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Monday, November 21, 2005
Congrats 
Producer Cockpit
| | The initials are already used, but the label describes my ideal way to go on the Net, and what comes to mind as I read Geoff Moore's call for renovating the UI we inherited from the typewriter. He writes, |
| | The current UI is still tied indirectly to the PC's original root metaphor, a typewriter. It needs to transition to another — the stock trader¹s workstation on Wall Street. It needs to recast itself as a media machine, with many concurrent feeds that enable traders to scan for information, detect trends, and transact, all very rapidly. Switching between states, foregrounding one without losing the context of the others in background, is the technical requirement. Picture-within-picture on a TV is a crude example. I think we can do much better. |
| | I think Geoff's angle is still a little too much about consumption, rather than production. I may read and look at ("watch" is too TV) stuff on my laptop screen. But most of the time what I do is at least as much about production. I participate. And I'm not alone. Dave Sifry this morning reports 21.5 million blogs with 1.7 million links, just in Technorati's index. |
| | And that's just bloggers. Emailers and IMers and gamers all participate too, in larger numbers. The Net doesn't mediate those activities as much as it provides a place where they can flourish. (This is a big point behind Part III of Saving the Net.) |
| | The generative PC has not only met but become intertwined with the generative Internet, and the whole is now greater than the sum of the parts. |
| | Indeed, for many purposes the line between the PC and the Internet has simply disappeared, and it may be fair to refer to the current Internet as something greater than the literal network it entails. The implications of this are difficult to overstate... |
| | The browser has long served as a good metaphor for perusing and reading the Web's goods; but we need something that's equally good for authoring or producing them. |
| | Geoff thinks it needs ad space. I don't agree. The ad hat is way too old. Ads as we know them, even little text ones, are still intrusive, too much a tool of producers shoving unwanted stuff in front of consumers' headlights (or, as Steve Gillmor sees it, their attention). We need to think about the sovereign and autonomous work we do, in this habitat, that is at least as much about production as consumption, about supply as well as demand. |
| | I do like Geoff's final line, though... |
| | In short, we need to recognize that the role of the user has shifted from passive consumer to active director, someone continually choosing from among multiple feeds to construct the desired experience, and reconstruct the UI to serve that new end. |
| | ... with one quibble. It's not just about that buzzword, "experience." A pilot, a driver, a writer or producer, doesn't "experience" his or her work. Mastery is what we want to serve here. "Experience" is too much about passivity. I want to feel on the Net that I have an instrument of mastery like the kind I feel at the wheel of a fine automobile, or in the cockpit of a high-performance airplane. |
| | Can we do that, with something that will probably always have a keyboard under our fingers? I dunno. But I do know we don't have it yet, and won't get it if we don't give full respect for the productive aspects of living and working in this generative world. |
| | It won't be easy. But Geoff's call for renovation is a good start. |
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