At my job they use a more elaborate setup for development than I've been used to (the Very Special engineer that I am). It has some advantages over the quick 'n dirty approach I've used, but it has proved to be extremely tricky to set up. So I thought I would share the set of solutions I gathered that make a working setup, in case it helps anyone else. (In advance I should say that these aren't the über geek ways of doing these things; for that, learn to love the Linux command-line and tip forums. They are stripped down and simplified.) I do mainly design, so I don't want to spend that much time getting things perfect, just workable. I run Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. I've been doing a lot of one-person development with Textmate, Fetch, and Terminal. If that sounds similar to your speed, this setup might be interesting.

The idea is that you run a local Web server, manage code revisions in a shared repository, and set up a virtual host for each project. This has the advantages of:

• Giving you a fast, private, local environment to see and test your work
• Having code that can will work on a public server with no changes
• Letting you roll back to a previous version before you screwed everything up
• Collaborating with others or working on more than one machine, effortlessly
• Use a bloated-but-pretty-good development application with idiot-proof debugging, code hints, docs, variable name lists, and function tracking

It has a disadvantages of:

• Being complex to maintain
• Requiring more steps to do simple things
• Being wrong for small projects

So, anyway...

Eclipse is a coding tool, a completely free Textmate or Coda replacement that has 18,423,521 features. It takes a lot of getting used-to, but in the end I do like it better than simpler tools. Projects can get complex really fast, and it's much better for that than any tools I've used. Plus it has a lot users, plugins, and developers.

1. Eclipse

Eclipse is mainly for Java development, so it needs a plugin to function well for PHP coding. The easiest way to get that is to download a free, pre-configured version of Eclipse 3.3.2 that's maintained by the PDT project.

• Download the PDT "all in one" build (Mac DMG file, gzip)
• Double click on the file to uncompress it, then copy the folder to Applications. Open the 'Eclipse' application inside the folder
• Make a 'workspace' folder when the application starts up that is not in a system folder (like Library or Applications). I use Macintosh HD/dev/workspace in all the below steps

2. Subversion

Subversion is a version management tool that lets you go back to previous versions of files and collaborate with others really easily. Happily, Mac OS X ships with it pre-installed.

• First, set up a repository (where your code will be tracked)
• Open the Terminal (Applications » Utilities) and enter:
  sudo mkdir /dev/svn
  sudo mkdir /dev/svn/repository
  sudo svnadmin create /dev/svn/repository
  sudo chown -R www:www /dev/svn/repository
• Then, if you want to get the most out of Subversion, continue following the instructions in the excellent documentation, setting up a trunk and branch for each project. Or, you can just create a new repository for each project like I do, and continue to the next part right now.

The simplest way to use Subversion is an Eclipse plugin called Subclipse. To get it, open Eclipse, then:

• Go to the menu Help » Software Updates » Find and Install
• Select "Search for New Features to Install"
• Click "New Remote Site" and enter a name for the site (e.g. "Subclipse")
• Enter http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x for the url and click 'Ok'
• On the 'Update Sites to Visit' screen, make sure the checkbox next to 'Subclipse' is checked, then click 'Next'
• On the Updates screen, expand the 'Subclipse' item and uncheck the 'Integrations' item
• Click next and accept all the following dialog's defaults
• Create a new project (File » New » Other... » SVN Folder » Checkout Projects from SVN)
• Choose 'Enter a new Repository' and enter http://localhost/dev/svn/repository/, select the item created, and click 'Finish'
• On the next screen, set up the project as PHP by finding the PHP folder, opening it, and choosing PHP Project. Then give it a name, and code away
• Be sure to read about how to use Subversion, and Eclipse either at their sites or from within Eclipse Help.

