Ok so for anyone that doesn’t agree with my general premise that big media and big tech will turn web 2.0 into American Idol style boredom, CBS acquiring last.fm is arguably a good example. I am a long-time user of last.fm, and a huge fan of the AudioScrobbler stuff underneath it. It was great before it was a social network. I was a user when the blogosphere was down on them. The CBS news is great for the last.fm team (congrats), but as a general sign of the consolidation trend…hmm. There’s nothing inherently wrong with CBS buying them, but for anyone that believes in the culture of innovation, startups, and the true long tail, this situation in which increasingly the only exit for web startups is acquisition by one of 15 or 20 big players is nothing to be happy about. I loved FeedBurner, I loved Keyhole, I loved last.fm. It’s the “big-boxification” of the web, my friends.

Just posted a short piece on the cruxyconsulting blog, here.  If you’re into this kind of thing, the premise is basically that media companies would do well with more incremental, iterative strategy rollouts than whole-hog approaches to digital media distribution.  No one likes to fail, but the fact of the matter is that there will be failures, so thew trick is to control and learn from them rather than try to avoid them altogether (which is impossible).   The strength of incremental iterative approaches is one of the great lessons of recent years — it’s been seen most obviously in software development but has applicability to all kinds of product management and corporate strategy domains as well. 

Warning: This (long) post contains rampant speculation, unfounded arguments, and poorly structured reasoning.

Web 3.0 seems to have entered the lexicon of the blogosphere, though it remains undefined. Well, a lot of folks define it as the semantic web. This is cool from a CS perspective, but the 2.0 nomenclature wasn’t fundamentally a technology designation, so it doesn’t really seem right that 3.0 should be. The semantic web should really be web 2.0 in that sense, but anyway. I’m a little more interested in the web’s evolution through usage and business models. So in that sense, what’s 3.0? I play the part of a psyched-about-the-future geek all day, so I’ll make the devil’s advocate argument for the sake of contributing to the discussion — whether I believe it or not is sort of a separate question (I don’t). It’s good to argue against yourself once in a while, right?

The premise is what I’ll call the American Idolization of the web: The next phase of the web experience will look more traditional , with a standard blend of “mainstream” and “alternative” content powered by a federation of a small number of large players, than any of us geeks want to admit.

The Groundwork

Taking an industry/social-trend view, rather than a technology-centric view (semantically-aware, user-mashupable, etc), of the web’s next phase, we’re closer than we might think to the point of being able to use Tim O’Reilly’s “this is qualitatively different; let’s call it web 3.0″ rule. Whatever we call it, the point at which the current 2.0 version of web hits critical mass with the mainstream is a big enough deal that we should call it out, it’s already happening, and it may not be as cool as we all thought.

So where have we been?

• Web 1.0 was about connectivity, access, publication, and commerce. People got connected, content and commerce showed up, and while there were some mistakes, we saw some value in it.
• Web 2.0 is about technical, societal, and commercial experimentation — community networking and user-generated content as business opportunities, widespread technical shifts to service-orientation, decoupling, and the web as a rich platform for applications and services.
• Web 3.0 will not be about user-driven aggregation of services, social networking platforms, or end users remixing application services — it will be about the transparent consumption of these services as provided by more traditional-looking aggregators, and will follow a long tail model.

We’ll focus on these as (one guy’s version of) practical reality in terms of how the industry and the technology have developed — we could talk all day about the original intent of TBL and others, whether “web 2.0″ was a useful name, whether what we call web 2.0 now was simply what was really intended from the start, and whether there were social networks 15 years ago. Here is a good jumping off point to a relevant set of discussions with O’Reilly and Tim Berners Lee, two smart guys.

Back to the premise. We all love to talk about AJAX, tagging and folksonomies, microformats, user-generated content, personalization, widgets, social networks (or social networking platforms), and the rest. I love Clay Shirky and David Weinberger and their views on structuring information, and the debate over the semantic web, strongly vs loosely defined taxonomies, RDF, etc. I love Marc Canter’s Digital Lifestyle Aggregator concept, which presents a view of the class of services that will tie all our crap together and help us make sense of it. I love the distributed computing paradigm that simple widgets and start pages will evolve to. I love this stuff because I’m a geek. But I love to talk about it in the same way that those crazy Spanish cooks love to talk about foams and airs and their influence on world gastronomy. We’re the Dean (or Obama?) supporters, and its great to be there, and great stuff happens, but Bush still won. It’s easy to forget about the poor old mass-market user, and what’s reasonable or unreasonable to expect that they will do (and pay for), in the midst of this debate.

