Michael Bierut of Pentagram gives “a brand new talk on the subject of Clients.” On Tina Roth Eisenberg’s swissmiss website, commenter Stratton Cherouny says:

Perhaps the most valuable “exit video” any matriculating design student could ask for. Should be required viewing before even thinking about picking up the diploma.

On the New York Times Dot Earth Blog, Andrew Revkin writes about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and whether they are a burden on government agencies who must handle compliance. Revkin references my article quoting Stewart Brand’s full thought at the 1984 Hackers’ Conference – that information wants to be free and expensive.

In the article, Revkin includes a response from Chris Horner, a lawyer at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who has filed numerous FOIA requests. Horner explains to Revkin why he believes FOIA compliance should not be viewed as a burden to agencies:

Keep that journalist hat on and the telescope won’t so easily get turned backward, as to who has a burden when the public seeks access to that for which it entirely pays.

His point: information that is expensive to develop, and paid for by tax dollars, should be freely accessible to those who have paid for its creation – the public. That’s one example of how information can be expensive – true to Brand’s thought – and free in the sense that it should be freely available to those who have helped cover that expense.

Sydney is Australia’s oldest and largest city, and state capital of New South Wales. The city is built around Port Jackson, where the Parramatta River meets the Tasman Sea, and Sydney Harbour is graced by two of Australia’s most iconic structures, the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Sydney is a major cultural, retail, fashion, art, and education center, produces more than 25% of the country’s economic activity, and is home to approximately one-in-five Australians.

Sydney CBD (Central Business District), seen from the air. The Royal Botanic Gardens can be seen at center right, with the Opera House on the water at the northern tip of the Gardens, and Sydney Harbour Bridge to the left of the Opera House.

Sydney Harbour and Parramatta River

Designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon and opened in 1973, Sydney Opera House was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.

Circular Quay Railway Station

From left to right: Sydney Opera House, The Rocks (one of Sydney’s oldest neighborhoods), and the southern approach to Sydney Harbour Bridge

Panorama, Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. The bridge is a steel through-arch designed by John Bradfield, an Australian engineer who also designed the Story Bridge in Brisbane (photos of the bridge under construction between 1923 and 1932).

The Harbour Bridge opened in 1932 and is famous for the Bridge Climb, an adventure tour that allows people to climb to the top of the bridge’s arch, 134 meters above Sydney Harbour.

Front steps, Sydney Opera House, seen from the Royal Botanic Gardens

Sulphur-crested Cockatoos in the Royal Botanic Gardens

From left to right: Deutsche Bank Place (partially obscured by trees at left), Chifley Tower, Aurora Place, and Governor Philip Tower, seen from the Royal Botanic Gardens

Coat of Arms of Australia. The shield is surrounded by a Red Kangaroo and an Emu, two native species of Australia, and the unofficial animal symbols of the country.

University of Sydney

Main Quadrangle, University of Sydney, Camperdown and Darlington Campuses

Looking down University Avenue from Main Quadrangle, University of Sydney. The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) tower is in the upper left.

Central Sydney at night, looking north. The illuminated red “W” on the building in the center is the logo of Westpac, a major Australian bank

Darling Harbour

Glick’s Cakes & Bagels and a Kosher Supermarket next door in Bondi, New South Wales. Bondi and other towns in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney are historically home to a large portion of the city’s Jewish population.

Control Tower, Sydney Airport

Mike Monteiro illustrates the shift in computer use from domination by geeks to domination by a much greater number of people who do not consider themselves geeks, and are more inclined to buy a product they can understand than one they can tinker with:

As many others have noted, the release of the iPad might be the cannonball into the consumer device pool the iPhone dipped its toes in. It’s also been referred to as a thing that sits between that iPhone and your laptop. I see it as more of a fork in the road. It’s the thing many people will get INSTEAD of a laptop.

Commenter Koen van Hees noted the high degree of civility in the comments on Mike’s article:

What the? A blog that writes about the most hyped product of all times, an Apple product at that, and all the comments are intelligent and nicely worded.