3. Apache

Both Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard come with Apache already installed. Turn it on in the System Preferences » Sharing preference pane. To configure it for this setup:

• Open the Terminal application (in the Applications->Utilities folder) and:
• for Tiger enter sudo nano /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, then your password
• for Leopard enter sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf then your password
• Scroll down (cntrl-v) until you find the line:
  # Virtual hosts
  # Include /private/etc/[apache2 or httpd]/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
  and change it to:
  # Virtual hosts
  Include /private/etc/[apache2 or httpd]/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
  
• Then add a 'Directory' block, entering these lines below the lines above (use what ever folder path you made for your workspace in the first line):
  <Directory "/dev/workspace/">
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all
  </Directory>
• Next, set up Subversion for Apache. Enter in the same document, after the above lines:
  LoadModule dav_svn_module /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_dav_svn.so
  <Location /dev/svn>
     DAV svn
     SVNParentPath /dev/svn
  </Location>
• Save the file (cntrl-o) and exit (cntrl-x).

Next, set up a virtual host so that you can type in the url for your domain and see your project almost exactly as on the final server. Open the Terminal application (in the Applications->Utilities folder) and:

• for Tiger enter sudo nano /etc/httpd/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf, then your password
• for Leopard enter sudo nano /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf, then your password
• Delete all the lines in the file that don't have a '#' at the beginning
• Enter, at the end (replace www.domain.com with your server domain):
  NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1
  <VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
     DocumentRoot "/dev/workspace/www.domain.com"
     ServerName www.dev.domain.com
  </VirtualHost>

4. php5

On Mac OS X 10.5, you can use the existing PHP5 installation:

• Open Terminal and enter sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
• Find the line #LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
• Remove the # and save the file
• Restart Apache (System Preferences » Sharing).

On Mac OS X 10.4, the existing PHP install doesn't seem to work reliably. Easiest is just to use Marc Liyanage's install packages with Apache 1.3 that comes installed:

• Download the installer (gzip)
• Follow the fantastic instructions

5. MYSQL

On Mac OS X 10.4:

• Marc Liyanage's great post has the best instructions for setup

On Mac OS X 10.5:

• Download MySQL 5 (dmg)
• Run Installers for MySQL, the startup item and preference pane
• Make sure the preference pane (in System Preferences) indicates it's running
• Open the Terminal application and enter /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root
• Remove a big security hole by adding a MySQL root account password. Enter:
  update mysql.user SET password=PASSWORD('yourpasswordhere');
• Enter EXIT to leave MySQL

6. phpmyadmin

Phpmyadmin lets you use a Web-based interface to MySQL instead of the command-line. For most tasks, this is drastically slower but far easier than the command-line.

• Download and uncompress phpmyadmin
• Copy to /Library/WebServer/Documents and rename the folder "phpmyadmin"
• Open Terminal and enter sudo cp /private/etc/php.ini.default php.ini
• Open the php.ini file and change the lines
  mysql.default_socket = and mysqli.default_socket =
  to:
  mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock
  mysqli.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock
• In your Web browser, go to localhost/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php and click 'add' in server section, then:
• Leave all defaults as they are, except for...
• set config user as root
• set config password as the one you set above in MySQL section
• Click the 'Save' button
• Go to the folder Macintosh HD/Library/WebServer/phpmyadmin/config/config.inc.php
• move config.inc.php up one directory level and delete the 'config' directory
• Go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin to use your database

You're done! Whew. Now, as long as you don't code any absolute paths, you can develop in Eclipse, save as you go, and see your site in its final form by going to www.dev.domainname.com. When it's time to deploy, you can move your files as they are to the production server and avoid all the last-minute path-fixing (at the very least).

(Thanks hugely to Jeff Reiecke and Yixu Lin for various pieces of help with this.)

In an article about Flickr by Virginia Heffernan ("Sepia No More" in the New York Times Magazine), she bemoans what she sees as the dominant aesthetic on Flickr:

As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. ...the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site's members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that "pop" with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.

To me, the site's most popular photos are as good as or better than most magazine photography. Flickr members have created large amounts of quality work from the willingness to love and critique each other's work and newly available decent equipment. This is work that would otherwise not exist if not for the site, a strong contribution to popular culture.

It's hard to believe that Ms. Heffernan would confuse popular culture with incandescent art in the offline world; why does she try to mix the two up on the Web?

