There’s a great interview with Michael Bierut over at Adaptive Path. Michael’s the former president of AIGA, and a frequent critic of business as usual in the design world.

It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of “strategy” but of common sense, taste and luck. Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity to accept this, and create garganuan superstructures of bullshit to provide a sense of security.

I love it when designers at least talk about holding themselves accountable, rather than having “an almost allergic reaction to demonstrating explicit business value”.

This is a story about whether traditional media has more pull or more trust (more readership?) than blogs, or vice versa. Kottke takes a stab at pre-judging a long bet between Martin Niseholtz of the NY Times and Dave Winer of Scripting News, on whether Google will rank stories higher for NYT (traditional media venues) or for blogs (new, social generation media)

Care to guess the winner?

37 Signals has just announced no more IE 5.x support in Basecamp and their future products. Good for them, but I don’t think it’s completely applicable for the rest of the world, at least not yet. They develop technology and apps for web developers, who are always going to have the latest and greatest technology and browsers. Not so true of the rest of the world. For most web sites, especially those aimed at the general publich, I don’t recommend following their lead, as much as I think the world of the talented fols at 37 Signals.