing feedback:

Twitter has better mechanisms for understanding how what you’re mindthinking resonates with others. Retweets or click-throughs indicate whether you’re on point, @replies show whether people want to engage in conversation on a given subject, and who’s following you is a sign of your reputation within that community…

(via Daniel)

In a long and dope exchange on Branch, Matt Haughey gives us more on feedback:

I guess what I crave as a writer is feedback, and that includes comments on my own post, twitter chatter about my posts, and posts on other blogs mentioning it. It’s not all about ego, it helps me know what people like and respond to in what I wrote, it helps me be a better writer if people were confused by a core concept, etc.

(via Dave)

Dave Winer on non-relative writing and finding productive ways of connecting relative writing:

I’m of the opinion that the best, most powerful, most useful writing is non-relative. That too much relative writing is of the form: “I have an opinion about something like this…What I’m hoping is that we can develop good ways of connecting writing, on a consensual basis. I’d like to team up with people whose writing complements mine. People who have ideas that I would like to see gain more exposure. Without opening it up to spammers and emotional thrill-seekers. That’s the challenge, to strike a balance, to create something new and better.

(via Dave)

Bret Victor on reading interfaces and seeing past argument structures as they’re presented, to their super-value:

Do our reading environments encourage active reading? Or do they utterly oppose it? A typical reading tool, such as a book or website, displays the author’s argument, and nothing else. The reader’s line of thought remains internal and invisible, vague and speculative. We form questions, but can’t answer them. We consider alternatives, but can’t explore them. We question assumptions, but can’t verify them. And so, in the end, we blindly trust, or blindly don’t, and we miss the deep understanding that comes from dialogue and exploration.

(via Nieman)

Jonathan on a “journalism for makers:”

Where is the journalism for the idealist doer with a burning curiosity? The journalism of makers aligns itself with the tiny hotbeds of knowledge and practice where great things emerge, the nascent communities of change. Its aim is a deep understanding of the complex systems of the real world, so that plans for a better world may constructed one piece at a time by people who really know what they’re talking about. It never takes itself too seriously, because it knows that play is necessary for exploration and that a better understanding will come along tomorrow. It serves the talent pools that give rise to our future civic planners, economists, judges, scientists, and leaders — regardless of where in society these people may be found. This is a theory of civic participation based on empowering the people who like to get their hands dirty tinkering with the future. Maybe that’s every bit as important as informing voters or getting politicians fired.

(via Jonathan)

Jonathan imagines the productive power of a “digital public sphere:”

What I see here is an ecosystem. There are narrow real-time feeds such as expertly curated Twitter accounts, and big general reference works like Wikipedia. There are armies of reporters working in their niches, but also colonies of computer scientists. There are curators both human and algorithmic. And I have no problem imagining that this ecosystem includes certain kinds of artists and artworks. Let’s say it includes all public acts and systems which come down to one person trying to tell another, “I didn’t just make this up. There’s something here of the world we share.”

(via Jonathan)

More highlights from the Branch thread:

Reflecting on the archetypal post-comment hierarchy, Paul calls for a way for bloggers to “enable peers.”

Anil Dash on the importance of emotional on-boarding for fledgling bloggers.

Paul on the value of a public publishing audience, and more on feedback.

Anil hones in on the “fundamental tension…between ownership and feedback.”

Paul on the value of owning your own tools/content and forming a “stronger, more resilient network.”

Ev discussed the difficulties of decentralization and his belief that if you follow that path you can’t “deeply” innovate and/or create a consistent user experience.

Anil disagrees and says it’s not impossible, just an “artifact of crappy implementation so far.”

Come through!

(via ITP)

Khoi Vinh on “editorial experience” design:

…we’re leaving an era where design operates in the narrative mode, in which its fundamental purpose is to create canonical, highly controlled visual stories. We’re now in an era — the digital era — where the new paradigm is designing for behavior: creating stateful systems that are responsive to user inputs and environmental inputs, where presentation is not just separated from content, but where presentation is volatile and continually changing by nature.

These two modes of thinking are so different and even so in conflict with one another that to find a nexus between them is very difficult. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” and that, more or less, is what’s required to be a great editorial experience designer. You must understand users and their expectations, and you must also understand authors and their expectations, and somehow, by hook or by crook, you must reconcile these wildly divergent worldviews into a single, coherent whole that looks and feels effortless.

(via Subtraction.com)