I’ll use my lovely wife as a use-case. She has a highly-successful corporate career, a huge professional as well as social network (offline), and couldn’t give a damn about del.icio.us or the Facebook platform. She’s an email/calendaring user, an e-commerce shopper, an online bill-payer, even watches stuff on YouTube — she’s like a lot of “regular people” in her use of the web. She likes geni.com not because it’s a social network play for the family or because it has a cool Ajax UI, but because it’s an easy way to create a family tree. What does she really care about “web 2.0″? She doesn’t, and neither do most people. And by most people I mean most people in a certain set of socio-economic bands, which still represent a minority of the population — we’re not even talking about the rest of the world.

Web 1.0 (and prior) kicked off a massive cultural shift — it really was, and is, something revolutionary. All of a sudden people began to communicate with one another in totally new ways, began to take advantage of daily-life convenience services never before thought possible (my parents tell me that balancing a checkbook on Sunday evening used to be a major event), gained access to new amounts of information about themselves, their health, their communities, and their governments. Parts of the world began to open up with new definitions of access, and average folks got their feet wet with the concepts and some of the basic tools (e.g. an email client, a browser).

This has been a continuing journey over the last several years — more and more applications, better and better interfaces, delivered via greater and greater penetration of broadband and PC access. Personalization in e-commerce is just one of many great incremental technical achievements we’ve seen large groups of “regular” users benefit from. Developers and technologists have been feeling their ways around the workings of these things — learning how to take a service-oriented view of the world, how to build richer user interfaces in a browser, the virtues of content syndication, and how to collaborate with one another more and more effectively. Similarly, users have been experimenting. It will be clear in the final analysis, if its not already, that the emergence of the blogosphere, of big-S-big-N Social Networks, and of user-generated content in general over the last few years were seminal events, but they were just very introductory baby steps. Web 2.0 is really about slight technical paradigm shifts and and online social experimentation, and makes sense in the long run only as a necessary interim step to what comes next. Again, not in terms of what the formal definitions may be, but in terms of mass-market adoption, end user behaviors, and business applications (valley VCs don’t count as representatives of modern global business).

The Next Wave

What’s next, then, what we might call web 3.0, is when the participants collectively hit their stride with what are now more accurately seen as anomalous events, and when the real money starts coming in. Take a look at the distribution of information across the web today, how even though there are millions and millions of nodes on the web, it’s a small number that get most of the traffic, hold most of the data, and provide most of the widely used applications. Though there are millions of blogs you can read to get news and opinion, users don’t read millions of blogs, they read a few (not including mine) or, more likely, they read a summary view that is aggregated by someone else, and someone that looks a lot more like mainstream media (my hero Dave Winer has some other thoughts on MSM in web 3.0 here). They listen to NPR, maybe watch FOX. They don’t surf all the Technorati results, they go to a few aggregate locations. They don’t use feed readers or start pages to assemble their own custom dashboard of applications and content from across the web. They watch video online, but they still sit down to watch American Idol as-its-broadcast and spend more time with a set-top box than with a PC hooked up to the TV. Again, keep in mind we’re speaking about general population here, not us technophiles.

Web 3.0 is where we’ll see the convergence of MSM outlets, main-stream portal providers, and big enterprises sucking in all the cool stuff that came on in the scene in web 2.0 — that’s where the vast majority of users will experience media, get and share opinion, accomplish the tasks of life and work, and be entertained. There will always be a huge current of leading-edge users that embrace the full spectrum of services available to them, in real-time, and remix them to their needs, but in the grand scheme of things this is a tiny minority of users. It isn’t until the user numbers on these things increase that these concepts get really interesting. People consume Digg stories indirectly because the interns at CNN read Digg and then feed them up for the main coverage, people participate on message boards of major TV networks to talk about their favorite character’s hairstyle, and enterprise users start to see more Wikis and blogs deployed internally.

And with respect to social networks, we are talking about big numbers already. But we’re also talking about hugely transient models. We’ve seen a few networks now come and go. We’ve seen that there is a high degree of tolerance for, and interest in, people having individual presences on the web, that they can interact with and connect to others and to their interests. We’ve also seen that while that’s interesting, there’s not a whole lot that’s new in the grand scheme of things — it’s just a tech-powered societal update to hanging out at the mall, going to a tupperware party, whatever. It’s not the same level of transformation that took place when the web first began to see widespread use in the 90s. The real transformation there will be about the long-tail networks. Some of the longest-lived communities on the web today still exist as collections of people that email one another, or maybe even hang out on some crappy old bulletin board implementation.

