Technology: March 2004 Archive Page

"[T]he world's first consumer application of an electronic paper display module in Sony's new e-Book reader, Librié, [is] scheduled to go on sale in Japan in late April. This 'first ever' [...] display utilizes E Ink's revolutionary electronic ink technology which offers a truly paper-like reading experience with contrast that is the same as newsprint."

(See also E Ink's press release and BBC News.)

Commercial E-Paper Display

Via join-the-dots.

--Dominique (Interactive Face) (Alterfin)

A great link from The Goreletter. I wish the eyes would follow the mouse cursor.

43.75 %

My weblog owns 43.75 % of me. --Does your weblog own you?

Hmmph. I thought it would be more than that. One question about dating really doesn't apply to me.

--Old School Moveable Type (MGK)

Real moveable type. Ever since I investigated the meaning of the name of the character "Shurdlu" in Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, I've had a longing to learn how to use an old-fashioned printing press -- one that actually presses the paper. As much as I love the power of "push-button publishing for the masses," there is still something to be said about the care that must go into getting it right when one uses a real printing press.

Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I'm not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They're using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I'm not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts? --Richard Long --Back from San Antonio (2River)

A good point. Link found via Will R.

Since it was initially packaged with every Mac shipped, it's likely the majority of buyers used it as a quicky Rolodex, if anything. But HyperCard's biggest win was a very low entry threshold for those who wanted to build their own 'stacks' - combinations of user interface, code, and persistent data. There were plenty of examples to suggest ideas, and all the code was open for tweaking. This did enable a burst of creativity by users, many of them educators and artists with no training in programming or database.

The proliferation of ideas created its own confusion. What was this thing? Programming and user interface design tool? Lightweight database and hypertext document management system? Multimedia authoring environment? Apple never answered that question. --Tim Oren --A Eulogy for HyperCard  (Due Diligence)

We the "early adopters"have been playing with blogs in our classes for awhile now. We're loved them just for the sake of loving them. We've evangelized them to our peers and our students, with mixed success.

But now, blogs must pull their pedgagogical weight. It's no longer enough to just put a student blog collective online and see what happens, or to send your students to Blogger and allow them to pretend like it's the same experience as writing a paper journal that they turn in to their teacher. --Stephanie Holinka --And The Crowd Cried out for Pedagogy (Weeblog)

Another CCCC blogger reflects...

Mike Vitia Blogs the 4Cs (Vitia)

Mike Vitia has a good series of blog entries covering several sessions at the 4Cs, including the great panel by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy, of which Mike had this provocative, if vague, observation: "Most of us know that the theories of Landow and Negroponte lie broken and useless: how, then, might we begin to build rigorous theoretical models that help us to account for the phenomena described by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy?"

Of course, the notion that these Web sites have to "count" toward tenure and promotion is one that most directly pertains to a relatively small audience: tenure-track faculty members, particularly those seeking tenure, promotion, or other institutional recognition. These Web sites have value (and thus "count") for an audience that is much larger than this, an audience that includes teachers working in non-tenure-track positions, those teaching at schools where the tenure requirements have little to do with scholarship, graduate students, Web readers interested in the topics of the sites, and so forth. I also think it's important to say that the creators of these Web sites put together their pages for reasons that exceed the question of how it might (or might not) fit into their own cases for tenure and promotion, much in the same way that most of us who are trying to publish our S/scholarship in journals and books are presumably motivated by more than simply how it looks on our cv. Steven Krause --Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites  (CCC Online)

As it happens, when I was printing out the final copy of my 4C's paper before I left the house (in the wee hours of the morning), I ran out of paper, and pulled the staple out of my printout of "Where Do I List This on My CV?" in order to use the blank sides of those pages.

Oddly enough, that's also my provisional answer to your question -- self-publishing isn't enough, and neither is any cutting-edge new media project. Publishing in traditional academic genres about new media activities does take time and energy away from those new media activities, but I don't think we really have any choice -- at least, not until we have succeeded in explaining to the reigning generation of scholars why what we do is valuable, and why doing it the traditional way is less valuable. We're not there yet.

Andre Torrez has found a way to use some new technology to get in touch with an old friend.

He's been spending a lot of his down time -- in airports and waiting for friends -- playing old-school Infocom interactive text games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. --Daniel Terdiman --Bots Open Door to Gaming History (Wired)

It's good to see contemporary free IF mentioned in Wired, though it would be nice to see it mentioned in some context other than nostaliga for a fondly remembered but now long dead genre.

I'd have no idea this article headline was about interactive fiction if I hadn't seen it linked in a cluster of IF articles on Appunti Disordinati di Viaggio

My "Computer Connection" section (in a distant corner of the main exhibition hall) was more interactive than I had expected, so I didn't get to cover all my material -- notably this list of "good practices" for using blogs in the classroom. Since a "real" weblog is a license to write whatever and whenever you want, an instructor who assigns the topic, frequency, or length of blog entries (in order to facilitate grading) violates the spirit that draws voluntary bloggers to their avocation.

