Cyberculture: October 2003 Archive Page

The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find "the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon" or "where to find the best airfare to Cuba" by using Amazon's search feature instead. --Monica Soto Ouchi --Amazon's inside look irks authors: Search function previews any page  (Seattle Times)

I think Mike Arnzen said it best -- "As a scholar, I love it. As an author, I hate it."

Please -- Never Do This!E-Mail)

This message, with the uninformative subject line "November Hours," an empty body, and a 45K MS-Windows attachment (see tips #1, #2 and #3 of "Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips") went out to about 450 people

By my count, this single message consumed 20MB of storage space on computers across Seton Hill University. A better alternative would have been a plain text list, or posting the file online and inviting people to download it if they want it.

On the other hand, it also motivated me to learn how to use the "pixellation" feature on my image editor.

I know this is probably a very uncool and politically incorrect thing to say these days, but I am going to brave it anyway. | I have wondered why, with all the briliant people writing in the different group blogs, am I not toally enchanted with them? --Torill --No Personal Touch (Thinking with My Fingers)

The dynamics of group blogs are certainly complex. A colleague of mine. John Spurlock, recently noted that within the past week, the New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill group blog has been dominated by my own postings, with few if any contributions or comments from students (though this may be becuase the students recently turned in their blogging portfolios, and know they have several weeks before they are due again). WebWord, which is mostly the domain of John Rhodes but does feature a few other regular posters, has been down all this month, and John has stated that it's simply not a priority for him to finish it.

Because I am trying to participate as actively as I can on about 30 student blogs this term, I find I really have to pick and choose which posts to get involved in in GrandTextAuto or KairosNews... and last week for the first time Slashdot gave me some moderator points that I felt too virtuous to waste. While I used to blog only for myself, now part of my blogging is "work," and that has changed how I spend my blogging time. I've been conscious that I'm blogging much more than I really "want" to.

For the last few months, Google has been courting publishers, hoping to convince them to turn over book content that could be used in Google's database, say people close to the discussions. | How that content would be presented is not clear, but it would likely not be provided in excerpted passages to customers, as it is on Amazon. Instead, the material would go into a database that Google spiders would comb, then turning up relevant links. If a user clicks through, they would be sent to a separate page that contains a book abstract and the opportunity to buy the title. Who would actually be responsible for the sale would be a decision presumably left to the publisher. --Steven Zeitchik --Google Studies Creation of Book Database (Publishers Weekly)

If Google is following Amazon.com's lead, it's a sign of Amazon's strength, and a sign of yet another New Media assault on the fortress of Old Media.

P.S. A breaking new story by Steven Zeitchick? Really? ("Zeit" = German for "time," as in "Zeitgeist".)

The problem of spam or unwanted commercial e-mail is usually attributed to outlaws and hucksters -- peddlers of pornography, get-rich-quick schemes and pills of dubious merit -- who use hackers to send their fraudulent messages in ways that cannot be traced. | But the torrent of spam that is flowing into people's electronic mailboxes comes not only from the sewers but also from the office towers of the biggest and most well-known corporations. --Saul Hansell

--Big Companies Add to Spam (NY Times)

Microsoft's menu bars are awash in anachronistic images, and it's especially evident in the latest edition of the Office 2003 application suite. This struck me as I was authoring my 364th "Inside PCMag.com" newsletter. Clicking on the Save icon, I found myself wondering why it's still an image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk. When was the last time you saved a file on a floppy? --Lance Ulanoff --Icon See It Now (PC Mag)

Hmm... this may be true in the business world, but the ledge of the whiteboard in the front of every computer room starts collecting abandoned floppy disks around midterm time, and there are often ten or twelve there by the end of term. I suppose this could be taken as evidence that students are abandoning such floppies, but my point is that they are still in use. Only once or twice have I seen an abandoned Zip disk. Nevertheless, I have a little keychain USB drive that I use to bring files back and forth from the office.

In critiquing the "cut" and "paste" icons, Ulanoff says "What a clipboard and a document have to do with pasting is beyond me." It sounds almost like Ulanoff doesn't know that "cut" and "paste" are references to actually taking a pair of scissors (or a razorblade knife) and clipping a chunk of text off of one page and actually sticking it on top of another page. When I was working for the (sadly defunct) University Journal as an undergrad, we would re-use graphics and logos, and while I don't recall whether we actually kept them on a clipboard, I think we kept them in the front cover of a notebook. So the clipboard icon makes sense to me. Ulanoff's point is, of course, that these images come from the print world -- a world that is more and more remote, and more and more metaphorical, to users of electronic text.