In a recent post on Hitwise by Heather Hopkins, "Content Aggregation is King?," the bind that existing news media is in is highlighted again:

"Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble is - creating all that content is expensive. It's tough to justify the cost of content creation if those that sift and sort are gaining on those that create."

The deal between the a consortium of newspapers and Yahoo to outsource listings functions to Yahoo in return for a cut of revenue was predicated on the idea that there is a way to do some basic arbitrage on this situation, but even that doesn't work over the longer term. News media simply can't justify the cost of their content creation staffs, even if they get rid of the printing presses and costs of classifieds businesses. And they have yet to really deal with this (probably because they are still much larger than the aggregator sites even now).

Maybe, as the news media starts seriously shrinking the content pool, the aggregators will start to strike deals like Yahoo did, but more expansive and lucrative. Done right, such deals could raise all boats. For example, rather than aggregating traffic on one domain, Yahoo (or Google, etc.) could drive traffic to news media sites that federated their news with aggregated content from all over the Internet. A network of these sites, served by a single ad engine, could broaden the ad inventory far beyond what Yahoo would ever be able to support on its own and save some amount of a business model for content creators.

It may take a risk by someone on the scale of the 2001 AOL-Google deal, which similarly tied a content network to advertising engine. Marissa Meyer talked about it as "a very big bet, a revenue guarantee" to AOL:

"It caused a huge amount of controversy at the time because by some of the models that we had run, the deal was going to bankrupt Google. Like Jonathan Rosenberg actually got up on the table and jumped up and down about how much we shouldn't do this deal because Google was going to go bankrupt. We had models, one said that we were going to go bankrupt, one which said we might break even... and one year into the deal what we saw was that by signing AOL and broadening the reach of our advertising network we attracted so many more advertisers, and RPMs (revenue per thousand pageviews) went up across the network and we outperformed our expectations by a factor of two, maybe even three times."

Many of the good ideas below came in talking about personal information with Doug Fritz, the bad parts are my own ideas.

When Friendster and Flickr started getting traction (2002 and 2004 respectively), I wasn't a huge fan of the functionality, but the social aspect was totally addictive. I got seriously into each (and even got comfortable with the photostream concept eventually, though the fact that I can't easily control the order of the photos without using the organizr still bothers me). These sites ability to connect me with other people blew away all other shortcomings. At the time, the fact that I was putting so much personal information into a public space didn't bother me at all; I assumed a that the Web made old ideas of privacy kind of obsolete, and we would all eventually adapt and make new social norms to cope.

But now that social networks are taking on large chunks of people, I am not so sure. Facebook with a dozen real friends is a much different thing than Facebook with 140 "friends." The information I post there is, to me, the things that define me personally as I choose to represent myself. In the social network context however, the sites ultimately have more control over how I get represented than I do.

I had an experience with that when my story about a stolen cellphone and pictures from the thief unintentionally uploaded to Flickr briefly became news. There were some wrinkles in the story that caused people to be suspicious that I was doing marketing, or lying about the phone being stolen (as opposed to lost). I knew the facts of the matter and was not looking for any large amount of attention in posting the story. But once there was that attention, the people who read the story simply did not believe it and couldn't be convinced otherwise. They used personal information about me that was publicly available (on Flickr, my blog, and other sites) to make the case that I was perpetrating a hoax (for example the fact that I worked at Yahoo was used to say that I was marketing the Flickr service). Even the Reuters reporter that interviewed me asked "how can I know you're not deceiving me?" I didn't have an answer for her. The effortless flow of personal information (flow that I started) did not lead to anything like the truth, and caused some people to think that I was not a real person at all. Privacy as we knew may be gone, but the idea that everyone is now a public figure (with none of the protections of public figures) strikes me as wrong.

We can say that in the context of computer networks "information wants to be free," and I support the idea that copyright is an outmoded framework for intellectual property. But when it comes to representing ourselves, how can it be that personal information should flow everywhere and be used by anyone however they want? Open Social and the Data Portability initiatives are good starts for independent mechanisms, but I still have to give these systems a truckload of personal information, with no way to take it back after it's out there.

