For as long as there have been programmers seeking monetary compensation for their time and effort coercing a machine to do their bidding, has there been users who look to take the former group’s 0′s and 1′s and claim them as their own. Like conjoined twins, commercial software and piracy tend to pull each other along, not quite able to rip free from the bond that, well, makes this analogy interesting.Remember the days of Intel 386′s? I was first imposed to computing sometime during their rise to popularity, and I distinctly remember all the clever schemes sales and marketing came up with to thwart people from taking a shiny new 5 1/4″ disk and digitally replicating their $200 piece of software; or, in my case, $30 games.
As I sit here, a good four day’s worth of work on the screen in the concise and almost insulting form of a site banner, I’m reminded at how frustrating inefficient and painstaking the design process can be. It’s awful repetitive, and you can tweak the smallest detail for days before you realize what you thought looked good in your head is a monstrosity when brought to life and would kindly ask for euthanasia.
I like to think of design as a trifecta of processes: creation, elimination, and consolidation; or, in non-corporate speak, the artist, the critic, and the editor. The artist serves as a factory of prototypes, taking ideas to reality; the critic’s job is to apply Sturgeon’s law and strip away all the bad ideas; the editor takes what’s left, combines the good ideas within each remaining design, and tweaks the result.
Then start again from the top.
One of the defining characteristics of the modern Internet is anonymity – you are free to roam the maze of cyberspace revealing nothing to fellow travellers beyond your online alias and maybe IP address, the social constraints that might have bound your lips to silence absent in the virtual world. You exist in the hard drives of hundreds of servers around the world, holding different names, personalities, histories, each residing in its own community.
But anonymity is a doubled-edged sword: the absense of reasonable social constraint allows for some…pretty crappy voices. Much like a democracy, giving everybody a voice means that most of what’s said is of little value (), so much effort goes into tuning to those voices which seem to shout louder, perhaps with a touch of sense.
What does this have to do with blogs?