UPDATE 6/11/04: I decided to nominate The Fractal
Blogosphere and Evolution of Corporate Web Sites for the Best Software Essays of 2004 book that Joel Spolsky is editing. If you enjoyed either one of those articles, please leave a comment on Joel’s discussion board to support my nominations. Click here to second my Fractal nomination, or here to second my Evolution one. Thanks 🙂 [end of update]
Joel Spolsky is editing a new book of the
best software essays of
2004. He’s looking for nominations and I commend him for opening it up for anyone to
nominate. Of course, I’d love to have some writing of mine published in a book – so I’d
like to nominate at least 1 thing I’ve written this year.
R/WW readers will know that I tend to write long, thoughtful posts – that can easily
be defined as “essays”. Incidentally the flip side is that, as Lilia
pointed out, my posts can be a trade-off between depth and accessibility. So essays
are arguably not the optimal format for weblog posts. But as Popeye would say, I yam what I yam and I can’t help writing long posts :-).
Here are 10 of my favourite posts from 2004 that could be
considered software essays. I’d very much appreciate it if you would let me know in the
comments which one(s) you think I should nominate for Joel Spolsky’s book.
Individualizing the
Web
The Fractal
Blogosphere
Interview with Marc
Canter
The
Evolution of Corporate Web Sites
Weblogs as Avatars
A Theory of Synchronicity for
the Web
Mama don’t let your baby grow
up to be a Generalist
A New Kind of
Literacy
Electracy Comes From Other
Planets [worth considering for the title alone]
Digital Lifestyle Mobile
Jigsaw
P.S. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out my interview with Lucas Gonze that I published yesterday. It’s as long as an essay, but I learned a lot about P2P and decentralization from this collaboration with Lucas.
P.P.S. Wait till you see my next interview, you’re going to love it! I did the phone interview this morning and I’ll write it up over the next few days.
Update: Cool, the Lucas interview has just been Slashdotted!
