Design is important, and bad design can kill: Here's a gem from the Guardian about the horrible, and I mean horrible new logo for the 2012 Olympics, which was developed at a cost of £400,000: Here's the story...

George W. Bush confronts a long and lonely walk down the hallway of history.

So asserts this brilliant article by James Moore that chronicles the likely future of the President who will be forever immortalized in Google as a "miserable failure." "There will be loyalists and radical ideologues that will remain his confidantes and treat him deferentially, but he is poised to become a man estranged from the country and the people who endured eight years of his deadly inadequacies. We will not want to talk or think about President Bush because he will be a symbol of how our democracy went horribly wrong just like O.J. Simpson turned into an icon of the failure of our criminal justice system.

Social Networks Suck...

How can we make them better? This brilliant article by Jawad Shuaib breaks it down as well as I have read: "Social networks suck. There is a new social network launched every other day, and they suck as well. Somewhere along the line, the evolution of social networks took a wrong turn, and we the consumers are left to choose bad from worse. Every new social network created today imitates the mistakes of the predecessors before them. For instance, it has become a standard to make site maps difficult to visualize because their primary demographic, teenagers, have all the time in the world to figure them out [1]. Fortunately for us startups, though, we can pay attention to the failures of the existing social networks and figure out what not to do the next time around."

Now that the election is behind us, and the Democrats control both houses of Congress, there's no reason not to admit it: the Right was right about us all along.

Here is our 25-point manifesto for the new Congress:
Add your own post: http://right-was-right.blogspot.com/
1. Mandatory homosexuality 2. Drug-filled condoms in schools 3. Introduce the new Destruction of Marriage Act 4. Border fence replaced with free shuttle buses 5. Osama Bin Laden to be Secretary of State 6. Withdraw from Iraq, apologize, reinstate Hussein

Release Early and Often

Here's a great article about accelerating the design process to embrace fast change, rapid experimentation, fast failure leading to fast learning, reducing risk while steadily creating innovation. This is our preferred methodology! The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site

YouTube

is just the latest salvo in the case of media eating itself big time. So much more is coming: collaborative editing, dynamic documentary, hyperfilm, panopticon, WikiPedia Media... My personal feeling is that we are beginning to experience the reknitting together of our lost and fractionated culture and wisdom atom by atom in the nanotechnological loom of internetworked dynamism. We are also about to see a lot of light and truth being shone into innumerable dark areas where legions of powermongers have been able to keep Big Media Eyes blinded and Mouths muzzled. But Big Media cannot seem to get what the YouTube phenomenon is about, because it is the exact inverse of Big Media. The reality is literally invisible to them. So naturally, Big Media is reporting about the size of the deal without doing justice to the inversion of all the key relationships it thinks are the rules of the game: Winner Take All becomes Longtail; expensive "professional" formulaic production becomes whatever works; stars become everyman; timeslots become the eternal now; the elite director becomes some guy you know or who's just like you; 500 channels become millions and millions; and writing becomes curiously irrelevant.

Keith Olbermann

continues to be the quintessential last remaining journalist. Yesterday, he delivered another Murrow-like deconstruction of the desparate attempts of our President to equate Democrats with Terrorist supporters in campaign fundraising speeches:

The president of the United States — unbowed, undeterred and unconnected to reality — has continued his extraordinary trek through our country rooting out the enemies of freedom: the Democrats. Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, “177 of the opposition party said, ‘You know, we don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.’�

If you're like me, you remember the original Napster with great fondness as a technology that worked incredibly well until it, uh, got evicerated. The new, improved corporate version is the same only in name (although it is trying hard). Could it be that YouTube is destined for the same fate? This TechWeb article in Information Week - Analyst Firm Predicts YouTube Is 'Goin' Down' puts forth the Napster-like redux of YouTube being "sued into oblivion" by studios unless it proactively acts to remove copyr

Reports of the death of journalism

may have been exaggerated. Keith Olbermann delivered a presentation Wednesday on his MSNBC Program "Countdown" which transcended modern newscasting completely. It was, unambiguously, Murrow-like. I was transfixed, and if you haven't seen it, please click below and prepare to have your socks knocked off with pure unadulterated elocution. Democrats, wake up. This is the voice of the New American Evolution. Here's a great article about it: Richard Greene's HuffPo blog on the masterful message and the masterful messenger. Waaaaay to go Keith, and kudos to MSNBC for backing their man.

What with plummeting poll ratings, Lieberman's loss, approaching midterm calamity, and Seymour Hersh blowing the lid off the administrations plans for growing the MiddleEast debacle to a full-scale war with Iran (building upon the unvarnished triumph of its strategy in Iraq), the Bushies are feeling a lot of political threat. And what happens when that happens? In eleven cases out of eleven, an "imminent" terror plot is discovered and the threat level increases, of course. It helps us feel their pain. Here's MSNBC's Keith Olbermann's classic rollup of the first ten such instances, which I present in honor of the most recent exploding shampoo scare, number eleven.