February 2007 Archives

We watch the Carnival on TV and follow the scoring and commentary like it were big league sports, the entire country talks about the competition and each day there are highlights on TV. The dancing keeps on going each night until Fat Tuesday (today). Then tomorrow the judges scores will be revealed to the huge and very anxious crowds, as they wait with their 4,000+ team members to know if they won. The winning team dances once more, down the 1 hour long Sambadrome to the roaring crowds in Rio de Janeiro.

John Perry Barlow coined the tern "cyber space" from which I embellished "cyber estate" to describe online property. He was such a pioneer JPB, so much so, as to be way out front of almost anyone else alive at the time. When he published "Economy of Ideas" it must have caused allot of confusion even amongst academia, the only place it would have been read (at first). Now all these years and quantum leaps forward his manifesto is just as valid as it was, and may always be. The most valuable assets in the new global economy are ideas.

Another Blog that I publish is called "Intellectual Security" and is information related to Intellectual Property (IP) topics such as copyright, trademark and patent law. Most of the content is Press releases but occasionally I come across interesting articles, so I write to the authors and ask for permission to republish. I met the attorney and IP expert John Farmer in 2004 in this way and now he's provided 2 excellent articles for that site.

Possibly the most important aspect of web site design is the categorization of the ideas, as this is what creates the navigation. Ultimately the flow of ideas is what makes a site successful or not. The way that people consume information online is very different from other medias, so it's even more important to get the categories correct and provide the reader an index of the content.