“It’s time for a reality check. Hypertext is not, and has never been, all that. Electronic literature is a tiny field and mostly, no one cares about it, except for a handful of endlessly bickering insiders. Maybe 200 people in the world are even marginally interested in the academic arguments….From the outside, though, it looks…
“When writing a website the writer needs to be focused on the reader; that is write for readers. Even though human readers are those who are going to be active and do something about your site, one of your primary readers is Googlebot. Writers need to be aware that building information has an effect on…
“Forty German authors are hoping to set a new world record by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours, the event’s organizers said on Tuesday.” —Germans to Create Book in 12 HoursCNN) I believe the German word for the activity is zuschnellbuchermachen. Thanks for the link, Mike.
“Baseball – a slow, serene game played with a wooden bat, a cloth ball, and cowhide mitts on a broad, grassy field – surged in popularity just when the industrial revolution was taking hold, leaving masses of urban workers and shopkeepers yearning for the pastoral peace and quiet of the fabled agricultural age. They could…
“Dear Strong Bad,|Right now I am putting off writing a paper for my English class. Can you write my Englilsh paper? I don’t even care if it’s good or not. I just don’t want to do it.” —A Well Thought-Out Englilsh [sic] Paper, by Karl “The Yellow Dart” SmithHome Star Runner) Never underestimate how a…
“People will soon be able to publish their own website via their phones as blogging goes mobile.” —Blogging Goes MobileBBC) Sounds a bit much like drafting a press release to fill a Sunday evening news gap, but journalists have been quick to grasp the social significance of weblogs. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.
The next time you publish a timely magazine article that gets mentioned by a lot of webloggers during the same week that you accept a new job, resist the urge to celebrate by sending out for Papa John’s pepperoni pizza and getting laid up for three days with a bad case of food poisoning. My…
“A NASA engineer warned of the possibility of grave damage to the shuttle Columbia days before the spacecraft broke up on Feb. 1 and complained that it was hard to get relevant information, according to e-mails released by the U.S. space agency on Friday.|The e-mails by safety engineer Robert Daugherty expressed concern that a debris…
Dave Winer on scripting news quotes from my “On the Trail of the Memex” in order to disagree: Here’s one for the history books. “For all intents and purposes, Google owns the Web, by virtue of its superior and highly popular search engine.” I don’t agree. Teoma appears to be as good a search engine…
DADDY: Peter, the weather is so nice… let’s play a game.PETER (age 4): I do NOT want to play any game that’s in the world. I want to play a game that’s NOT in the world.DADDY: Peter, what kind of game is not in the world?PETER: (pointing towards computer) On a CD.Games: Not in the…
“The arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those involved in this effort?on either side of C.P. Snow’s old divide?are at the center of today’s intellectual action. They are the new humanists…..In too much of academia, intellectual debate tends to center on such matters as who was or…
Here is the complete text of a message in my inbox today, from someone who signed it “freak”: “help find information about the beleives of the pilgrims in 1620” How Not to Request Help OnlineE-Mail) Sorry. Please do your own homework.
“When we view the computer as an interactive artifact the computer exists as our partner in the completion of important tasks. We ask the computer to do something and it, by proxy, does it for us. We should, instead, view the computer as a tool that we use to perform tasks: we use it so…
“Of course I wanted to be popular.|But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design marvellous rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make…
“I HAVE just ploughed through the first five books devoted to an Internet art form that fascinates me and may well be unknown to you. Where to start?|Say for the moment that the weblog – a log of the World Wide Web, as it were -can be personal publishing at its most liberating, an online…
“Hypertext as mediated by the Web browser has not proved to embody the qualities of the ideal post-structural text longed for by literary theorists such as George Landow; neither has the World Wide Web fulfilled the document-association function of the memex, the hypothetical research tool Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 essay, As We May…
“Prompted by a complaint from the Liberty Legal Institute, a group of Christian lawyers, the [Justice] department is investigating whether Michael L. Dini, an associate professor of biology at Texas Tech University here, discriminated against students on the basis of religion when he posted a demand on his Web site that students wanting a letter…
“Andy Serkis’ computer-aided performance was one of the best things about ‘The Two Towers.’… Is Hollywood ready to acknowledge and honor digital performances, or even human-digital hybrids? This year, the answer seems to be a resounding no.” Ivan Askwith —Gollum: Dissed by the Oscars?Salon)
“[A]cademics are throwing themselves into the study of emotion with the rapturous intensity of a love affair. In a sense, emotion has always been at the core of the humanities: Without the passions, there would not be much history, and even less literature. Indeed the very word ‘philosophy’ begins with philos (love).” Scott McLemee —Getting…
“Unfortunately, most will just view the team projects, class presentations, software life cycles, and ambiguous problem statements as ‘hoops they have to jump through’ to graduate. I recall a meeting with a student who was having trouble working with her project team in a recent class. She actually asserted with some confidence that the problem…