Stumbled on a really awesome overview of object oriented programming for PHP 5. If you're looking to get out of the php 4 mindset, this is a good place to start.

PHP Design Patterns

Like a tornado, online communities only form under certain conditions. If you're looking to build an online community, understand that they are very difficult to build artificially. They seem to only emerge from natural conditions. Indeed, you can help them emerge, but you can't *create* them in my experience.

Below, are the 6 essential conditions that I've observed as necessary in building online communities. I think three to four of these conditions are the bare minimum for a reasonable chance. All six would guarantee that a community would form -- probably whether their Dr. Frankenstein of a creator liked it or not. 

The Six Conditions

I. The community creates a meeting place for people who didn't previously have a place to come together. This is probably the most powerful condition, as its very difficult to create a community if a larger one already exists somewhere else.

II.  A sense of shared ownership between the members of the community -- something they can point to, and say "this is ours -- and its worth defending".

III. At least one strong leader to keep conversations going. They lead in the sense that they set the tone for others to follow, but do so only by example -- they don't order people directly. This person is usually willing to devote an extraordinary amount of time to the effort.

IV. A shared identity among members. The may share a love of baseball, or want to dominate the shady underworld of hand modeling insurance policies. It doesn't matter what the goal is, as long as its felt that everyone shares it, and is passionate about it.

V. Members have an opportunity for personal gain: be it career, reputation, sex or education.

VI. The conversations within the community are entertaining in itself. Indeed, there doesn't need to be a goal; there just needs to be a doggy treat to keep people coming back.

While this list isn't complete, I can't think of anymore conditions. Can anyone else?

Anyone who works a lot online will agree that this project is a godsend.:

The concept behind the StupidFilter Project originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.

Last may, I got a new laptop. It was an acer5670 aspire, with dual processors, 2 gigs of RAM, etc[1]. While I'd normally feel a bit unseemly for bragging up my laptop specs, this situation is a bit different. Acer -- in their infinite wisdom, gave me a system with dual processors, and Windows XP home edition preinstalled...

::pauses for to give audience a chance to grasp the significance of the proceeding sentence::

You see kids, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition doesn't support dual processors. So why would Acer package a high end system with an operating system that didn't support it?

Writing those sort of headlines makes me feel like I need to to take a shower. Yet, sometimes the truth is dirty, and the truth is that Rupert Murdock "gets it".

Fox has annouced that that they will use their network of sites to offer downloads of their televised content. [see news story]

Now, admittedly, this pay-per-view model sucks the private parts of goats. Who wouldn't pay 1.99 for an episdoe of 24? Well, let's see....

Everyone.

However, these things evolve slowly, like the law. Sooner or later FOX will realize that there is far more money to be made from offering vidoes for free, and using whatever methods are possible to force consumers to watch 40 second ads for pringles, or the airforce. 

Sometimes, when I'm out to eat, a friend of mine will take a bite, grimace, and then exclaim, "uhg, this tastes terrible... try it!" I usually do in a heart beat. There's a priceless hilariity to be found in the horrid. 

Similarly, I grimaced while reading this article titled, "Why Enron Chief Was Better Than 'Philanthropists'". The title itself is like a cankorsore -- it's annoying, and hurts -- but for some reason your tounge can't leave it alone. 

Now this article suffers from numerous faults. However, what bugs me most was lines along the lines of, "Now we're supposed to be shocked and awed by Buffett's decision to give $37 billion--about 85 percent of his assets--to Bill Gates' foundation."

By Michel Focault | Excerpted from Power/Knowledge

It was while I was studying the origins of clinical medicine. I had been planning a study of hospital architecture in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the great movement for the reform of medical institutions was getting under way. I wanted to find out how the medical gaze was institutionalised, how it was effectively inscribed in social space, how the new form of the hospital was at once the effect and the support of a new type of gaze.

In examining the series of different architectural projects which followed the second fire at the Hotel-Dieu in 1772, I noticed how the whole problem of visibility of bodies, individuals and things, under a system of centralised observation, was one of their most constant directing principles. In the case of the hospitals this general problem involves a further difficulty: it was necessary to avoid undue contact, contagion, physical proximity and overcrowding, while at the same time ensuringventilation and circulation of air, at once dividing space up and keeping it open, ensuring a surveillance which would be both global and individualising while at the same time carefully separating the individuals under observation. For some time I thought all these problems were specific to eighteenth-century medicine and its beliefs.