Books take time to transport. Their text vanishes and their pages yellow in a rash of foxing. Most important, it's still shockingly difficult to find information buried in books. Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books. --Gary Wolf --The Great Library of Amazonia  (Wired)

1.) Weblogs deal in the golden rule, modified to read: link unto others as you would have them link unto you.

6.) The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments (virtues) like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly. And as Roy Peter Clark says, if you?re telling a story and there'sa dog, get the name of the dog. --Ten Things Conservative about the Weblog Form in Journalism (PressThink)

A good counterpoint to an earlier article "Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism"

Together these articles are a tremendously well-written (and well-linked) introduction to weblogs in the world of journalism (or journalism in the blogosphere).

Putting computers in classrooms has been almost entirely wasteful, and the rush to keep schools up-to-date with the latest technology has been largely pointless. --Bob Blaisdell reviews Todd Oppenheimer' s The Flickering Mind --Why Computers Have Not Saved the Classroom (CS Monitor)

Oppenheimer argues that when technology is working, it is because enthusiastic teachers have made it work. He notes with alarm that politicians and parents seem more comfortable with spending money on technology than spending money on teachers.

I can say with certainty that all the technology in the world won't help if the teachers don't have the training to use it; and that translates to giving them time to learn for themselves what the technology can do for them. Many teachers who think of a curricular website as a photocopying machine (just stick the handouts up there so students can download them and print them out) will never reall understand how the Internet has changed the process of researching a paper.

Would today's tykes tolerate the classic games you grew up with? Kids do say the darndest things... --Kids Play (EGM)

The premise: force a bunch of tweens to play the games my generation grew up with. Just how badly do yesterday's games suck... and how badly to today's kids suck while playing them?

The article is annoyingly laid out without a table of contents, so you have to click blindly through chaining "next" links... so...

• Pong
• Donkey Kong, Football, Tetris
• Super Mario Bros, E.T., Space Invaders

Found on MetaFilter.

On average, internet users spend three and a half hours a day on the internet compared with 2.8 hours a day watching television. | The research, which is the first to suggest the internet has overtaken the television as the most popular medium among people who have both, will provide further grist to the mill of those who argue the web will eventually spell the end of linear television. --Owen Gibson --Surfers switch off TV for PCs  (Guardian)

Just as a shark must swim to breathe, a hard drive must be in motion to receive or return data. This air bearing technology, as it is called (pioneered at IBM in the 1950s), explains why dust and other contaminants must be kept out of the drive casing at all costs. If the heads touch the surface of the drive while it is in motion the result is what is known as a head crash: the head, which it must be remembered is moving at speeds upward of one hundred miles per hour, will plow a furrow across the platter, and data is almost impossible to recover. Thus, a key aspect of the hard drive'smateriality as an agent of digital inscription is quite literally created out of thin air. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --An Excerpt from Mechanisms: Grammatology of the Hard Drive (MGK)

Kirshenbaum is publishing excerpts from his forthcoming book, which examines the hard drive as an inscription machine. Here's part of a somewhat rambling comment I posted on his site:

I was at a zoo today and suddenly realized that the term "fledgling" has an orinthological origin -- it's not a metaphor to apply the term to birds. It's amazing that I've been using that word for decades and it never occurred to me. Thanks for similarly making me understand the term "hard drive crash".

A post on netwoman reads:

Dale Spender and Helen Fallon (1998) also assert that terminology such as 'abort', 'chaining', 'thrashing', 'execute', 'head crash', and 'kill' portray negative images of sex and violence to women, creating an uncomfortable and unfamiliar terrain. http://www.netwomen.ca/Blog/2003_09_01_archive.html#106427418616569858

I haven't read the specific article referenced, but I wonder if your description of the technology of computers as a physical environment (on the micro level) would place the percieved violence of computer terminology into another context.

Missed your daily dose of Panda Cam? Don't have the time to watch our pandas sleep? Boss expects you to do work? | Well, we have the solution right here. Our newest feature, the Daily Panda, lets you recap the daily escapades of Hua Mei, Bai Yun and Gao Gao thanks to our Panda Cam time lapse video. So go ahead, get some work done? we'll keep track of the pandas for you.
--Panda Cam Live from the San Diego Zoo (San Diego Zoo)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

At the height of the Internet boom, e-books were hailed as the shining new tomorrow for publishers and paper books were heading for the scrap heap. | But the bubble has burst and electronic books are still the poor relation to the printed word with consumers preferring to turn the pages themselves when they curl up by the fire with a good book. --Paul Majendie --Bubble bursts for electronic books (SignOnSanDiego)

"The entire ideology of information technology for the last 50 years has been that more information is better, that mass producing information is better," he says. | But the net is now so much an machine with all the answers instantly, it has mutated into a "procrastination apparatus", which spews information without much prioritisation Dr Nielsen argues. --Jo Twist --Web guru fights info pollution (BBC)

A good interview with Jakob Nielsen. The bit about procrastination isn't new to anyone who's spent time on a college campus recently... and I'm definitely guilty of using my blog as a way to convince myself I'm being productive when I've got ten or fifteen minutes to kill... when in reality, I often read gad about online for an hour or more before I find something that really motivates me to blog.

