A news event of the new year is that Blogging has broken through or tipped
Immediately, we see a host of late adopters in the marketing field jumping on the bandwagon. For many of them it is all about the technology. Or it may be about faking the evangelical aspect of legitimate authority figures like Robert Scoble.
My Christmas present to myself this year was volume 1 of Christopher Alexander's masterwork - The Nature of Order
One of the key points that he makes is that great design is driven by the whole, or the meaning, and not by the assembly of the component parts. Our mechanistic mindset tends to start with the parts. Here is an exercise from page 97 that makes this statement real for me.
We start with a photo of Henri Matisse.
Now look at this set of 4 drawings.
They all look like Matisse - right?
Now look more carefully.
In each drawing Matisse offers a different set of detail. Big nose, small nose - round chin - pointy chin and so on. But they look like Matisse. What has he done?
He has been able to draw "Matisse" He has been able to express the character of Matisse.
The meaning of blogs is not the technology. It is that they convey voice. They convey character. They convey culture and values.
Those that miss this - miss everything