Then while studying the problems of the penal system, I noticed that all the great projects for re-organising the prisons (which date, incidently, from a slightly later period, the first half of the nineteenth century) take up this same theme, but accompanied this time by the almost invariable reference to Bentham. There was scarcely a text or a proposal about the prisons which didn't mention Bentham's 'device' - the 'Panopticon'

The principle was this. A perimeter building in the form of a ring. At the center of this, a tower, pierced by large windows opening on to the inner face of the ring. The outer building is divided into cells each of which traverses the whole thickness of the building. These cells have two windows, one opening on to the inside, facing the windows of the central tower, the other, outer one allowing daylight to pass through the whole cell. All that is then needed is to put an overseer in the tower and place in each of the cells a lunatic, a patient, a convict, or a schoolboy. The back lighting enables one to pick out from the central tower the little captive silhouettes in the ring of cells. In short, the principle of the dungeon is reversed; daylight and the overseer's gaze capture the inmate more effectively than darkness, which afforded after all a sort of protection.

... We are talking about two things here: the gaze and interiorisation. And isn't it basically the problem of the cost of power? In reality power is only exercised at a cost. Obviously, there is an economic cost, and Bentham talks about this. How many overseers will the Panopticon need? How much will the machine then cost to run? But there is also a specifically political cost. If you are too violent, you risk provoking revolts...In contrast to that you have the system of surveillance, which on the contrary involves very little expense. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze.

An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorisation to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercizing this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be minimal cost.

Okay, so time for a confession. I use AOL instant messenger for IM. Its not that I'm unaware that there are better clients; really its just that I'm lazy, and all of my contacts are on it.

As most AIM users have no doubt noticed, everytime you sign on, a stupid AIM browser opens up, and you get to take a quick look at the AIM homepage. This is a picture of the one I saw tonight:

Now this is worth sharing for a number of reasons.

AOL's Potential Investors Should Take Note of How Effectively Instant Messenger is Targetting its Ads -- As a matter of a fact, AOL is even aware of the fact that I'm a 24 year old male who works as a web designer. I'm not a brilliant programmer, but I know for a fact that if I had data on a suser, I could easily return specialized content to them. And that's why I thought it was so brilliant that they decided inform me that Shakira is back.

That's right SHARKIRA.

And the text, "Just when you thougt it couldn't get any better, Shakira shakes it onto stage" is a priceless gem in itself. As it turns out, when the page loaded, I did in fact ask myself, "can it get any better than this?" Turns out it could! AOL, its really awesome that you know what a 24 year old male web designer is interested in. Thank you.

Who write's the copy for this shit, might I ask? I had to re-read this sentence several times before I was fully able to take in its satanic lameness. I urge the reader to re-read it several times too:

Axl Brings Back Rock!This "Rose" has a 'tude

Okay, the quotations around "Rose" were nice. I hadn't initially caught the brilliant play on words the author is making. Get it? His Axl's last name is Rose, and he IS a rose -- cause he's in Guns and Roses. The worst part about those quotations is that the reveal that the author was in fact very proud of himself for figuring that out. Copy writer, we here at Nick Lewis: The Blog are very proud of you too. However, this was just a warm up, THIS is what puts AOL into a completely new universe of lameness:

AOL Thinks if It Greets you in a foreign language, it can be cool like Flickr

That is SO pathetic. Its like some pathetic high school girl who wants to be cool, so she goes and buys the same clothes as someone else. This is like trying to tell someone else's story to someone only to realize that they were the one's who told you the story to begin with..

Oh -- and did you notice?

THEY MISSPELLED GUTEN TAG IN THE PROCESS

Like I said, Holy Christ! AOL is lame...

Worth a thought, and perhaps a full read. 

All we have is human conversation to do this with. Either you can be held hostage by the human conversation that occurred 2,000 years ago and has been enshrined in these books, or you can be open to the human conversation of the 21st century. And if there's something good in those books, then it is admissible in the 21st century conversation on morality.

Not to go on a rant here, but lately I've become increasingly tired of the hiflautin language of my trade. Its a profession which is infested with poly-word-rendered[1] monstrosities of terminology: "content management system", "constituent relationship management system", "hierarchical taxonomy"... One sometimes gets the sense that such terminology wasn't chosen on the basis of being the most accurate way of describing the given object, but rather because it happened to be the most impressive sounding to the layman.