Rosssmith. Namtastic. The Microsoft Daily. Building Windows 8 on Listorious. City Brights: Howard Rheingold. “Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.”
Ernest Hemingway, 1954 The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge – the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part – the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. The Architecture of Participation. By Tim O'Reilly June 2004 I've come to use the term "the architecture of participation" to describe the nature of systems that are designed for user contribution.
Larry Lessig's book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which he characterizes as an extended meditation on Mitch Kapor's maxim, "architecture is politics", made the case that we need to pay attention to the architecture of systems if we want to understand their effects. I immediately thought of Kernighan and Pike's description of the Unix software tools philosophy referred to above. I also recalled an unpublished portion of the interview we did with Linus Torvalds to create his essay for the 1998 book, Open Sources. Linus too expressed a sense that architecture may be more important than source code.