An alternate solution would be to allow people to own their personal information store, and choose to allow social network sites access to this store. Sites that behaved badly could be banned. This is much like OpenID and Oauth in concept, where one's identity is tied to a DNS-like way of creating a single namespace for unique user identifiers. It could take the form of a fancier version of an "Attention Profile Markup Language" file; a "Social Profile Markup Language" file, say. It would be stored on my own web server and under my direct control. If I wanted to share with Friendfeed or mybloglog (for example) what sites I've been posting to, saving, liking, or reading, I could allow them to access my SPML file under the condition that it be removed if I decided not to use the application any longer. (This is a geeky solution, but that's usually where these things start.) There should be a better solution to the new portability of social data than exists today, or my own understanding of my personal information will mean less and less.

• - Extraction of thumbnails, descriptions, and tags for Flickr images, Amazon products, and Vimeo videos.
• - Extraction of media embeds for YouTube, Current TV, and Vimeo videos.
• - Tagging and collections for all saved items
• - Up to 10 email lists of 10 recipients each

When I was a teenager I was lucky enough to own a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, with a 300 baud modem. It allowed me to program in BASIC, compose documents in a Wordstar-compatible text editor, and even access CompuServe (sorry about those hourly rates Dad!). It started instantly exactly where I left off, no need to save at all (until you had to change the batteries, then it was time to break out the cassette tape recorder drive). It's eight-line by 40 character LCD screen used little power, so I could use it for 30 hours or so on one set of batteries. I doubt anyone has ever looked so completely scary nerd while believing that they were the hottest shit as I did with that thing. I wish there was something like it now, something smaller, lighter, and simpler of course. I would just like to be able to write wherever I am, without carrying or pulling out a laptop, and I would like not to worry about saving, battery life, weight, expensive equipment, etc. Something like the Flip for words.

Specifications 2GB RAM (enough for 8000 pages of text or about 5 million words, surely enough for anyone), full keyboard, non-backlit LCD display, low-power Bluetooth transceiver (file access only), 1 mini-USB port for data transfer and charging. 22 hours of use per charge. RTF/HTML format text editor. 8 x 8 x 0.3 inches, 1 pound.

Update: Rob Mcartney points me to the Alphasmart, a little bulky but maybe just the right thing! Ordered one... thanks Rob.

See update at bottom.

Having a "design process" for Web projects is an appealing idea. It codifies principles that designers like into rationales for involving design in major decisions. Since design is imagining, a lot has been written about doing innovation through design. Since I'm getting really old now I have seen many different attempts at making an innovative design process. I can say right up front that the only thing that actually works is working with a designer on a small team that is driven, wants to create something new, and has the courage to go where that leads. As a former advocate and practitioner (for years) of these design processes, it's my experience that they contribute little of value to the success or failure of a design.

1. User and market research doesn't work. As Douglas Rushkoff sez:

"...because you can only research the market's past, not its future, consumer research doesn't ever lead to true innovation. It only helps companies to sort out some of last year's trends in order to create an illusion of sales predictability." -- pg 235, Get Back in the Box (Thanks to Bob Baxley for this quote!)

2. Brainstorming doesn't work. Creation of many ideas and scenarios divorced from reality is good, but limiting this to a two-hour meeting every so often insures that ideation is not part of major decisions. Occasional brainstorming with project teams is often used as a team-building exercise, so everyone is happy when the ideas they produce are close-in, not new or disruptive directions. Make brainstorming part of making the product, not a separate meeting.

3. "Wizard of Oz" videos don't work. Fleshing-out an idea in a speculative (i.e. faked) animated scenario is a tactic used by some designers to sell an idea that has no existing engineering or business basis. Without constraints, real innovation does not happen, just out-of-control "idearrhea." Actual innovation is build-able in some way, anything else should be taken as suspect.

4. Personae don't work. Defining users as archetypes and attempting to see the product through their eyes has some use for avoiding massive disaster, especially for non-designers. But they are of limited use for designers making hard decisions. Personae should not be over-sold as the answer to making the product user-centric, that has to happen in other ways.