So wrapping up this devil’s advocate view of what mass-media Web 3.0 will be, some trends we’ll see:

• Consolidation in the software space will continue, with the big players getting bigger and even more boring.
• Mass-market media outlets will dominate in the entertainment segments — not exclusively as content providers, though mainstream content production will continue to dominate over Mentos & Diet Coke from a revenue perspective, but also as centers of influence for the communities of independent content. That is, the user-generated-content sphere will be a huge influencer of mainstream media, but mainstream media will still be the gateway, and the filter, for most of the distribution.
• Advertising will naturally continue to become more ubiquitous, and following the transition to product-placement in the mainstream content segment, in-place advertising will become increasingly the only way for innovative software solutions to see wide adoption. Sponsored content integrated into RIAs, not just sidebars and on search results.
• Enterprises will start to turn their substantial infrastructure dollars to next-generation “collaboration” tools in the web 2.0 style, resulting in enterprise web applications becoming more and more usable, and enterprises will incorporate external web services more and more into their architectures. However, they won’t do this without the usual gang of integrators in tow, which may undermine the move to open source in the enterprise. In other words, if enterprises think they already have what software and systems they need, and can focus on decreasing cost and improving maintainability and performance of such systems, they look to open source alternatives to their current solutions. However, as they think they identify new software needs, they will resort to their SOP and start paying integrators for “web 2.0 stuff”. This is analogous to what is already happening in the enterprise in regard to SOA investments. Just when it seems the enterprise has what it needs and can start incrementally improving their effectiveness, they identify something new to spend money on.
• Users won’t be remixing the web Pipes-style, they will be using applications provided for them by a common cadre of “trusted” sources. The technorati fringe will continue to steam ahead, and we’ll continue to see incredible innovation, but again, it will increasingly be delivered to the mass market by aggregators rather than directly to end users. It is within these aggregator applications and services where the remixing will occur, and it will be upstream of the average end user. This will be a new era for the portal — the solution will look far different from an old-style portal in capability, in terms of personalization, end-user configurability, and startpage-like behavior. But it will be largely familiar as it relates to how power is centralized in the industry with a few key, large-scale players that mediate the majority of the experience.   Providers of great DLA-type solutions will be the new portals, and widgets will evolve into solutions for content delivery into these one-stop DLA solutions.  
• Lastly, crops of new innovators will turn their attention to green and other new opportunity spaces, as the pure web per-se becomes commoditized by the dominance of big players, traditional media, and the entrance of the enterprise.  There will continue to be a strong push on the web itself, but we will see other industry segments taking back some of the enthusiasm, and capital, that has recently been poured into web 2.0.

So What Now?

Nothing — remember we’re just playing devil’s advocate here, and I’ll probably post the opposite side of these arguments at some point soon . If you read all this you get a gold star.

There’s plenty on the web about web 3.0, the semantic web, and other people’s opinions on where it’s all going. Here are a few posts I personally find interesting:

• Nova Spivack
• Sramana Mitra
• Dave Winer
• Phil Wainewright
• Danny Ayers
• Scott Rafer

There’s lots of interesting activity in the platform-play world these days, and all the recent Facebook stuff is a good excuse to talk about it.  Platform strategies have been written about extensively over the years, but it seems like a new gen of web 2.0-style players have gotten the platform bug.  While most web 2.0 strategies include an API component, by platform we mean the extension of a core API/dev offering to include the larger ecosystem of applications, tools, developers, and partners around it.  Here are a few interesting examples (my opinion) of some of the recent platform strategies coming out of what we might loosely call Web 2.0:

