I spend a great deal of my time explaining to students how to work on the web. Open source development is as much about working via the web as it is about source code. Students often have a hard time believing me when I tell them that blogging has value, or that keeping a wiki up to date is important, or that code in a repository should build for people other than themselves: "Nobody is going to look at this stuff." No, that's how television works, and that's the world that bookstores create, but that's not how the web is built.
The web is made out of data packets, XML, JavaScript, baking powder, blog comments, and short films about cookbook authors. Yesterday I was delighted to read my friend Luke blogging about pancakes and, as always, an obscure little book he'd picked up; this time a cookbook by Edna Lewis. I'll let you read the post for yourself, but the bit I'm most interested in (I actually loved the detour to discuss baking powder, don't get me wrong!) is the comment that Bailey Barash made:
Hello -
I am a filmmaker in Atlanta. I read your latest blog with the mention of Edna Lewis and her recipes.I just wanted to let you know I produced a 21 minute documentary about Miss Edna Lewis and its viewable in its entirety on Internet at a Gourmet Magazine website:
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/video/2008/01/Edna
I get so much mail from people I don't know related to my work, that I've stopped thinking about it as special. It's simply how the web works. And yet I was happy to see it happening in a non-technical discussion. Much of my thinking of late has been about how to enable non-technical collaborative projects via the web. I've never doubted you could do it, but I'm happy to have a simple example to point at and say, "See? Exactly."
The web is made out of data packets, XML, JavaScript, baking powder, blog comments, and short films about cookbook authors.