smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Seth Godin on lessons de musique:

“The biggest opportunity for the music business is to combine permission with subscription. The possibilities are endless.”

There is so much understanding packed into this I hardly know where to begin.

Whilst labels fight to retain a business they have profiteered from for years, artists are embracing this ideal directly, forging new partnerships with the consumer and fan alike. It’s a level of intimacy the big labels have only ever dreamed of achieving.

Translation? Lables have to evolve, grow and most importantly adapt to new technologies and mediums.. or face eventual extinction.

Jeff Atwood has a great piece on the relentless pace of programming change:

“It’s no longer unique for something to be new, no longer interesting when something is shiny. Eventually, you grow weary of shiny new things.”

The Magpie Effect — no sooner do we finally get a chance to check out some new programming platform, it’s already obsolete and out-of-favour.

Why should anyone invest time and energy developing in the latest craze, when even it’s biggest proponents and drum beaters change their minds on the current framework flavour every other week?!

There in, gentle readers, is the moral of the story and why it’s a rare thing indeed to see such technologies embraced by a wider audience or why they seldom seem to gain much long-term traction, despite the hype.

The pace of change is such that both platform and programmer alike become their own worst enemy, dooming the platform before it has any real chance of taking wing.

A conspirational hat wearer believes Rands in Repose is Garbage:

“I really don’t know how to approach this; I thought it was sarcasm until I read the rest of the article. Is it supposed to be profound?”

Profound? No.

Is it an interesting insight into “data on data”, that is, taking an existing data set and performing statistical analysis on it? Yes.

Indeed I’ve noticed the article cropping up in discussion already — along with some fascinating patterns regarding twitter usage.

Rands in Repose is a smart read as it’s author takes the time to break often-complex concepts down to a level the lay-person can grasp, not because it’s pitched as some esoteric Mecca.

Once again Jessica Hagy finds the mark:

“Please, give the writers whatever they want.”

Could not agree more, lest we suffer more reality show tomfoolery.

Joen, a smart chap whom I read quite diligently perhaps passes the comment of the week:

Usability is not a Jackson Pollock painting.

Whilst Joen argues that Wordpress is the single best blogging platform out there, and to be fair his comments are true to an extent, it does suffer mix of legacy design elements with an assortment of new css-slicing techniques that result in a UI challenged (at best) product.

The interface is, quite frankly, shocking. Traversing the UI isn’t a fun process — and the less spoken of the template engine and it’s propensity to mix structure and presentation, the better. It’s not uncommon to hear the phrase “it should not be this hard” within the community.

The demo Joen points to is a classic example of why the Wordpress developers just don’t seem to “get” the idea of smart UI design — repeated vertical scrolling just to post and or edit an entry isn’t the bastion of great design.

The community has attempted to help out in the past and received little more than passing interest — amusingly whilst there is now some hint of ’shuttle’ in the 2.3.x releases, it’s at best a passing shadow of what could have been. Without a solid commitment to get it right, Wordpress will always be an ungainly and navigationally challenged beast.

Whilst Habari may have been a haven for ex-Wordpress developers, it’s yet to really gain any traction. One wonders what would have been if the same creative and design flair had been welcomed by the Wordpress project team instead of the litany of excuses reasons why it’s always just too hard.