Cyberculture: November 2003 Archive Page

Dellavalle's concerns reflect those of a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival. In one recent study, one-fifth of the Internet addresses used in a Web-based high school science curriculum disappeared over 12 months. | Another study, published in January, found that 40 percent to 50 percent of the URLs referenced in articles in two computing journals were inaccessible within four years. --Rick Weiss --Web sites vanish so fast scientific papers just can't keep up... (SF Gate)

I wonder how many of these broken URLs are caused by the actions of webmasters who temporarily publish articles for free, and then pull them behind pay-per-view walls. A researcher who cites a URL that appears to be free may not know it has an expiry date. FYI, the above article originated from the Washington Post, whose free articles expire after a few weeks.

If students cannot find the answers but must make the answers, they are less apt to pass off others' ideas as their own. The secret is to pose or ask students to pose questions or problems and decisions which have never been adequately answered. --Jamie McKenzie --The New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery in an Electronic Age (From Now On)

This article, from 1998, was prophetic. It argues that the "find out about X" assignments that used to require a lot of reading and persistence are today so trivial, and so many of these answers are already posted online, that we do our students a disservice and encourage them to cheat. If they realize it's busywork, and that their teachers themselves couldn't be bothered to come up with a challenging assignment, then how can we possibly expect them to become intellectually invested in it?

I try to impress upon my freshmen the fact that in high school, they were often rewarded for producing, on demand, the answers that were already printed in the back of the book or in the teacher's guides. (I always contextualize my statements about high school by observing that high school teachers have to teach a lot more students, and that they have more disciplinary problems, so I don't want to sound as if I'm slamming high school teachers.) But one day, they may have to speak at a city council meeting and present a reasoned argument for why a new road bypass should take route A (the one that does not destroy their house) instead of route B; or, one day their spouse might convert to a religion that they personally find morally reprehensible; or, they might be told that, due to a budget cut, they will have to write up a report that recommends which one of their three equally-competent assistants should be fired. A liberal arts degree is supposed to give students practice exposing themselves to new ideas and making sense of the world through multiple and varied viewpoints.

Even in upper-level courses, I find students -- some of whom are in the ed school -- asking me, "What do you want me to write?" as if I already have memorized the one and only correct answer to "Is Willy Loman a Tragic Hero?" or "How Personally Culpable was Torvald for Nora's Plight?"

Users are berated and insulted for not having consulted the documentation, but, in many cases, the user can hardly be blamed. The documentation is shoddy, incomplete, and badly organized, if it's present at all. Exceptions are becoming rarer and rarer.| As documentation decreases in quality, users stop turning to it. As users stop turning to it, companies stop trying to maintain it -- why bother, if the users won't read it? This line of reasoning is dooming the future of documentation to failure. Documentation is important and needs to be taken seriously. --Peter Seebach --The cranky user: The importance of documentation (IBM)

Seebach was the good-natured target of my pedantry earlier in the year when I criticized a title an editor chose for one of his articles, originally titled "Here ye -- let thine site visitors speak". I've only been away from teaching technical writing for one semester, but I really wish I'd had the time to introduce my "Writing for the Internet" students to some basic technical writing concepts such as report writing. But the semester just got too chatoic. Oh, well, maybe next time.

Most newspapers have traditionally not made room for online producers and editors in their newsrooms, shuffling them off instead to a different floor, or to a different building entirely.|But in the past few years, many newspapers have decided that having two newsrooms -- one for print and one for online -- doesn't make much sense. One by one, papers are moving their online editorial staff into the main newsroom. --Jane Ellen Stevens

--Moving Online into the Newsroom (ORJ)

VOCALOID allows song writers to generate superb authentic-sounding singing on their PCs by simply inputting the words and notes of their compositions. The software synthesizes the sound from "vocal libraries" of recordings of actual singers, such as those being developed by Zero-G, and retains the vocal qualities of the original singing voices to reproduce real-sounding vocals. VOCALOID also features simple commands enabling users to add expressive effects, and as it runs on Windows-based PCs, amateur enthusiasts as well as professionals can now enjoy creating music with great-sounding vocals. --Vocaloid "Singing Synthesis Software" (Press Release)

This could be the ultimate weapon against Big Music. Music fans often claim they don't listen to the words, they just like entering into the music. Will this do for Big Music what blogging is doing for Big Print? Probably not -- this software is not free, and it looks like it takes a lot of effort and at least a smattering of musical knowledge (you have to be able to input the notes and probably tweak the script so that the synthetic singer sounds emotionally involved in the music). But it will put creative power into the hands of a wider range of people, just as digital video cameras and printing presses did their share in the democratization of media.

