A friend recently made the observation that no matter how many projects we have running concurrently in our development center they all seem to slide into lock-step and arrive at phases and milestones simultaneously. The analogy she used was that this seemed similar to the way that menstrual cycles of women in close quarters tend to synchronize over time. I find a lot of truth in this and don’t exactly know how to explain it. The extremes don’t seem to apply — if you are in the design phase of one project and launching another you’re obviously too far apart — but projects with only a few months offset do seem to synchronize, somehow. This is most noticeable when you realize that an entire entire category of skilled resource is busy simultaneously. (How come all the information architects are swamped all of the sudden?)

Why does this happen? Could be coincidence, but what if it a kind of macroscopic inability of an organization to truly multi-task? That is, what if there is some underlying tendency which drives teams working in close proximity to maximize productivity by shifting timelines slightly so that they are all in the same phase of a project at once? One benefit would be a kind of lateral development support. (Need help solving this particular design problem? Look at the team next door.) Other than that, though, it seems to me to be a trend fraught with downside: vertical resource shortages, projects completing at the same time (putting large numbers of people on the bench, potentially), and organization-wide single points of failure (if something should happen to prevent some step of the project methodology from being able to proceed.)

Maybe it has to do with pheromones. Thoughts?

The paper I will be presenting at the Museums and the Web conference in Vancouver next month is now online. I know you can’t wait to get at it, so here’s an appetizer from a section called Tools of Representation.

All museums are places of technologically-enhanced representation. At its most fundamental level, a museum is a place for the re-presentation – the presenting again – of something created, used, or identified with someplace else. Many technologies or tools assist in this enterprise. Plate glass, cases, framing, interior architecture, lighting, climate-control, and signage combine to form a sometimes surprisingly high-tech, if mostly transparent, “machine” for the presentation of a cultural artifact, artwork, or other exhibit. Certainly more complex mechanisms exist. Interactive technologies both in physical space and on-line enable museums to act as platforms for the creation of an experience. In the manner that a theater stage is a kind of machine for the production of an experience or a run-time application is a virtual machine for enabling lines of code to be actualized, the museum today operates as an enabler of visitor experience. For many museums and cultural organizations, this experience is made possible by providing context. But it has not always been this way.

I know, I know, how dare I leave you with such a cliffhanger? The whole thing is located here.

I’ll be presenting at this year’s Museums and the Web conference in Vancouver, April 13-16. If you’re going to be there (or live in Vancouver) and want to meet up, drop me a line. Five years ago one of my projects won the Best of the Web award here. Here’s hoping Eternal Egypt can regain the honor amongst such worthy competition.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has just launched a new visitor service. The MoMA Digital Guide, a story-based multimedia tour guide developed in collaboration with IBM, is the next generation of the service originally developed for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. I’m part of the team who developed the app, so I’m naturally biased, but I think it is a very fine complement to the very fine new MoMA space. For now, renting the guide is free. Go on Friday evening between 4 and 8PM and admission’s free too.

Business Week recently ran a short piece on the Digital Guide. If you’re interested in the technical details, feel free to e-mail me.

Last week Richard Gere bumped me off a phone call with the OneVoice crew. My ego was wounded, but, you know, I shook it off. Well, take that Mr. Gere. You got yours tonight on The Daily Show.

Gere’s been taking some heat for his presence in a get-out-the-vote PSA for the Palestinian elections, but I was pretty surprised to see Jon Stewart pick up on it. Surprised and pleased, I guess. The Daily Show’s got way more credibility than many mainstream media outlets these days.

So in the span of 24 hours OneVoice finds itself with an outspoken supporter newly elected in Palestine and has acheived the level of cultural currency conferred by a bit on The Daily Show. Time to get to work on the hard stuff.

Daniel at OneVoice is in overdrive. With the attention of the world cast toward the upcoming Palestinian elections there’s a great chance that moderation can snatch the spotlight from extremism. OneVoice is doing all they can to help in the snatching. Good news from the OV blog today.

The first-ever Get-Out-The-Vote Campaign in the Palestinian Authority, conducted by OneVoice-Palestine, is about to release a Public Service Announcement that will turn heads: it juxtaposes Sheikh Taysir al Tamimi, the Chief Palestinian Islamic Justice, and Father Attallah Hanna, the Patriarchite of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, with Richard Gere, the film star and humanitarian. They all encourage the Palestinian people to go out and vote. Sheikh Tamimi calls it a “religious and a national commandment” to participate in the elections.

The main site — very soon to receive a facelift, by the way — can tell you a heck of a lot more.

2004 ended with tragedy. Let’s start 2005 on the other end of the spectrum of human emotion.

Matt Kirschenbaum asks “What if new media simply became a part of what writers and artists did, not something special or new?”

Well, first thing you’d need to do is stop calling what we do new media, but that’s peripheral. I’d tweak Matt’s question just slightly to ask: What if new media — or whatever name we give it — is just something that people do? Not artists or writers, per se, but people in general. New media is, after all, just expression, creation, manipulation using a computer. Some of it is mundane (e-mail), some of it is beautiful though perhaps not art (elegent code)*, and some of it would qualify as art because of the way it partipcates in an emotional and intellectual dialogue with the viewer/user. Digital communication today is a completely normal mode of human expression for most people. Very little is ‘new’ about it, even if it is very young medium. So I’m with Matt. Let’s ride that bandwagon of normalcy. If we ply our trade well it will be highly considered, irrespective of medium designations.

* This is a topic for another day. I’m not so sure code isn’t art.

Well, it’s official. IBM is selling its personal computing division to Chinese computer-maker Lenovo. The ubiquity and sometimes-elegiac tone of the coverage of the transaction points to a fact that I live with every day: people still think IBM is a hardware company. I have come to see the futility of trying to overpower that meme. No matter that over 60% of IBM’s revenue comes from services and consulting. When IBM does something again as revolutionary as invent a personal computer then maybe the public perception will shift. Until then — even after IBM is long out of the personal computing market — people will think it outrageous that I work on a Mac at the office and find it odd that many IBM client solutions have no IBM hardware at all in them.

‘Course, I use a ThinkPad too and I think it is a superb machine, the best PC laptop made. And I thought that well before I took a job with the big ‘BM. That’s the only part of the sale that gives me pause. I certainly hope Lenovo can keep up the quality. By the way, did you know the ThinkPad design was inspired by a traditional Japanese lunchbox?

And, no, I don’t believe the Apple rumors. It just doesn’t make sense to me. But hey, strange bedfellows abound.