• Social networking platforms (Facebook).  This is all over the blogosphere, so let’s just say it’s interesting that they are taking this kind of aggressive position to grow their business as, arguably, a hedge against the obselescence that eventually plagues most pure social network plays.  Acknowledging that a one-stop social network is not a long-term strategy, better to be a provider of social network infrastructure that the more niche networks can leverage as the usage model moves past the “hang with your friends” paradigm and heads down the long tail of community interests.  This is a bold, and impressive, move for Facebook.
• API management & mediation platforms (Mashery).  The offering here is really interesting — as a developer who’s always focused on APIs, the concept is compelling. I’d argue however that the most effective positioning for this kind of an offering at this stage of the industry is in regards to the enterprise.  Enterprises spend a lot of money on software, use big integrators, and deploy lots of fat enterprise packages — huge (usually bloated) J2EE infrastructures, for example.  Though there’s a separate argument around all of that, there is a gap in the market represented by an enterprise’s need to efficiently leverage existing web services from the public web, but not being able to stomach the SLAs that are typically associated with them.  Enterprises can’t afford critical business processes to go down when a web 2.0 API they are using goes down, no matter how cool it is.  If an enterprise had a way to leverage the functionality of all of the great API services that are out there, but could could get enterprise-class SLAs (security and data protection, uptime, supportability, version management, etc.) around them, they would pay for it.  No amount of internal ESB infrastructure, and no amount of external mashup tools like Pipes or CSF-powered NetworkedMashups, will do this on their own.  This is somewhat analogous to the enterprise open source movement — how companies like Cygnus have moved through the world and exemplified, for a different class of services anyway, by things like IBM’s Enterprise Linux strategies.  Take the best stuff from the community and repurpose (wrap) it for the enterprise, and get paid handsomly for that added value. Many others have argued for this as well, and I wonder how this does or doesn’t factor into Mashery’s (and others) view of the world.
• Web application infrastructure services (Amazon).  Not much new to say here, other than that personally I’m an admirer of the fact that they made a risky and forward-looking move in this regard — always exciting to see entrenched players placing bets.  Are the services perfect?  No, but lots of folks are being productive with them.  It will be interesting to see how Amazon’s earnings in this space unfold and how the strategy evolves — lots of folks are looking to them to prove out whether this kind of a model can be profitable in the long-term, even when it’s based on pre-existing core assets. 
• Widget syndication platforms (Clearspring).  Clearspring is still under the radar a bit with their upcoming community offering, so the full strategy is not totally revealed, but there is a tremendous opportunity in managing the deployment and traceability (which seems to be a primary focus of Clearspring’s) of dynamic, micro-application content as delivered into all kinds of container environments.  Widgets is almost a limiting word — the general opportunity space isn’t just web-based widgets but includes dynamic content modules within virtual environments (SL, WoW, etc.), on in-dash automotive systems, on mobile device homescreens, and many more outlets.  While there are players at some level in each of these domains, their unification for the purposes of multi-channel micro-application/content distribution and multi-pronged online campaigns will be the killer.  There is a lot to be gained by whomever can figure this out and come to the table with the compelling toolset and support ecosystem as we move beyond MP3 players and photo viewers, and this seems to be at least some of what Clearspring is up to. 
• Carriers as mobile internet application platforms.  I’ve written about some of this before.  I’m a big believer in the potential for carriers to move in a platform direction, rather than remaining so focused on controlling the handset UE and the associated revenue streams.  There are compelling services carriers can offer to the next generation of mobile web applications (and we’re not just talking about better J2ME APIs and HTTP headers), if they would just get off the pot and start doing some of this stuff.  Parlay/X, SDP, IMS and the rest have got them churning on their own weight rather than focusing on the principles of real platform ecosystems.  There are platform services that developers will pay to access, and we could figure out exactly how much if someone would do some experimentation and give it a shot in an incremental way.  Full openness may not be the right strategy, but without market testing some initial examples the carriers have no choice but to keep doing what they’re doing.  “More of the same” is never a good move for a pressured segment.  I’ve always thought that the MVNO space is where we might see more of this type of thing, and who knows, maybe this is what Google has in mind. 
• The micro platform as Trojan Horse.  In addition to the big plays, there are any number of what I call micro-platforms — extremely focused solutions to extremely focused, and sometimes transient, problems.  A favorite example is addthis.com.  While things like this may not be the drivers of the transformation of the industry, they add substantial value and, without a lot of overhead, build for these companies a real ecosystem.  The smart ones then leverage this ecosystem — not only users and developers but press, investors, advertisers, etc — for expanded solutions over time.  It’s easy to forget, but search as trojan horse, whether it was intended that way at the time, was more or less how Google all got started.  Single-purpose internal platform, single-purpose external platform, multi-purpose external platform, FOG.

