Joel's Best Software Essays of 2004
UPDATE 6/11/04: I decided to nominate The Fractal Blogosphere and Evolution of Corporate Web Sites for the Best Software Essays of 2004 book that Joel Spolsky is editing. If you enjoyed either one of those articles, please leave a comment on Joel's discussion board to support my nominations. Click here to second my Fractal nomination, or here to second my Evolution one. Thanks :-) [end of update]
Joel Spolsky is editing a new book of the best software essays of 2004. He's looking for nominations and I commend him for opening it up for anyone to nominate. Of course, I'd love to have some writing of mine published in a book - so I'd like to nominate at least 1 thing I've written this year.
R/WW readers will know that I tend to write long, thoughtful posts - that can easily be defined as "essays". Incidentally the flip side is that, as Lilia pointed out, my posts can be a trade-off between depth and accessibility. So essays are arguably not the optimal format for weblog posts. But as Popeye would say, I yam what I yam and I can't help writing long posts :-).
Here are 10 of my favourite posts from 2004 that could be considered software essays. I'd very much appreciate it if you would let me know in the comments which one(s) you think I should nominate for Joel Spolsky's book.
Individualizing the
Web
The Fractal
Blogosphere
Interview with Marc
Canter
The
Evolution of Corporate Web Sites
Weblogs as Avatars
A Theory of Synchronicity for
the Web
Mama don't let your baby grow
up to be a Generalist
A New Kind of
Literacy
Electracy Comes From Other
Planets [worth considering for the title alone]
Digital Lifestyle Mobile
Jigsaw
P.S. If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out my interview with Lucas Gonze that I published yesterday. It's as long as an essay, but I learned a lot about P2P and decentralization from this collaboration with Lucas.
P.P.S. Wait till you see my next interview, you're going to love it! I did the phone interview this morning and I'll write it up over the next few days.
Update: Cool, the Lucas interview has just been Slashdotted!
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I think there are, of those, two that stand out above the others as both good essays and also as things that can stand alone (and don't need lots of context in terms of what other people said about what before one feels like one really has "the whole story"). They are The Fractal Blogosphere and A New Kind of Literacy.
However, there is one post of yours which you didn't include in the list but which I think needs to be included somewhere, and that is Knowledge Management for Generation Y.
My only concern is that as this is "software" essays - perhaps something more like Simplicity and extensibility or Microcontent Wiki fits more in such a category, and both of which I think would be suitable submissions as 2003 essays are accepted now.
But while I'm at it, reviewing all these old posts of yours and considering them, I'd like to say that I'm interested in formal "Part 2" posts for Weblog Ontologies and eBook Culture Strategy and maybe even some others - speaking of which, are you planning on doing NaNoWriMo again? Unfortunately I do not anticipate having the time. to.
I like Fractal Blogosphere, and Weblogs as Avatars. Or perhaps Syncronicity. Good stuff.
Thanks heaps Andrew and Greg. Fractal Blogosphere will definitely be one of them. I'm looking for at least 1 more too.
If anyone has any suggestions, please leave a comment.