Catching up on links

Catching up on reading, here’s some linkbloggery. Mostly from Kottke.org, I should think, bless whatever flavour of socks he prefers:

  • Interview with a guy who works for Pixar. I’m fascinated by how Pixar operates, since they’re clearly better at what they do than anybody else, and what they do isn’t as far away from what I do as one might expect. Organisationally, they seem to be an intriguing hybrid of film crew and… something else. Note that I’m not interested in where they get their ideas – I know where they get them, and it’s the same place as the rest of us. They make them up. In their heads. Durr. No, I’m interested in how they recognise the good ideas, and particularly in how they turn those into films. It’s non-trivial.
  • A commentary on the current state of Wikipedia by one of the project’s founders. I basically agree; the editor’s job is both much-maligned and often misunderstood, but critical – Wikipedia doesn’t have editors in the traditional sense, and ‘everyone’s an editor’ isn’t so much a replacement as missing the point. Why am I interested? Partly because I like the idea of a free encyclopaedia, and partly because I’m using their software for the Secret Project I’m Still Not Talking About. Thus, I’m facing some of the same problems, on a considerably smaller scale. My solution? Draconian dictatorship. Hey, sue me: my site, my rules.
  • Musical representation of financial markets. Isn’t that exactly what the late lamented Douglas Adams had one of the central characters writing in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency? He named it Symphony, as I recall

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