Chris Ritke is thinking and writing...

...about this and that and some other things...

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Who gives us permission to explore our world?

Steven just turn me on to this. I can't believe I hadn't seen it before. This is truly amazing - and from 1999. But with all of the stuff going on with blogs, podcasting and videoblogging now - it's as important now as it was then.

There's tons of great stuff in there - this section just amazing:

Who gives us permission to explore our world? The question implies that the world in fact belongs to someone else. Who gives us permission to communicate what we've experienced, what we believe, what we've discovered of that world for ourselves? The question betokens a history of voice suppressed, of whole cultures that have come to believe only power is sanctioned to speak. Because the ability to speak does involve power. It entails ownership and the control conferred by ownership. As the saying has it: "Money talks, bullshit walks."

Right then and there, in that chance encounter in some random Tokyo coffee shop, I gave myself blanket permission: to be curious, to learn, to speak, to write. But it's a long road from permission to practice, and there's plenty of negative reinforcement in between. Freedom of expression may be called out loftily in the U.S. Constitution, but even after two centuries of democracy, it's still a far cry from second nature.

And now we can podcast and videoblog... and damn it - I'm gonna do it!

Oh:

Don’t rely on lists, self-styled "gurus," or business books.


Damn it!

2 Comments:

  • At Thursday, July 21, 2005 8:00:00 PM, Blogger steven edward streight said…

    Chris, thanks for mentioning me and little Blog Core Values blog.

    Cluetrain is great, it's one of the first books I read as I entered the internet realm.

    When I first visited web sites, I wondered why so many were hard to navigate, determine who was behind it, what it had to offer, etc.

    Then I immediately found Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen.

    I still have a list I made of my first use of the internet, the sites I visited, the books I read, my own observations, and my entire web usability analysis methodology (some of it is in the first early posts on Vaspers the Grate from over a year ago).

    Be sure to read Christopher Locke's Gonzo Marketing too.

    I'm trying to find time to read Learning Netware and The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen).

     
  • At Thursday, July 21, 2005 8:25:00 PM, Blogger Chris Ritke said…

    Steven, Thanks for all the tips!

    It sure is a challenge to make a site usable. How are you supposed to know what your users are thinking? Pretty much the only thing is counting clicks. If it's an improvement, the clicks should go up. If not, then they should go down. Right? I dunno.

     

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