One week from today, Thursday the 18th.

Some people present biking as an alternative to driving. Why? Biking is so much more fun than driving, it’s not even useful to compare the two.

The other day a friend sent me this note:

I biked to work today for the first time in my life!

YEAH

A little sore (I still have to bike home but get to break up the trip with a stop at Max’s baseball game) in the legs, but my mind is soaring and I feel great!

That’s the feeling exactly. Yeah! Get a little exercise, clear your head, have fun, live life.

If you’re considering trying the whole bike commuting thing, you might want to check out the SF Bike Coalition’s Bike to Work page.

Last Monday was a fun day. I helped Paul and Ed from Worldbike deliver a lecture to the students at Stanford’s d.school. First I sat in with Jim Patell’s course on extreme affordability. Worldbike discussed their experiences in Kenya, and Sally Madsen from IDEO, gave a nice presentation on her previous work with the Ignite Innovations’ IGNITE Light project.

The main lesson was that it’s tough to design something for someone without having good contextual information about how they’ll use it.

The other lessons: Read the rest of this entry »

Plan Resonate just finished an internal blogging system for software manufacturer SAP.

This system was built in collaboration with Jeff Nolan and the SAP Apollo Strategy Group. We did our best to meet their specs. I’m happy with the work. So far the feedback from within SAP has been positive.

More importantly, I sincerely hope the system will help SAP to embrace the idea of distributed strategy making in management. They have 35,000 employees. That’s a lot of collective business insight and individual genius. The strength of the blogging system, and the main premise of the design, is that it makes it easy and rewarding for people to share their ideas with their coworkers.

I’m biased, and I’d love to see SAP become a model case for distributed strategy making. This is a big vision, and a process that should take years to unfold. It’s smart that they’re starting now. Credit Nolan with the foresight to inspire this internal shift. It’s been an exciting and satisfying project.

Thanks to the project team — they’re amazingly talented. They were: Nick Aster (Treehugger, movable type expert), Mark Mazziotti (art director), AJ Wilhelm (TapeOp, senior hacker), Terry Passarotti (social systems analyst), Jim Chen (SAP, IT support),and Christine Zender (Tendo Communications, communications strategist). Socialtext‘s workspace played a big role in the project. (I’m a big fan of their tool and we’ve already turned a few other project teams on to the
technology.)

Several big projects happening recently. If they don’t involve writing, they involve blogs. As a result, I’m not usually excited to write in my blog. More news on the projects very soon.

In the interim, I’m announcing my plan to leave the computer for at least 24 hours, and go up to the hills in Mendocino. Come and find me at the BoontBeer Festival.

I went to a beer festival once, and I remember drinking a lot of beer. Beer snobs are utterly dull. Thank god they always come with beer.

Sun and beer and music in Mendocino is enough for a Saturday afternoon. And Saturday night will be fun too. I’ll be visiting my friends at Emerald Earth Sanctuary. I’ve been there a few times before, and every time it makes for a great change of pace.

IE6 is a tricky tool for web developers because it will render the appearance of a webpage according to it’s own special set of rules. Browser incompatibility has really been a pain in the ass for developers to work with, and although things have improved slightly, it may be too little too late for Internet Explorer.

I switched to Opera two years ago, and more recently I’ve been using Firefox. The web developer extensions to Firefox are very innovative and incredible timesavers. I’m now using IE7, and although it corrects some of the problems of IE6, it doesn’t approach the functionality of Firefox.

Every developer needs a copy of IE6 in order to troubleshoot annoying compatibility issues. This process is time consuming and expensive. And now it’s just gotten harder, because when you download IE7, it automatically overwrites IE6.

Microsoft: you insult me when you refuse to ask my permission for something that you “assume” I’ll want.

I don’t want IE7 or IE6. Unfortunately I need to use them to address problems that you could have easily fixed years ago. This is clever strategy, sure, in the short term. Now however you’re unprepared to deal with the competitive forces in the market.

Soon (I hope) there will be a new cross-browser compatability extension for Firefox. I would love to be able to create a virtual view of a page for other popular browsers. This would be sort of related to the cool IE View plugin, except it wouldn’t launch IE… it would just change what I see on the screen. It wouldn’t have to interact with the server as if it were IE, it would simply give me a visual to help troubleshoot CSS cross-browser issues.

Please SIGN THIS PETITION — This is a bipartisan issue. We need to keep the internet free from telecoms lobbying efforts. They’re making increasingly aggressive moves that could destroy the nature of the internet.

My first reaction to another Move On petition was that I shouldn’t bother. Why is Move On doing this? Their involvement is confusing the issue for people, as summarized in this interesting post by Russel Shaw.

If you don’t want to sign a Move On petition, then maybe you’ll consider participating in this Viral Marketing contest.

I personally disagree with Shaw’s conclusions. The viral marketing contest idea is clever, I guess, and I hope it generates a lot of interest. Still; not many of us are going to invest the time and energy it takes to create a thoughtful 30-60 second video sound byte. Maybe the web community is overlooking a potential solution — let everyone link to their research and hash out their ideas in a non-partisan, public funded, Carter Center moderated wiki.