Parting thoughts: two great “classic” pieces on platform strategy for your reading pleasure:

• Those Harvard folks on two-sided networks, but you gotta pay for it
• Our old pal Joel Spolsky on platforms, free from the blogosphere

Let’s pause for a brief celebration of great industrial design.  I have a 2002 Jetta.  It’s an ok car in general, a V6 with a manual transmission so it’s pretty fun to drive, but it’s nowhere near my wife’s 2000 Accord in terms of overall robustness, build quality, etc.  The one thing that is totally awesome, however, is the way the windows work.  You know, those glass things that are on the doors that you look out of.  Two killer features:

• On both front side windows, you can press the switch once in either direction until it “clicks” to cause the window to go up or down all the way automatically.  That’s right folks, not only to open them all the way (which my Honda does), but to close them as well.  I’ve never tried the experiment of putting my arm in there to see how much pressure it takes to reverse them, but I imagine it wouldn’t chop it off.  This is exceedingly useful for tollbooths (those old school kind with no EZ-Pass), drive-throughs, needing to give someone the finger, etc. 
• After you shut the car off and remove the key, you still have the ability to control the windows until you open the door.  This is awesome for things like cracking them when parking in the heat, closing a window you accidentally left open, etc.

In any case, just wanted to take a moment to recognize the substantial accomplishment of the windows subsystem team at VW.  Good show.  Who the hell needs auto-parallel-parking Lexi anyway.

DISCLAIMER: There has been quite a bit said already about the challenges that convergence (of voice/data, wireless/wired, vendors, user-experiences, device types, etc.) brings to the telco industry, and how various players are, or are not, adapting to these challenges. The smart folks at Unstrung, Gartner, GigaOm, Telco 2.0 and others have thought, and written, long and deeply about these issues. I speak with some purely personal observations.

I’m an Interweb guy that worked for a big-4 US carrier for a few years, and lived to tell about it. I was one of the “Internet people” there, amongst a majority of “telco people”. Back on the other side, and with a keen appreciation for how closely these two domains are tracking toward one another, I am struck again by the vastness of the schism between them. More significantly, though every carrier gives lip service to convergence, IMS, and the need for change, and everyone sees the writing on the wall, the opportunity for a name player in either space to take small but effective steps to rectify telco-land and Techcrunch-land remains on the table.

• The industries speak past one another in a very fundamental way. Telcos are busy hemming and hawing about the future of telcos and professing change, Internet players are busy thinking they don’t need telcos (or at least not any big ones), and meanwhile, the world moves on and consumers wait longer and longer for all those compelling mobile products and services (Twitter doesn’t count). Lots of web 2.0 (etc.) people talk about the dumb pipe, and lots of telco people talk about how you can never do anything more than watch crappy FLV video without real QoS. The real kicker, though, is that with some notable individual exceptions, these people don’t talk, really. The world of the TechCrunch-inspired web-tech blogosphere and the world of telco lunchroom conversation could not be more different. The situation is markedly more positive in Europe, with some carriers doing interesting things and a lot more dialog, but still a disconnect.
• Carriers need to let their smart people go nuts. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief on the Interwebs, there are in fact lots of smart people at carriers. As a technical guy, some of the most amazing engineers I’ve met in my career are to this day sitting in the bowels of these huge behemoths. The problem is just that — they are sitting in the bowels. This certainly isn’t a challenge unique to telcos, but it is acute given the incredible pressure on the carriers to innovate or get left in the dust. Many of these companies, and their vendor ecosystem, need to take drastic steps internally to identify the hot talent and get it to the helm, at all layers. Nothing worse than smart people stuck maintaining legacy systems, spending months fretting over the same vendor architecture diagrams, or trying to make the case for change to deaf ears.
• Incremental deployment models as risk-avoidance strategies. One of the greatest moments in my software career was when I personally realized the strength of really incremental development models (with the help of all the folks who figured it out in the first place). Without getting into specific processes, the fundamental shift from waterfall, big-bang approaches to more incremental agile methods drastically changed my outlook, my productivity, and my understanding of the market and customer landscape. I’ve never seen a carrier, or a vendor at the carrier’s direction, do this. Certainly it’s not appropriate or possible for some of what a carrier builds, but for the domains in which the carriers are competing with internet software companies, this is absolutely critical. Instead, the real-world tendency is to front-load a new product or service project with so much size and cost that the best possible outcome is a substantially de-featured final result. Why bother? This is precisely why carriers cannot take risks at the level that many Internet software companies can — they wind the stack so far up that they lose the ability to adapt to change, customer feedback, testing results, and the rest. This, more than anything else, is death when it comes to adoptable user-level products and services.
• There are legitimate, compelling services that carriers can provide to web-land. Quality of Service, location, presence, user profiling, billing mediation, and more. Data as well as communications services. These are the services the carriers talk up, but their arguments are valid. These are all services that will contribute to the viability of a whole class of new mobile applications. Look at the archetypal mashup, Google Maps and XXX — where the heck is real-time location data in all of these? Why do all the major video distribution sites still show users lame “buffering…10%, 20%” status bars? However…
• It will take carriers changing their perspective on developer platforms to really see these services adopted. I am a big fan of what Amazon has done with S3 and EC2 — they’ve taken an aggressive (and arguably risky) stance to become a platform for a new wave of web (and more) applications. Carriers do have things to be concerned about — the protection of the network from rogue applications, the need to maintain the integrity of emergency services and legendary (sort of) reliability standards. However, these needs don’t preclude a new level of openness in these platforms — smart engineers and architects are certainly capable of putting in place the necessary mechanisms to securely onboard developers and their applications, protect from attacks, shut off miscreant applications, etc. The root cause here isn’t technical, it’s a confused perception of the level of ownership required. You can make money offering infrastructure services to the application layer, and the potential increases with the value of the service.
• Carriers should be trying to court and enable, not out-innovate, the Internet startups. A carrier-built social network? Some crappy home-built UI for a calendaring application? A beat-down version of a popular internet service finally “allowed” to get on the phone? Carriers should engage the ir communities through aggressive developer outreach and evangelism campaigns (like Amazon’s, what Scoble used to do, or even some brightspots like Cingular’s IMS dev contest), and you’ll quickly see what creative people can do with a few feeds, a few web services, and an on-boarding and support mechanism to get to them easily. Want to use the Flickr API? You’re up in 5. Ever tried getting hooked up to a carrier API?

