An undiscovered discipline

While googling for a good edition of Menard’s “Quixote”, I found a bunch of obscure research publications dealing with studies of Software-Engineering-Research Engineering –that is, these people study those of us who, in turn, study software engineering. It’s fascinating to find that we ourselves are the subject of investigation of a particular niche. Here I [...]

xkcd’s map of online communities

This map from webcomic xkcd is absolutely cool:

Among my favourite bits: The sunken island of Usenet, the small “Attractive MySpace Pages” peninsula in proportion to the huge MySpace kingdom, and how the Bay of Angst shores on Xanga and LiveJournal.
(Speaking of weird maps, you should really check out the Strange Maps blog if you haven’t [...]

One more link to the Web 2.0 video

Since I was underwater for the past couple of weeks, I barely had a chance to write about this video. It’s now been linked to by practically every blog on the planet but mine. In case you haven’t seen it, here it goes.
You may know I’m not a fan of the Web 2.0 buzzword, but [...]

What’s in a word – Agile

Our choice of words says a lot about how we see the world. Sometimes inadvertently, we label things so that our beliefs are portrayed with a positive light. The abortion debates, for example, are between pro-life and pro-choice groups (and who would like to be against life or choice?).
There are many examples of this wordplay [...]

Web 2.0 and the Grunge Hoax Victims

I just had to post about Joey de Villa’s great spoof on Kathy Sierra’s graphics.
The short story: in her fine Creating Passionate Users blog, Kathy Sierra inexplicably tries to argue that Web 2.0 is not a buzzword, but jargon. Dare Obasanjo convincingly refutes the argument, and Joey de Villa (at Global Nerdy) draws a parallel [...]

Cheap shots at the Gartner Hype Curve

The Gartner Hype curve, or Hype cycle, summarizes the visibility and the maturity of currently hot technologies and forecasts the productivity they will have. At both of the workshops in CASCON that I went to, presenters showed us the most current curve, pointing out that web 2.0 is currently at the “peak of inflated expectations”. [...]