Bryce has started blogging with AOL Journals about using AIM and the IM bot to blog with. Sort of incestuous but interesting nonetheless. We can all watch and learn.

I have my new screenname for blogging and for the IM Bot but haven't started an AOL Journal yet. What should it be about since I already have 2 ongoing sites as it is?

As I am sure many of you know by now, AOL is releasing a blogging product this summer. I have not spoken about it yet because of confidentiality reasons and then when I finally got the ok to write about it, I got really busy at work.

So, it's true. We are doing blogs. And the best part of it is that my team out here in California, did the UI work. As bloggers ourselves we have been equally excited about designing a product we will actually use and terrified that the rest of the blogging world will trash the product up one side and another. Even when we work on great ideas, with good UI and a lot of thought and research, there is inherent backlash because we are AOL.

So you can imagine how pleased we have all been over the response to our "sneak preview" with many of the blogging trend setters (Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, Jeff Jarvis, and Clay Shirky). Mena, over at Typepad, has a few words to say and Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky say a few favorable words.

I have been thinking about design leadership lately and reading the Design Management Journal and looking for workshops, seminars or classes on Design Strategy and Leadership.

My role at work has shifted a bit—getting bigger since a peer manager left the company, I now manage the entire west coast UI team within the AOL Studio organization—which is 225 people strong (the studio, not my team).

I am pointed to (courtesy IDBlog) an interview with Ken Friedman Ph.D. found in the NextDesign Leadership Institute Journal. Titled New Design Research: Leading or Following? Friedman offers a nifty definition of design:

“It is difficult to consider design leadership before defining the word design. The word has two levels of meaning.

On one level, the term design covers nearly any planning process.

The word design refers to a process that creates something new or reshapes something for a purpose. The design process serves many kinds of purpose to meet needs or solve problems.

Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon defined design as the process by which we devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

The artifacts, systems, and processes we design are not themselves design. They are designed. They are the outcomes of the design process. This leads us to the second level of the term design.

On this level, many design practitioners think of design as BOTH the design process AND the domain-specific outcome of a specific design activity. Here we find software design, systems design, organization design, graphic design, industrial design, interaction design, engineering design, and dozens more.

To speak of design leadership, we must clarify the kinds of design we intend to consider. ”

He goes onto talk about the PhD-Design mailing list and the types of discussions on the list as well as the relationship between research and practioners and the symbiotic relationship needed to continue to advance the field. It's a good read and I look forward to what else the journal has coming.