It’s good to see civilized discourse in the comments. Vitriolic commenting has gotten out of hand, especially in technology-related discussions. Earlier this week, tech website Engadget disabled comments to stem a rising tide of overly negative, attacking, and off-topic comments.

Former Microsoft executive Dick Brass offers his perspective on how unchecked internal politics and competition can damage an organization’s ability to get good ideas to market:

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.

He offers two examples where this dysfunction stifled or delayed new products.

ClearType:

Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control.

Tablet PC:

When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet.

So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.

(Via David Travis)

During his sit-down last night with Bill O’Reilly, Jon Stewart said something profound about the differing presence of opinion in newspapers and television:

Newspapers are a passive piece of paper that you go to and you know where the opinion thing is. Television doesn’t function that way.

There are cases where opinion is subtly woven into the hard news reporting in newspapers, but the fact is, the op-ed page is clearly labeled so that people can draw a distinction between facts and opinions. The line is nowhere near as clear on television news – particularly on cable.

Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That’s just how it is.

- Barack Obama, State of the Union, January 27, 2010

Photo credit: The White House is pictured in the morning after a night of snow February 3, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The Wall Street Journal reports on how the recession has prompted businesses to shift away from strategic plans to more flexible strategy reviews and quick decision-making:

Office Depot

Office Depot Inc., for example, began updating its annual budget every month, starting in early 2009. “This downturn has changed the way we will think about our business for many years to come,” says Steve Odland, Office Depot’s chairman and chief executive.

J.C. Penney

Amid the slowing economy in early 2008, [Chief Executive Myron E. "Mike"] Ullman realized that “there’s no way you can have all gun barrels blazing.” So he devised a tentative “bridge” plan that lasted through 2009. “We hit the pause button on a lot of things,” he explains, while speeding up efforts to woo customers in fresh ways such as through social-networking sites. Mr. Ullman says the bridge plan succeeded, and he cites Penney’s improved margins and lack of layoffs.

Spartan Motors

[Chief Executive John] Sztykiel inaugurated a three-year strategic plan that he and his lieutenants update every month. The Spartan CEO has started to see a payoff. In November, the company agreed to buy Utilimaster Corp., a maker of delivery vans and custom chassis, for $45 million. Mr. Sztykiel is sure the deal wouldn’t have crossed his radar in time if he had stuck with quarterly strategy reviews.

In Breaking More Than Just News, Richard Ingram says it’s more important than ever to check and recheck your content before publishing it – especially when you’re under deadline:

As Google begins to apply further weight and prominent positioning to live search results the pressure for some to publish useful, usable, and shareable content fast will no doubt increase. Those editorial workflows, style guides and quality control checklists – considered mere obstacles during moments of high publishing intensity – have never been more vital to ensure the web content you publish is accurate, consistent, relevant, and supports your overall web content strategy objectives.

(Via Kristina Halvorson)

Rob Foster shares three stories about iPad-excitement from people he least expected to even know about it:

The Grandma:

My mother-in-law walked in the door the day of the keynote and the first thing out of her mouth was “Did you see that new Apple iPad? That looks like it would work for me. Would that work for me?”

The Technophobe:

I told him about the new iPad and his eyes grew wide. He blurted out “Wait, are you talking about an iPhone but with a bigger screen? A regular sized computer THIS easy to use? $15 a month for internet anywhere? When can I buy one?”

The Luddite:

“Dude, I think I want to get one of those Apple tablets for my business.” “Really?” I said. “Yeah, I went and looked at them and they seem really easy to use. I think it would work great for showing potential customers my work and for doing bids on.”

If these three people are any indication of a wider trend, this could be really big. Although some geeks are complaining about what the new device doesn’t do, there are many more luddites, technophobes, and grandmas who are excited by what it can do – more easily than a traditional computer – for them. Dan Moren of Macworld calls this a third revolution in computing:

For Apple, it’s not about killing off tinkerers, but ensuring that not everybody who wants to use a computer has to be a tinkerer.

Technology is like politics, in that you have to go outside your traditional base to make big things happen. I think Apple is reaching out, perhaps farther beyond their base than ever before, with the iPad.

Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images