The "forced blogging paradigm" is the resistance that results when even voluntary bloggers feel hampered by the imposition of academic rules and standards. It's also the resistance that results when students who don't really want to blog at all are forced to do so. Here are a few strategies I've found helpful.

In Class, Refer to Student Blogs. In the minute or two before class starts, I sometimes chat with students about the content of their blogs. Of course, the best bloggers will tend to get the most attention, and the result is that the infrequent bloggers will feel marginalized. That?s the way it is in the blogosphere outside of academia, but it makes good pedagogical sense to recognize the achievements of less committed bloggers, too.

When asking a student to repeat for the class the contents of a particularly good blog entry that I feel might be useful in sparking a discussion, I find that students sometimes need their memory jogged if they are expected to talk about something they blogged in the wee hours of the morning or maybe a couple days ago. Calling the blog entry upon on the screen, saying a few words about why it seemed significant to you, and then inviting the student to click through their weblog seems to be a good strategy.

Begin Oral Presentations from Blogs. I ask my students to blog their notes for their oral presentations. In my upper-level course, peer pressure encourages students not to identify this kind of forced blogging as an assignment -- students just casually mention a thought that occurred to them while reading Plato, and then launch into their subject from there. Since I encourage them to link to their sources, it's easier to encourage them to emphasize their own ideas, rather than spend most of their oral presentation summarizing what they find on SparkNotes or other curiousity-killing "study guide" websites.

Give Flexible ?Forced Blogging? Assignments. Requiring students to post X comments of length Y every week may force some middle-of-the-road students to write a little longer, a little more frequently; but it will also encourage the Type-A students to stop when they have reached the magic number. That can kill the dynamic of a weblog, which feeds off of the feverish productivity of the A-listers. I might also ask students to write a short response to the assigned text, but give them the option of blogging it (if they have a lot to say and want to make it public) or just hand it to me on paper. Even if only or two students blogs a reaction essay, those will probably be at least mildly interesting.

Blog During Class. Not all the time? but whenever the site is sagging a bit, asking all students to blog for 15 minutes can help perk things up. Sometimes I suggest that they post only comments that contain questions for their peers, rather than create new entries. Responding to the 'Forced Blogging' Paradigm: Good Practices for Weblogs in the ClassroomCCCC 04)

While my suggested prompts regarding John Donne's Holy Sonnets and The Secret Life of Bees sit ignored, during the time I was giving my presentation on blogging at the 4Cs, and while I show the audience the SHU blog, I see that debate is currently raging on the subject of athletics at Seton Hill University.

Blogging puts students in the driver's seat. There's a great community of bloggers at SHU. The ride can be bumpy -- particularly if some students feel left out or attacked. But sometimes, the best thing an instructor can do is sit back and trust the students. They'll work this out, and they'll do it through writing.. what more can a writing instuctor ask?

[Grr... the Word file that has my abstract in it won't open on this public terminal on the convention floor. I'm retyping this from my lecture notes.]

When a curricular weblog program was made available to all students, faculty and staff at a small liberal arts university, the students, expected to blog as part of their course grade, initially expected to be told what to write about, how frequently to write, and how many words were required. While about a quarter of the students rarely if ever blogged more than the bare minimum, and therefore appreciated being told exactly what their blogging should be, other students quickly developed a sense of audience and ownership over their own blogging space; these students object to "forced blogging" assignments, reporting that their regular readers found those entries boring, or becuase the academic discourse they felt they had to adopt jarred with the tone offered by the rest of the site's content. The field of composition studies encourages students to invest themselves in and take ownership over their writing. How do issues of "investment" and "ownership" translate into their participation in a shared blogging environment? My presentation examines the tension between forced blogging and voluntary blogging. Blogging is a medium that developed to meet the needs of a specific kind of writer. As many of us who teach with weblogs have quickly recognized, not every student is that kind of writer. Incorporating blogging into our curricula requires us to address these questions.

New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University

Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in their Academic WeblogsCCCC 04)

Among those in the audience was Ann Raimes, whose "Keys for Writers" I've used for years. She's considering using blogs as an example of student writing in her next revision, and says she's been reading through SHU student blogs.

Sarah Jane Sloane, "Blog is My Co-Pilot: Blogs in a Graduate Classroom."
Cynthia Cox, "Blogging and the First-Year Composition Classroom"
Bonne Smith, "All Along the Blogwatch Tower"
Lisa Langstraat, respondent: "In Blog We Trust"Teaching the Blog (CCCC 2004)

I wasn't able to meet Sarah Jane Sloan, whose dissertation on interactive fiction, Interactive Fiction, Virtual Realities, and the Reading-Writing Relationship, is a tremendously valuable resource for the study of text adventure games as narratives. Sloane wasn't actually here -- she was arriving at the conference late, so Langstraat read Sloane's paper.