5. "Agile" methodology doesn't work. Scrum is a huge success in helping large companies redefine engineering to give ownership of products to teams and to deliver better products. But the process fails when applied to design and ideation. A two or three-week sprint is simply not enough time to try a few design directions and prototype working code (and I have tried on at least a dozen occasions). Any kind of exploration has to go out the window. A very experienced Scrum master and advocate I've worked with agrees that Scrum is best for delivering against a well-defined specification, and even then produces huge amounts of stress on designers (who have to stay somewhat ahead of the other team members in their deliverables).

A good objection to all of the above would be that IDEO and other great companies have been very successful at innovating through design and have many solid methods they use that they detail in books, etc. I would point out that most of the examples people use for success are physical products (like, as is mentioned again and again, the iPod), not Web sites. I think this is because it is much, much easier to create a prototype of a physical product and see how it feels to use it that to do the equivalent with Web work, where application pieces, data structures, and lots of other very abstract design work needs to be done before you can see how something feels in use.

Another good objection would be that for utilitarian, task-oriented projects, the goals are clear enough that all of these techniques are valuable, and that's true enough. But these kinds of commodity projects (e.g. building a new shopping cart or a content management system) are not what most designers can contribute to in valuable ways.

Creating products is not a rational process; much depends on tiny aspects, timing, and emotional dynamics between people. Designers should embrace this and stop trying to define their value through processes. Designers should ideate through building, directly with engineers on small teams.

Update: Thanks to Kai Turner who made several valuable points, I've edited the post to not sound old and cynical quite as much. I should also make the disclaimer that this is a polemic and deliberately foamy-at-the-mouth.

In an article about the politics and economics of consumer choice in cable entertainment ("Bland Menu if Cable Goes à la Carte") in the New York Times, the author talks about how it's actually a good thing that the costs of producing niche programming are borne by all cable subscribers, as otherwise such programming would be very expensive and possibly not attract enough buyers to exist at all (even the most popular channel, ESPN, would rise from $3/month to $12/month). This makes sense, and could be a useful way of thinking about two other media businesses that are in some trouble: the Web and newspapers, both of which are in that bad à la Carte downward spiral.

In the case of the Web, despite the large amount of investment and growth in Web users, the economics still do not support niche content in any serious way. Small publishers have not made a living off of their content, depending on VCs or large distribution networks for investment to stay afloat, or publishing despite the lack of money. And even the most popular blogs on the Internet make a tiny amount of money compared to any other publishing medium like books, magazines, TV, etc. For example, Boing Boing is estimated to bring in $50,000/month in advertising revenue, which sounds like a lot until you consider that a single full-page ad in a local magazine like New York generates the same amount of revenue. Traditional media companies like AOL and Yahoo! have tried to aggregate many small publishers and sell ads across all of them, but despite getting a lot of traffic for this content, the rates for ads remain low (and at flat growth rates). The money remains in search text ads. Jaron Lanier pointed out in an Op-ed that this model doesn't work for content authors.

In the case of newspapers, their audience is falling steadily and won't sustain the costs of keeping the staffs of reporters and editors working (let alone the costs of publishing in print). They have had some success working with internet networks like Yahoo!, but this is likely not sustainable nor will it replace enough revenue to keep things going at current spending levels (magazines haven't had the same problem, but that's another topic).

So given that the cable model supports a number (not a huge number, but a number) of niche content players, and given that the Internet functions well as a big lab for new ideas but not for building content businesses, maybe what's needed is a sort of content consortium, or at least association of creators, with thresholds for membership and the ability to bargain collectively for better compensation. This would be different from a union, more like the Author's Guild or Screen Actors Guild, where plenty of work is done outside their auspices, but productions that generate a lot of revenue must conform to standards of pay. The cable model shows that if companies seeking to exploit content have to buy in to a collective pool of content, content costs are lower while allowing even niche content to thrive. This model doesn't need the cable networks to work for the author's benefit.

