Twitter Hashtag Inventor Explains Why Patenting It Would Have Been The Wrong Thing To Do

Hashtags like #techdirt are not only an indispensable part of Twitter, but are also increasingly to be found elsewhere as a handy way of flagging up key topics in a compact and recognizable way. Given the monopoly-mad world we inhabit, it's something of a miracle that they weren't patented. Business Insider points out that Chris Messina, the former Google employee who came up with the idea in the first place, has explained precisely why he didn't try to patent them. The first reason is practical: 

On Techdirt.

Living the Open Source Life

*Really* living it:

In a world not known for its epic romances, ChrisandTara used to be Web 2.0’s version of Brangelina. They lived together, worked at adjoining desks, finished each other’s sentences, guided each other’s dreams. Personality-wise, they were yin meets yang meets a whole lot of Venus and Mars. But in many other ways, they were two pieces of the same puzzle. Ultimately, the core tenet of open-source culture is that the sum is exponentially greater than the disparate parts—and the same could be said of Hunt and Messina’s union. In both work and love, they pushed each other to thrust the ideals of open source, including transparency and collaboration, into real life. In just two years, through the coworking movement and myriad other projects, the ripple effects of their partnership could be seen around the globe. “It was sort of magical,” Hunt says. “Just really powerful to have his more technological side and my more human side, and bring them together.”

A well-written and interesting outsider view of our (closed) open world.

Open Source: A Question of Metrics

Here's a characteristically thought-provoking post from Chris Messina:

I’ve probably said it before, and will say it again, and I’m also sure that I’m not the first, or the last to make this point, but I have yet to see an example of an open source design process that has worked.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to wager that “open source design” is an oxymoron. Design is far too personal, and too subjective, to be given over to the whims and outrageous fancies of anyone with eyeballs in their head.

Call me elitist in this one aspect, but with all due respect to code artistes, it’s quite clear whether a function computes or not; the same quantifiable measures simply do not exist for design and that critical lack of objective review means that design is a form of Art, and its execution should be treated as such.

What interests me is that he's actually articulating something deep about the open source methodology: it can only be usefully applied when there is a metric that lets you judge objectively when things get better.

That's why free software works: you take some code and improve it - making it faster, more compact, less buggy - or, ideally, all three. It's why collaborative novels and symphonies rarely work. There's no clear way to improve on what's already there: anyone can tinker, but there will always be different views on whether that tinkering works. It's also why why Wikipedia more or less works: although based on facts and their citations, there's still plenty of room for disagreement over how they should be presented.

Browser Wars Redux: Don't Touch That Meme

On Open Enterprise blog.

OpenID Becomes Enterprising

On Open Enterprise blog.