Sloane identified the start of the weblog culture with the 1996 Geocities offer of free home pages, and then credited Jorn Barger with the term "weblogging" in 1997. There's a great deal of difference between a Geocities home page and a blog; as far as describing the development of personal online publishing, the chronology makes sense, but the format of the blog was being used by the authors of the earliest web pages. And Barger didn't exactly coin the term "weblogging" -- in a Dec. 1997 newsgroup posting, he announced that he was going to start a log of his daily web readings, and the name of the file where he placed this log ended with "weblog.htm". His post didn't actually use the word "weblog" in its present sense, and he credits Frontier and Scripting News for the form.

All three presenters treated weblogging as experimental, all three were blogging in writing classes (two of which were, I believe, freshman composition, and one graduate writing course), and the latter two particularly followed at format of "what I thought I was going to do with blogs" followed by "what actually happened".

Of the 60 or people in the audience, only a few raised their hands when one presenter asked how many of them were bloggers; I was a little surprised to see that, when the presenter asked how many people use blogs to teach, more hands went up -- instructors who don't actually identify themselves as bloggers are requiring their students to blog. I don't make this observation as part of an argument that only bloggers should be allowed to teach with blogs, but because it seems that teaching with blogs is not enough to make some people feel that they are "really" bloggers. This is directly analogous to the observation that students who blog only because their instructor tells them to are missing out on the benefits that those of us who are excited about blogs tend to observe.

Cox observed that, despite her explanation of what she expected in terms of the length, frequency, and content of student blogging, students tended to find their own values for the online writing that they did.

[Whoops, the next session is about to start... this blog is unfinished, but I'd better post it now.]

A mattress and box springs stacked near a curb catch the professor's eye. There is some scrap metal on top of the mattress, along with a few sticks of discarded lumber. He reaches into his pocket and retrieves the small, round magnet attached to his key chain. "This," he says, "is a scrounger's most important tool." If the magnet is attracted to the metal, then it's probably iron and therefore not worth grabbing. Iron isn't worth much at the scrap yard. If the magnet is not attracted, then the metal might be aluminum, a more sought-after commodity. The magnet likes the metal, and so we leave it behind. --Thomas Bartlett explores the recycled and only occasionally stinky life of "punkass anarchist" professor Jeff Ferrell.

--The Emperor of Scrounge: A tenured professor becomes a Dumpster diver (Chronicle)

Just in case my current SHU gig doesn't work out, it's good to explore the alternatives.

As you've probably noticed, the look of this page has been updated. What do you think of the new look? (Please leave your opinion in the comments for this entry. For reference, here's the old look.)

Put a +2, +1, 0, -1, or -2 at top of your comment indicating how you feel.

FYI This entry written by Will Gayther - I wrote the software that runs this weblog, and did most of the redesign.What Do You Think Of The New Weblog Look?

If you have an AOL Instant Messenger account, send an IM to InfocomBot or InfocomBot2. I set up an automated bot to play classic Infocom text adventure games from your favorite IM client, T-Mobile Sidekick, or any other device that connects to AIM. It supports "save" and "restore" commands, so you don't need to lose your place. --Classic Infocom Games via AOL Instant Messenger (Waxy)

A great link... thanks for the suggestion, Chris.

--Technorati's Speech Bubble Icon (Technorati)

What Technorati used to call its "Link Cosmos" appears to have been replaced by "Web Conversations." The speech bubble icon that calls up a list of inboud links referencing a particular website is now part of the Technorati logo. Much less new-agey, much more down-to-earth. I haven't time to investigate that just now, but I thought I'd note it. At first glance, it looks like Technorati is trying to retool itself as a site for writers...

English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It?s 6:50 in the morning. After logging in, he opens up his personal page on the school Intrablog. There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times front page headlines and clicks through one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. With a quick click, Tom uses the ?Furl it? button on his toolbar, adds a bit of annotation to the form that comes up, and saves it in his Furl journalism folder which archives the page and automatically sends the link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for students to read when they log in. Next, he scans a compiled list of summaries that link to work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before. With one particularly well done response, he clicks through to the student?s personal site and adds a positive comment to the assignment post. He also ?Furls? that site, putting it in the Best Practices folder which will send it to the class homepage as well for students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he created to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It?s 7:00. --Will Richardson --Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School # (Weblogg-ed)

A good description of how one might use content-aggregating tools to link blogs in efficient and productive ways.

No assembly lines. No wireless Internet service or lattes Most work was done with hand or horses. Unlike modern ?death march? projects, 27 people actually died in the course of engineering the Brooklyn bridge.