In a rough environment for content creators, where the economics are against them (but no one wants them to stop creating), the authors and makers should hang together more than they are. Some kind of association would re-balance a business that is out of kilter, draining the money out of a very valuable part of the culture we live in.

Sarah just turns me to warm goo, babbling all the clichés I've heard, because the overwhelming love blows all other thought away: She amazes me every day, she is beautiful, precious, it is such a blessing to take care of her, it is unnerving how fast time slips away, etc. We are so, so lucky. She is three!

"Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections. The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available. Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service."

Once again an amazing effort by talented artists pulled together a great datavis show put on for nextfest folks: six examples of y! network data, the latest finished the night before. Thank you to Havi, Jeanne, and Jen for having us. Incredible datavis work by Aaron Koblin, Michael Chang, and Aaron Meyers. The rest of nextfest was very uneven for me, with some amazing things and many just ok things. The highlight for me was definitely meeting Jeff Han and talking with him about his multitouch screens, but I also liked the Green stuff a lot, and the Bumptop folks. More pictures.

UPDATE: Here's me giving an interview about the "bursting queries" visualization to Noah Barron from Annenberg's Online Journalism Review. Oy, I sure do go on and on, stupidly saying the same thing over and over! The incredible visualization was created by Aaron Koblin based on an idea from Aaron Meyers and with the original 'bursting' data analysis by Jasmine Novak, something I added at the end of the interview but got cut out. Sorry :(

[see updates, below]

My brother, Michael A. Clemens, is an expert on issues of economic development and was recently asked to do a book review for the pre-eminent journal of thinking on international politics, Foreign Policy. I am not able to appreciate his work fully, but I know he's very smart and worked very hard to get to the point where his ideas can get the influence they deserve, and I am very proud of him and happy to share his name! In his honor, I want to rip off one of his frameworks and use it for my own purposes; pretty bad behavior, but that's family for you.

He divides thinkers on economic development for poorer countries into two camps: "planners" (who want to create grand visions for the future and fund large projects) and "searchers" (who want a more incremental and experimental approach to finding what works). If I butcher his arguments completely, I could say that he concludes that neither camp adequately and seriously takes on the complexities of actually improving the economic situation of developing countries at all, however. Development is hard to do, and there are no short-cuts.

Far away from the moral value of his work and in my petty world of Internet bullshit, there is an analogous divide, between "storytellers" and "searchers." The storytellers are usually the big thinker types and designers, who believe in their ability to imagine a solution, build excitement, tell the story of how it will make things better, and make it happen. The searchers don't believe in stories anymore, they trust hard facts and cold reality, eschewing fanciful stories for careful scientific principles and evolutionary methods.

In engineering, the culture is heavily weighted toward the searchers. In design and marketing, the culture is weighted toward the storytellers. For example, today visual artists were described to me as interfering with good design decisions in Web sites, "failed artists" who shouldn't been taken as seriously as "an architect, say." This is clearly a searcher perspective, heaping scorn on the emotional side in favor of 'more serious' approaches. Conversely, the storytellers will deride the 'incrementalism' and 'lack of ambition' of the searchers, wishing for the 'next game changing idea' to emerge out of some yeasty marathon whiteboard brainstorm.

Recently this article about the weaknesses of "democratized design" looks disapprovingly at the new "hack culture" of participatory innovation, saying that genuinely new things ("like the iPod" --ugh) can't be produced "by committee"; the clear implication is that a single person's great idea (storyteller) will beat a mob of tinkerers (searchers). I'm not sure about that either; seems too grandiose.

You can even find parallels to this in ancient philosophy, where Plato exalted the unseen ideal (storyteller) and Aristotle wanted to ban plays and poems because they distorted clear thinking (searcher). Being a designer, I constantly find myself on the wrong side of whatever group I'm in. Being able to draw a picture of something does not count nearly as much as code, but I am addicted to the power of stories. I have attempted to bridge this gap by becoming a designer who builds, but most people I know still sort themselves firmly into one of the two groups.

