Slowly but surely, Git is conquering the world.

Today, a “social network for developers” based on the coolness of Git launched: GitHub.

One of the most impressing features of GitHub is their network visualiser. The visualiser shows open source software development in a whole new light. Very nice.

Once the book on Pragmatic Version Control With Git is out, I’ll have no excuse left not to convert to Git. All the cool kids seem to be using it. Git is in. Git is the new black.

Duncan J. Watts is a physicist turned sociologist and author of the book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. In a recent interview with Fast Company, Watts disputes Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point theory which became conventional wisdom when his book became a bestseller.

“It just doesn’t work,” Watts says … “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”

It’s difficult to build an argument such as Gladwell’s tipping point without relying on anecdotal rather than empirical evidence. Watts on the other hand bases his theory solely on controlled experiments albeit with computer simulations rather than people.

The debate that is sure to follow will be an interesting one and we can safely recommend both books as highly enjoyable.

I haven’t received it yet … so more on that later.

The book was recommended in a post about innovation at Google by Microsoft based blogger Dare Obasanjo.

Among other interesting posts by Dare are Improving Website Usability with A/B Testing which discusses an MS research paper that I highly recommended for any web based decision maker, and A-List Technology Bloggers: What Are They Good For? which outlines Dare’s take on Facebook and how those who don’t get it … don’t get it.

Finally, for those who like trivia, Dare is the son of Nigeria’s former president Olusegun Obasanjo.

The author is a PHP hacker and it was interesting to see that according to him, PHP has had it’s fair share of the same question people keep asking about Rails: “Does it scale?”

The distinction between performance and scalability is made very clearly in the book and a scalable system is defined as one that has thee characteristics:

• It can accommodate increased usage.
• It can accommodate an increased dataset.
• It is maintainable.

Rails passes all these tests for the same reasons PHP does. An increased dataset is accommodated in the database layer, an increased user-base is accommodated though the “share nothing” architecture and as for maintainability, Rails passes with flying colours.

Taleb’s new book, The Black Swan, has just been published and the excellent Book design review blog discusses the unconventional UK cover (the image on the right) versus the more traditional US cover (see: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, US and UK and The Black Swan redux).

Publishing a book cover with no title is a risky strategy, although Fooled by Randomness was such a hit that it will be difficult to judge the impact of this particular cover.

If The Black Swan is anywhere near as edgy and interesting as Taleb’s previous book, his readers are in for a treat. For a preview, the New York Times has published the book’s first chapter.

On a related note, the newest edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (IAWWW) just dropped in through the mailbox. The foreword is by none other than usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Jakob’s legendary site, Useit.com, receives far too little attention in the Web 2.0 world.

IAWWW has more than doubled in size since its groundbreaking first edition and the newest version is very up to date on the newest trends. Highly recommended.

While we’re on the theme of information design, the newest edition of A List Apart has an interesting article called Contrast and Meaning which reminds me of a book I once got hold of after seeing that Jason Fried of 37signals recommended it: Designing Visual Interfaces.