Think blogs are useless? Donna, while applying for jobs, got a email back from Central Pa Magazine. They happened to have read her blog and asked her to write a column on food/health for them. Let's all cross our fingers for her that they ask her to be a regular columnist. | Woo Hoo Donna. You give good hope to future journalists that blogs are an extension of a résumé. --Brian McCollum

--Think Blogs are Useless? (BAM SE)

Very interesting in light of the ongoing discussion of Dvorak's anti-blogging column. Neither Brian nor Donna are in any of my classes -- in fact, Donna graduated before I started at Seton Hill. But both are regulars on the New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University website. Congratulations, Donna!

It's no coincidence that the most-read blogs are created by professional writers. They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into blogging, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome, albeit insincere.|Unfortunately, at some point, people will realize they've been used. --John C. Dvorak
--Co-opting the Future (PC Magazine)

This article seems to presume that many (if not most) bloggers are trying to blog for profit.For a person who has Internet access, the cost of producing a blog is minimal or nil; likewise, reading a blog costs nothing. One reason I bloog, and give away my ideas for free, is because I know that I benefit so much from the freely-given ideas I have read on other people's blogs. I hope there will always be professional writers, but I also rejoice that so much amateur content is being produced, shared, enjoyed, and put to use in the world. The vast majority of bloggers aren't in it for the money.

"Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a blog mystifies a lot of professional writers," he says. But that presumes that professional writers don't write voluntarily. Yes, writing is tiresome, and except for a few superstars, writing doesn't pay very well, so many professional writers have made economic sacrifices to feed a compulsion that drives them to write. I recall a conversation I had with a struggling young actor who finally announced her decision to stop taking acting roles that were good opportunities but that didn't pay anything -- yes, they looked great on her resume and yes, she learned a lot, but all the time she was spending rehearsing or auditioning for free wsa time that she couldn't spend looking for paid work. I feel the same way about my blogging, but quite frankly I've been fortunate enough that, while I don't get paid directly for my blogging, as a new media teacher I feel that I need to blog in order to participate in the cyberculture I am teaching and studying.

Most academics don't get paid for the academic articles they write, and get paid only very little for the books they write. When I give a talk at a conference, my university will pay my way (up to a point). Of course, this wasn't true when I was a grad student -- since there is very little research money in the humanities, I had to pay my own way to conferences, while students in engineering (for instance) had travel budgets from the corporations bankrolling their professors' research. While grad students in the sciences thought of their research as a job, we in the humanities often didn't even earn enough money to pay our tuition, so we ended up paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of marking stacks of papers and teaching lower-level classes. It came with the territory.

There are professional speech-givers who wouldn't dream of giving a speech and getting reimbursed only for travel expenses, but as an academic, I'm expected to deliver papers at conferences. Yes, it's a bother, but it comes with the territory.

I feel the same way about blogging... on a Saturday night after the kids are in bed, what am I doing? Blogging. A few years ago I might have been watching Saturday Night Live; now, rather than sit still and absorb media produced by someone else, I am spending a half hour or so creating someting of my own, and posting it for whoever finds it.

Dvorak cites the statistic that most blogs have a readership of 12. So what? If they are the right 12 people, and the blogger gets sufficient satisfaction, what's the problem? Traditional diaries theoretically have a readership of one, but that shouldn't devalue their importance in the culture of literacy. I think most professional writers do understand concepts such as self-expression and personal discovery. If each of a blogger's 12 readers also has a blog, and each of those reader-bloggers is read by an overlapping but not identical group of 12, then the dynamics of producer and consumer, author and reader, authority and readership are completely re-written. This is part of the whole paradigm shift in new media.

Not completely yes.

• First: most obviously, the Memex (had it ever been built) would have operated on photo-mechanical, rather than digital technology. (As you watch the animation, you can hear the machanical operation sound, that sound would be a proof to believe that it is not digital media)
• Second, the operation of the memex is tied to the physical presence of texts - a stack of densely-printed microfilms, which can be sorted and displayed quickly, but which must first be printed and distributed to a paying researcher.
• Bush was fixated on the human mind. All of his initial machines and visions were analog devices. Furthermore, he frequently used the analogy of electricity to the human brain. In doing so, he believed that he could improve on the imperfect biological processes that existed.

