On the 8 Spot

I’m a geek thus I try the newest shiny thing available, I muck around daily builds/ beta builds etc/ buy robot kits etc, How could I say the Amish rules are sensible?

Simply put I try my best to see where I stand. I constantly ask myself why/how/when/where I am changing. I constanly evaluate myself in how technology changes me and my interactions with people. In a way I follow these rules but with a faster turnover.

An example of this is how I resisted having a phone, when I realized that because of phones people tend to have less respect for meeting times/appointments etc. It took me a long time to grow accustomed to fluid meeting times etc. I used to never be late at anything I am usually 30 minutes to an hour early for anything, but not I see my habits have been changed.

more thoughts on this later!

The Amish are steadily adopting technology — at their pace. They are slow geeks. As one Amish man told Howard Rheingold, “We don’t want to stop progress, we just want to slow it down,” But their manner of slow adoption is instructive.

* 1) They are selective. They know how to say “no” and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ban more than they adopt.

* 2) They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.

* 3) They have criteria by which to select choices: technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.

* 4) The choices are not individual, but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.

The Technium: Amish Hackers.

Agreed!

People read from one line to the next. If you can’t read the line above the line you’re reading, it feels odd, and you can lose track of the narrative. When you’re reading a book, it’s almost instantaneous to flip a page, but with a website, the time taken to click on the “next” link and wait for the page to reload is much longer. What’s more, all that finding the link and clicking takes you out of the narrative — and, of course, makes it much more likely that you’ll disappear off somewhere else entirely, just like newspaper readers generally fail to read beyond the jump.

The multiple-pages problem is so annoying, indeed, that many bloggers, including myself, make it a point to always link to a “single-page format” or “print version” of the article instead. That’s not always possible, however, and what’s more the print version often lacks important navigation, multimedia, and other hypertext components.

Most annoying, for a blogger, is when you’re quoting a bit of an article which is on, say, page three. Do you link to page three, or to page one? Neither is particularly pleasant.

Every time I go to a website like the NYT or The Big Money, the need to hunt around for the “single page” button and click on it and wait for the page to reload makes me hate the site just a tiny bit. For really gruesome offenders like Time, I simply don’t read a lot of their listicles, no matter how good they are, because the multiple-page format makes them all but unreadable. Now that the need to maximize inventory has disappeared, maybe this whole annoying thing will go away.

How the Ad Recession Could Improve the Web – Finance Blog – Felix Salmon – Market Movers – Portfolio.com.