P.S. Jo Twist? Really?

Monkeys can control a robot arm as naturally as their own limbs using only brain signals, a pioneering experiment has shown. The macaque monkeys could reach and grasp with the same precision as their own hand. --Duncan Graham-Rowe --Monkey's brain signals control 'third arm' (New Scientist)

Barriers are being destoyed at the same time as bridges are being built within the literary community just as in almost every other field affected by the almighty computer. Arguments fly on all sides especially as to what constitutes art. Progress constantly changes the determination--even when it may be that it is a subjective view, after all. Time and experimentation move things beyond the established (to date) criteria and may improve, but certainly expand the categories. Homo's red handprint on the cave wall can not remain the standard forever. --Susan --Interactive FictionSpinning)

One of Steve Ersinghouse's students tackles the 1999 text adventure game "Photopia" and reflects in broader terms on digital literature.

News makers have always had ways of getting their news and views before the public. Often with the help of public-relations professionals, they've held press conferences, issued statements, offered interviews. In the past decade, they've created Web sites, though those pages have usually contained public-relations puffery, not candid communications.|Recently, a few forward-thinking news makers have seen the power of creating their own messages. --Dan Gillmor --Blog has become former actor's portal into new career (Mercury News)

This story places former Star Trek child actor Wil Wheaton's newfound success as a blogger into a greater context. Link via BlogsCanada, a site that reminds me both of what I loved about Canada when I lived there, and also why I was glad to come back to The States. (Blog on, eh?)

Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months). --The Blogging Iceberg (Perseus)

Predictably, Orlowski is all over this one, especially because the news broke during Harvard's $500-a-head BloggerCon. Don't miss the comparison between blogging and a dog licking its own genitals.

KairosNews points to Oliver Wrede's reaction to the Perseus survey; Wrede notes that the survey was skewed towards the personal blog, and didn't seem to include users of the power-user weblog tools such as MovableType.

My trawling of BlogDex reveals "Deflating the Blog Bubble," which sensibly suggests that -- gasp -- blogs might not be the solution to all the world's problems. (That article suggests that blogs are mostly of interest to upperclass white men, which is interesting in light of Orlowski's assertion that most blogs are written by teenage girls.)

What does it look like at exactly 25 degrees N, 8 degrees E? What about the other places on the globe where latitutde and longitude lines intersect? Find out at Confluences. --Degree Confluence Project (Orbitals)

Link via Rosemary Frezza, who also sends this BBC article: "A Unique Picture of the World."

Listeners who have come to hate the labels believe their favorite artists no longer need the labels. If only that were true. Maybe Prince can afford to cast his label aside and go directly to the fans. But he did so only after becoming a household name. The vast majority of musicians will never find an audience large enough to let them quit their day jobs without a staff of marketing and promotions people who know how to book a tour, make a video and get their CDs into stores... --Jeff Howe --Listen, It Isn't the Labels, It's the Law (WashPost)

The link will be dead soon, of course, as is the case with all WashPost articles.

Google is engaged in a battle royale with rivals Overture -acquired by Yahoo - and Sprinks for the lucrative classified text ad business. Initially welcomed as the potential savior of small websites, including blogs, Adwords payments have trickled away in recent weeks, webloggers note. --Andrew Orlowski --Google shafts blogger, adds gagging clause to Adsense (Register)

Is Google turning evil? Has Orlowski found a new target?

Web pages soon plunged in Inktomi's search rankings and disappeared from key sites like MSN, where Inktomi feeds its listings. After he demanded to know what happened, Spooner learned from Inktomi that his site contained editorial flaws that hurt his ranking. And he would have to become a paid-inclusion customer to learn what these flaws were. All this, while his pages remained well ranked on Google. "I lost a quarter of my traffic," says Spooner. --Ben Elgin --Web Searches: The Fix Is In  (Business Week)

Literature is defamiliarizing the ordinary, making us see even the most quotidian things in a new way. And games? We might describe them in several ways, but they are certainly ritual spaces in which rules that are not the ordinary social and cultural ones apply. So perhaps the concept of the literary game -- a seemingly curious concept -- is not truly oxymoronic. It may be that certain literary games, including works of interactive fiction, derive their power from the play between their literary aspects and their nature as games... Nick Montfort --Literary Games (Poems That Go)