--Chen LiuKe and Xia Li

--Is Memex a digital media? (York University CS Department)

The Memex is Vannevar Bush's hypothetical microfilm-based document storage and retrieval system, proposed in the 1940s but never built.

The above excerpt is the conclusion to a computer science paper posted to Peter Roosen-Runge's curricular website. The first two points in this list are plagiarized from an article I wrote earlier this year. See for yourself:

Seeing the memex as the direct precursor to the WWW is attractive, but problematic for several reasons. First, and most obviously, the memex (had it ever been built) would have operated on photo-mechanical, rather than digital, technology. Second, the operation of the memex is tied to the physical presence of texts - a stack of densely-printed microfilms, which can be sorted and displayed quickly, but which must first be printed and distributed to a paying researcher. Third, the memex is only additive - the scholar can duplicate pages, but cannot synthesize (by copying and pasting chunks) or inserting or rearranging words in a stream. "On the Trail of the Memex," Dichtung Digital

I e-mailed Roosen-Runge two weeks ago, and got no response. I e-mailed Roosen-Runge and his department chair a week later, and still got no response.

The paper in question does include my article in its "Reference" section, but there aren't quotation marks around the passage lifted from my work. I'm appalled at the lack of response I have received from the instructor.

While I'm at it, I don't really think that Chen LiuKe and Xia Li know what they are talking about -- the Memex is an analog storage system, which involves taking pictures on microfilm. It's a chemical and mechanical process -- it's analog, not digital. The only answer the three bulleted points supports would be "Not in any way, no." I see nothing that convinces me the Memex should be considered "a digital media" [sic].

We live in the dark ages of digital media. We fantasize about the infinite possibilities and revolutionary potential of the Web, about how free information wants to be, about uploading our brain to a hard drive -- but we actually know less about the creative computing that happened in our lifetimes than some people know about incunabular broadsides and Babylonian school tablets. Forget about Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad -- we can't even run MacPaint. Forget about Vannevar Bush's trails -- we can't even run The Oregon Trail. It's as if we have some sort of cultural, corporate, and academic attention deficit disorder and mommy has sold our supply of Ritalin to Rush Limbaugh. --Nick Montfort --Condemned to Reload It: Forgetting New Media (nickm.com)

I love this guy!

I recently had a brief conversation with our university archivists.

At the moment, their strategy for archiving electronic information is -- you guessed it -- printing it all out and preserving the pages. They're paying a small fortune in printing, since the university is generating so much in terms of e-mail and other electronic data.

I asked whether they had plans to preserve the university website as it develops, or all the material curricular currently archived in the proprietary course-management software (J-Web). And with that question, I probably marked myself for future committee work.

Nick Montfort's Twisty Little PassagesLiteracy Weblog)

I just ordered my copy of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction -- Nick Montfort's study of riddles, Adventure, Zork, and beyond.

Their one-star bombs were nasty and relentless?landing at a rate of five a day. My characters were undeveloped, my structure sloppy, my prose trite. There were complaints of money and time wasted and of friends never again to be trusted. Some hated the book so much they were forced to put it down. One argued that Christopher was, in fact, "too dull to hate." And each review was headlined in bold capital letters?things like "SUCH A DISAPPOINTMENT" and "YAWN!" And, to make matters worse, above each bad review was a landslide of endorsements: "18 of 18 people found the following review helpful." And above the old, positive reviews the numbers had changed overnight: "20 of 68 people found the following review helpful." Within a few days Christopher's review average had fallen to a mediocre three stars. --Allison Burnett --I Was Stalked on Amazon.com (Media Bistro)

It sure looks like one nasty person sank the sales of a book that 20 other people thought was five-star good. But sending out e-mail to 200 people to log onto Amazon.com and correct an opinion that you don't agree with is a bit risky. Why not be content that 20 out of 21 reviews were glowing? And who really has 200 friends? Apparently about 198 of them treated the request as Spam.

--News-Images.com

Pretty self-explanatory -- like Google News but for people who don't want to read. Found on Slashdot.

Reading the news on a computer may soon be passe. Internet-enabled mobile phones and hybrid devices are fueling the next wave of change, and journalists need to know how to deliver content to these devices. --Vivek Shankar --Reporters, readers get new ways to publish and readOnline News Association)

This is some light, friendly PR-style coverage of a conference on online journalism. The sidebar has short summaries of other panels that looked interesting, including Andrew Sullivan on the blog replacing the op-ed and convergence.