In fact, the abstract nature of Web products allows people to work purely in one camp or the other, without a hard need (other than the success or failure of their projects) to cross the divide in their thinking. This is apparent all the time in the whining of designers and their fantasies of becoming dictators to engineers bound to execute whatever they say, and the resentment engineers have toward the promiscuous, irresponsible, and arbitrary ideas of airhead designers. This game is stacked against a synthesis right now, and we're all worse off.

Ultimately, I come down on the side of the storytellers, but try to make a practice of humility about my ideas, checking them relentlessly against reality. The best practice is like life-drawing from a model: make a bold line and decide how you want to show a subject, but constantly look back and forth from your sketch to the person in front of you, making sure your drawing still has a likeness.

Update: This article on egotistical architects bemoans the masturbatory elitism of top architects, and feints briefly with democratic design ideas before coming down on the side of the elitists:

[Democratic design advocate Bruce] Nussbaum is dreaming if he thinks democracy and design are seriously compatible. Truth is, they're not even love muffins.

This is partly because specialism - as in honed, polished expertise - is the core of what we call civilization. Designing your own may bring spiritual satisfaction, and homegrown design may be less ill-advised than homegrown, say, brain surgery. But be it blog, bog or village, it still has that unmistakable backyard look.

"Design democracy" is a feelgood idea, and that's about the only quality it offers. As the Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy told last year's Aspen Ideas Festival: "If I was competing with the US, I would love to have the students … spending their time on this kind of crap. To be a great designer is very hard. It's not about your friends [liking] something you did."

It's hard because humans are hierarchical primates. Only the few can be great at design or anything else. To be a great architect - a Brunelleschi, say - may require a self-belief so vast as to be limitless, but it also requires more than a Botoxed self-portrait as proof.

Meh, seems like they are trying to have it both ways. I think it's all about tension, not one extreme or the other. You could create a simplified two-card Oblique Strategies deck, with one card reading "let the usage and ideas of ordinary people be your guide" and the other reading "trust only your instincts and ruthlessly pursue what you think is best," and switch strategies randomly!

Update 2: An Economist blogger flagged Michael's review, and highlighted an idea that was implied in the review my brother wrote, that the only development strategy that made sense was allowing freer emigration to functioning economies (rather than trying to pursue 'planner' or 'searcher' strategies in countries that are so screwed up that no strategy is implementable. This made me wonder what the analogue to my world might be, and I think it's something along the lines of opening up companies and products so that their data and ideas are more portable and free. If products are 100% interoperable and your data is your data (not trapped or siloed) but completely portable, we could have a faster, easier evolution of better networked products and services. As it is, people satisfice; sticking with some things just because it's hard to move data around and nothing works easily with anything else.

The use of A-B testing and bucket testing for optimizing tasks can provide a clean, programatic way to make many design decisions. It's an invaluable technique for comparing two similar but incompatible choices, and the results are impossible to have much debate about. Because of the urge to move fast, some groups have been tempted to use A-B testing to create artificial certainty about qualitative questions, however:

Testing can't give insight into what the product package should be; it will never tell you why the results are what they are. Trying to test features individually and then assemble them into a coherent package will not give insight into the success or failure of the entire package, nor provide a sense of what the right product is. At best, it results in a sort of "drunken sailor's walk," as each new incremental test takes the product in a different direction.

Testing won't tell you which product will be more successful; direct comparison is seldom the way that people decide what to buy (Pepsi beats Coke in taste tests year after year, yet Coke has 44% of the market and Pepsi is stuck at 32%). In fact, attempting to compare a new products to each other this way can result in audiences simply choosing what's familiar. This can be seen in the heavily AB test driven designs of the search results pages of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, which are all very similar.

A great deal of research has been done into the product choices people make, and it consistently points to the formation of a "story" around a product being the most important factor in whether it succeeds or fails (the most eloquent person on this topic is Seth Godin, ex-Yahoo! employee). This is not the marketing at all, but how the actual product makes overall sense to people who use it, surprises them with something new and better, or disappoints for some reason. There is no way to create a story out of a list of features or parts, instead it's the combination that either works, or it doesn't.

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