At the end of the day, if this is all going to get better, and if we’re really going to see the next wave of mobile apps, we need to open the dialog. Why is there such a dearth of carrier discussion at all of the web 2.0 conferences (or, better, let’s have some unconferences)? Why is it only a handful of bloggers that hit these topics regularly? (here’s a great one) Why does the majority of the discussion on the future of mobile services from the blogosphere focus so much on the advertising model and on spectrum positions? There are any number of other topics we should be discussing at the community level, in the same way we discuss the virtues of this or that way to distribute music online, or who got how much VC money.

Others have started the dialog, here’s to keeping it rolling!

Ok it’s late, so I admit it. I like lolcats. Well, maybe except for that all-too-ubiquitous Twitter-down one. Maybe I don’t like them as much as the good old days of all your base, but still, lolcats are good as far as memes go. Incidentally, I am also I huge fan of making custom t-shirts for my kids to wear (and annoy their mother), favorite sources are cafepress and neighborhoodies. So, naturally, I decided to make my very own lolcat and put it on a t-shirt for my 15 -month-old. That’s what any other self-respecting parent would do, right? Just put the order in, here’s what’s going on the front:

I’m pretty bad at graphics, so no great shakes, but I am confident that it will contribute to the already high regard in which I am held amongst the other parents at the playground.

P.S. cheers to that phenom of the week, those cheeseburger folks.

A fun space to think about it if you’re into both design and the Internets is the visualization of folksonomical relationships — tags, the relationships between tags, and the relationships between the data they tag. Anyway, I ain’t no expert, I’m just the nuts and bolts variety of software guy, but I’m always intrigued when reading about this stuff.

• Dave Weinberger (notable most recently for Everything is Miscellaneous) with his take the new Technorati
• One of my favorite conference talks, Shirky on this problem
• Some attempts at showing this kind of stuff
• Randomly, Tufte, one of my heros
• And last but not least, a decent book from a few years ago, by a Brooklynite no less, that I have to assume is the inspiration for Weinberger’s title.

If you’re the type to be moderately into furniture, and why wouldn’t you be, then know that this week ICFF is going on, along with all the other NY Design Week craziness. Given that you’re probably not reading this blog if you’re an actual design person that reads all the design blogs, here are a few roundups for the laymen of some cool stuff: Design*Sponge, SallyTV, PSFK.

And, because it’s there, interesting/crazy architecture in Afghanistan.

Lots of folks seem to like/respect it, and gosh darnit they should. Everyone’s great in it. The screenplay is amazing. But let’s be honest here about what puts it over the top — it’s the voice-over. I ain’t no film reviewer, though I have watched a lot of films in my day, so let’s just say Will Lyman is my hero for being in this. He helps it cross the line from being just another suburban dystopia thing (they’re fun, but come on), and makes it into a truly new work. And it ain’t just the irony, it’s the whole package (even though the touch-football sequence is riveting).

Anyhoo, rent it at your friendly local online non-Blockbuster DVD service. You could probably torrent it, but hey, we’re not kids anymore…