Aviva, Diageo, Corus... the trend for rebranding companies with "nonsense" names has led to some notable additions to the corporate lexicon. | But a stunt designed to ridicule the tendency has come back to haunt its creators after several spoof names were registered for real. --Spoof brand names snapped up for real (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

What began as the ultimate outsider activity -- a way to break the newspaper and TV stranglehold on the gathering and dissemination of information -- is turning into the same insider's game played by the old establishment media the bloggerati love to critique. The more blogs you read and the more often you read them, the more obvious it is: They've fallen in love with themselves, each other and the beauty of what they're creating. --Jennifer Howard --It's a Little Too Cozy in the Blogosphere (Washington Post (will expire))

Item! Some Bloggers Love Themselves Too Much! Howard is right, but her realization is sooo 2001.

The good text adventures had more than a series of puzzles to solve; they had as much atmosphere and clever writing as a good novel, and I decided in Grade 8 that I was going to merge my love of writing and computers to become a writer of interactive fiction. I set my sights on getting a job at Infocom, the company that made the best text adventures. | Then graphics came along and ruined everything. --Jim Munroe --Professor Zork (No Media Kings)

I'm warming up for when I can post the results of IF Competition 2003.

As delegates arrived at the meeting, they were handed an intelligent tag the size and weight of a PDA to wear around their necks. Called an nTag, each delegate's device was pre-programmed with the conference schedule, which could be displayed on a small screen on the front of the tag, as well as with personal information supplied earlier to the organisers. This included the wearer's contact details, employment history, their professional interests and personal hobbies- the kind of information that people often compare to decide whether they have anything in common. The purpose of nTags is to ask all those ice-breaker questions automatically. The tags communicate with each other via an infrared link to find out whether their owners have much in common. When an nTag finds a good match, it does what any good party host would do and alerts its owner to the other person. --Hello, will you be my friend? (EurekAlert)

Amazing. Geeks aren't known for their people skills, and some would rather keep typing in their cubicles than venture forth into the world of "Hello" and "How are you today?"

If I went to a fancy event and was given "an intelligent tag the size and weight of a PDA to wear" around my neck, I'd feel... well, I'd feel like a geek. But I guess that's the point.

There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. Yes, really. --CSS Zen Garden

Via KairosNews, which also has the amusing ReUSEIT (a contest to redesign web guru Jakob Nielsen's minimalist UseIT site),

Microdoc News has now had feedback from more than 100 users of Google Adwords. The response from small advertisers is not convincing that Google AdWords actually works. There are one or two excellent supporters of the Google AdWords idea, but there are also the 88% of small-time advertisers who are having less than stellar results. --Elwyn Jenkins --Does Google AdWords Have a 'Use By Date'? (Microdoc News)

A good, honest piece by Elwyn (who, I am sure, would in his heart of hearts rather be able to report better news).

Pcol writes "The Washington Post reports that 'Spim,' as people are beginning to call unsolicited instant messages, is the latest sign that online marketers will seek to take advantage of other communication tools, not limiting themselves to spam or pop-up ads. The good news is that it's not easy for spimmers to send unsolicited instant messages. Instant message providers like AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have a lot of control over their instant message networks, and since they look at their IM offerings as gateway services that help draw customers in to their paid Internet offerings, these firms are already committing resources to making sure the spim problem never reaches the same scale as spam." --'Spim' is Latest Online Annoyance (Slashdot)

Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC) will offer a Ph.D. in Digital Media, starting fall 2004. The program, one of the first of its kind worldwide, is aimed at educating research-oriented theorist/practitioners who will bring the traditions of the humanities and arts to the design of digital media. Graduates of the program will be prepared to work in industry, public service, and universities, where they will help to shape the emerging digital genres and to expand our understanding and mastery of the representational power of the computer. --PhD in Digital Media (Ga Tech)

Janet Murray is launching this program, which sounds absolutely wonderful. Found on GTA.

Video games have received more attention over the past several years as their revenue has grown faster than any other form of digital entertainment. Gross revenue from video-game hardware and software sales has surpassed revenues from movie ticket sales, video rentals and concert tickets, according to Mike Goodman, senior analyst with the Yankee Group. --Katie Dean --Academics Can Be Fun and Games (Wired)

By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text. | But not only does this prevent people from getting inside the machine and keep them in a state of blissful ignorance, it also proves to be a deceit, for in the end the user still has to adapt to the machine anyway. --Dylan Evans --Smash the Windows (Guardian)

c:>print "I love the command-line interface"

The PDA is Dead... Long Live the PDA!Literacy Weblog)

The Palm has changed a lot in six years. When I bought mine in 1997 (or was it early 1998?) it was called a "Pilot."

--There is no website configured at this address (Google?!)

Aahhh! Somebody tell me there's a virus on my computer! I don't want to believe this... I noticed it at about 1:20 am EST.

On the same day she spoke about media panics to my journalism class, Torill Mortensen introduced my "Writing for the Internet" class to hypertext theory. (This is going to be a long post and I'll probably be too lazy to link everything properly, so see Torill's online lecture notes, "Hypertext, class and power.")

She began by asking the class to visualize taking a book and cutting it up, line by line, and gluing the words all together -- you could read the whole thing in one very cumbersome, very long, line. (She corrected herself -- actually, you would need to cut up two books!)

She introduced Vannevar Bush, an American scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, who felt the need to find something constructive for the scientists of the world to do once World War II was over. (This reminded me of the passion of Mr. Antrobus in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.)

She introduced Bush's Memex, and noted that its strength was that it organizes information not according to random order such as alphabetization, but the way our brains function -- by association. Even the most disciplined thinkers don't think according to a relentlessly rational, linear argument. (Here, I thought of a passage in Virgina Wolf's To the Lighthouse, which presents male thought as rational, attempting to progress firmly from A to Z, but shows a male character becoming frustrated because when he tries to move from A to Z by firmly focusing on each letter in his mind's eye, by the time he gets somewhere around Q or R, he finds his mind wandering.)

Torill worked her way through Englebart's "Mother of All Demonstrations," Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and Habermas's didactic philosophy of the media as a democratic conversation (rather than as a one-way flow from the aristocracy downward). She compared sophisticated, painstakingly constructed blogs which "reek of cultural capital" to the "bararian blogs" which have no cultural pretension.

She also shared a few stories from blogging lore, including "Damn the Pacific" -- the joint blog of transoceanic lovers, one of them dying from cancer, who begged for donations to fund plane tickets. Google actually caches at least some of the pages from "Damn the Pacific" -- so the story hasn't completely vanished from cyberspace. (I was rightfully booed by my own class when I asked whether Lane's new boyfriend also has cancer. Sorry about that, everyone.)

The saga of Kaycee Nicole also helped concretize the theory. Kaycee was the imaginary cancer-striken daughter of a blogger who doubly traumatized her audience -- first by killing off her daughter, and second by admitting the daughter never existed. (Here, I thought of Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which features an imaginary son, created by a childless couple as a means to cope with their psychoses, and also as a weapon to use against each other.)

We also talked about Jill Walker's posts in which she makes oblique references to her breakup with another blogger, and Torill pointed out a current message on Jill's blog that is a coded announcement (for those who can read between the lines) that Jill is seeing someone new and is very happy about it. Jill says that, while her blog may appear to reveal quite a lot about her personal life, she still chooses what to reveal and how. The way I see it, her autobiographical blogging gives her control over the events in her life -- or at least over the way the readers of her blog perceive her life.

After Torill's lecture, I introduced her to Julie Young, whose blog I discovered while I was still competing for my current job. The content of Julie's weblog on "blogs.setonhill.edu" is a little different than her earlier blog, and she has admitted that she also keeps a "secret" blog where she can write juicier gossip than she wants to post on her academic blog.

"Doesn't everybody keep a secret blog?" Torill asked.

I don't have a secret bog... this is it, folks.Torill @ Seton Hill University -- 'Intro to Hypertext Theory'Literacy Weblog)

It's not hard to imagine the power of millions of people each taking pictures and attaching them to physical places. You're headed into Helsinki, and you want to see what the Esplanade looks like in mid-August. Or you wonder what the inside of the Intercontinental hotel looks like. | There's immense potential for people to keep each other informed, or perhaps, misinformed. We all know the power of a picture to over-select, to crop, to be too specific and miss context important to other people on the scene. Now that potential is being democratized. --Justin Hall --Personal Life Annotation Devices (The Feature)

Via Jill, who has also recently posted links to the Idea Line (a beautiful expandible index to new media art and narrative) and the 100 x 100 Project.

Torill 'thinking with my fingers' Mortensen @ Seton Hill UniversityLiteracy Weblog)

For the past few days, I have been showing Torill's "thinking with my fingers" blog to my new media journalism students. Around the time that our own "New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University" blog was lagging, Torill posted about the lack of personal touch in group blogs. And since many of my students reported, in their midterm blog portfolios, how disappointed they felt when the blog entries they worked hardest on didn't attract comments, I called my student's attention to Torill's position on blog comments (on MGK she has written, "While I can see the value of them, I don't want the hazzle of maintaining and editing a blog where I need to check to see what others may have written into it. I treasure my peaceful little slot on the net.").

It took a bit of effort, but I managed to get some students a little worked up about the things that this Dr. Mortensen was saying. When some students on Monday offered to send her nasty e-mails, I sort of choked for a moment -- I hadn't expected a response that strong. This morning, one student apologized for forgetting to write an e-mail.

At any rate, because Torill and I had agreed to keep her visit a secret, we imagined that she could make a dramatic entrance, so I left her in a computer lab on the floor below, and started class for a few minutes before sending a student to get her.

When I flashed her bio on the screen, Jen recognized her -- "I think I just saw her in the lab downstairs!" Jen knew something was up... maybe Torill Mortensen isn't really a Norwegian blogger -- maybe this exotic foreigner is just imaginary, or maybe I have asked a friend to come into the class and pose as "Dr. Mortensen" in order to make some obscure pedagogical point.

"Would I do that to you?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

I'll blog some more about Torill's presentation later... in one class, she spoke of the technology panic in the Norwegian media, and in the other she gave an excellent, well-paced introduction to hypertext theory.

She's downstaris in the comptuer room, probably blogging away. It's so encouraging to find out that I'm not the only person who's so addicted to the Internet! Anyway, we're going to meet up with my family and have an enjoyable evening (if the kids aren't too rambunctious). Then tomorrow I'll take her to the airport, where she will continue on her US lecture tour.

The Internet is coming of age, and the era of innocence is gone. while the digital axis of evil takes over. It's high time we leave the term ICT (information and communication technology) behind unless we claim that it stands for "indifferent capitalist thrash", or "infamous crime technology". --finn --Infamous Crime Technology (Saywords)

Kitty Kelly has sold it to CBS. No, just kidding. A tremendous night. It's the beginning of a second media century, Joe, where it's much more of a people-driven media. And I say that not lightly. It was the Internet, it was talk radio, it was cable that put pressure on CBS, and heretofore, there's never been this kind of pressure applied to one of the big titans, one of the big three. And the pressure went all the way to the top of a super company called Viacom, and the chairman earlier today is my information said, "Listen, let's just get it on cable. Let's do it on Showtime. Let's show it uncut. Everybody will watch." So the word is that CBS will pass on it. It will not air on free television, but the full glory of "The Reagans" will air on Showtime. --CBS Passes on "Reagans" Biography (Drudge Report)

Pressure from the blogosphere and talk radio induced CBS to pass on "The Reagans," which has been described by CBS officials as too biased against Reagan to be fixed through editing. Is this censorship? Note that CBS had already edited the show considerably, to the point that there would have been dead air time because of the number of scenes that had been cut. By admitting the show was biased, not the romantic love story that had been pitched and purchased for airing, CBS gave up on it, but Showtime will air the whole thing uncut. Without the intense pressure from the blogosphere and talk radio, the editied version might have been shown, and nobody would have ever seen the full version (until the "director's cut" DVD came out, that is).

Software which enables e-mail writers to choose the image they want to portray is being developed by a team of Scottish researchers. --How to Become an E-Mail Extrovert (BBC)

Hi!!!! This new software sounds cool! ;) Its supposed to make your writing more cheerful and outgoing!! The article is a bit vauge -- maybe the designers have a little secret to keep (hehehe). I thinka Scottish extrovert is probably somebody who smiles at you before lopping your head off with a Claymore! Hahahaha j/k. Anyway, informal language with lots of exclamation points (!!!) and the word "hi" instead of "hello" helps your writing project an outgoing, upbeat personality!! Wow!!!

So, guys... here's my new, emotionally upbeat and extroverted writing style!! I even threw in a few typos to. Whadaya think!? Huh? Huh????

Now, everything you write will read like just the most annoying spam you've ever gotten!! Woo hoo! ;)

Take care! :-*

A while back Michael Lesk wrote a paper called "How Much Information is There in the World?" That work has now been updated by a team led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian: "How Much Information 2003?" --How Much Information? (Via MGK)