Modern web developer	Washington Roebling's team
3 week / month release cycle	14 year release cycle
Electricity	Horses
Coffee, doughnuts and air conditioning	Water and the elements (think muggy NYC summers)
Carpal tunnel syndrome	The bends
Layoffs	27 Deaths

If nothing else, the Brooklyn bridge is a reminder of what difficult projects are truly like. Sitting at a desk all day arguing through bug triage meetings might be frustrating, but it?s nothing compared to what these people had to go through.

--Programmers, designers and the Brooklyn Bridge (UI Web)

Via Tomalak.

Your worst nightmare has come true. (Or maybe your fondest wish - if you are a sick little puppy.) The dead no longer stay dead. Zombies are taking over the planet. So what do you do? Give up and become a shishkabob for one of the ever growing ranks of the undead? Not on your life! You are prepared for this, thanks to the following list. --The Survival Guide for a Zombie World (http://zombiejuice.com)

This one's for Mike Arnzen.

This paper examines metablogging in terms of Dawkins's concept of the "meme" and Reddy's critique of the "conduit" metaphor for communication.... The language of metablogging uses metaphors that emphasize communality and proximity, and thus offers an alternative to the social risks Reddy associates with the conduit metaphor. --Dennis G. Jerz --(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing Metablogging via 'Meme' and 'Conduit' (BlogTalks)

Formerly viewed as a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy, blogging is slowly becoming more of a mainstream phenomenon on the Internet. Thanks to much media hype and some high profile blog sites, these online journals have captured the public?s imagination. As novice authors plunge into the thrilling world of blog publishing, they soon realize that publicly writing about one?s life and interests is not as simple as it might seem at first. As they become prolific writers, more bloggers find themselves having to deal with issues of privacy and liability. Accounts of bloggers either hurting friends? feelings or losing jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent. 

Here we report the findings from an online survey conducted between January 14th and January 21st, 2004. During that time, 486 respondents answered questions about their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy and accountability for the entries they publish online... --Blog Survey: Expectations of Privacy and Accountability (MIT Media Laboratory)

--Graphical User Interface Gallery Guidebook (Politechnika Szczecinska, Akademickie Centrum Informatyiki)

Here's part of a screen capture, showing the development of the "file manager" icon in Windows, from the original release to today. (On the site, clicking the icon takes you to another page that has screen captures of the interfaces for the various applications.)

The development of the icon reflects the change from files existing on floppy disks (which needed to be regularly swapped in and out of the early computers) to the metaphor of the file cabinet (presumably more familiar to computer users than the computer).

This page demonstrates how the development of the icon seems to lag behind the technology. How many websites still use what looks like a dot-matrix printer as the icon for "print this page"? The second to last icon in the list above looks like a PC Junior from the late 1980s, with its tiny horizontal cabinet. I guess they wanted enough room to emphasize the screen instead of the CPU, which is a sign that computer users were expected to think of the screen when manipulating their files, not the bits in the CPU (or the papers in the metaphorical file cabinet). The rightmost icon, which shows a flatscreen monitor and a tower case, is for Windows XP Professional; clearly Microsoft expects those users to have cutting edge equipment. The mouse icon has the center scrolling wheel and the keyboard has the curvy wrist rest -- both are recognizably Microsoft computer accessories.

My computer, like those of most on our campus, is black -- but Microsoft probably isn't interested in having its icons make users think of Dell. Does any Windows user actually own a flatscreen monitor with a plain white frame?

Good voice acting can't save a bad game, but talented actors can imbue a game script with genuine emotional freight. Some of the best in-game voice work is not the long bits of dialogue in boring cut-scenes, but tiny, subtle bits of atmosphere. In Tomb Raider, Lara Croft's quiet, voluptuous moans as she hurled herself off ledges were half of what made the character so erotically charged. In Super Mario 64, Charles Martinet?a longtime voice actor who has done dozens of Nintendo titles?does almost nothing but grunt, sigh, giggle, and gasp, yet he gives the tiny anime plumber a surprisingly human quality. --Clive Thompson --The Game's the Thing: Why are Hollywood actors starring on your PlayStation? (Slate)

The article actually focuses more on A-list actors who are starting to appear in videogames, but I found this section on non-verbal vocalizations interesting.

GREETINGS. MY BROTHER, THE LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION, WAS RECENTLY DEPOSED BY A VIOLENT COUP THAT DESTROYED ALL KEYBOARDS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING LOWERCASE LETTERS...

GREETINGS. I AM NOT THE BROTHER OF A RECENTLY DEPOSED LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION WHERE KEYBOARDS DONT HAVE LOWERCASE LETTERS.

I AM INSTEAD SOMEONE WHOSE WEBLOG HAS RECENTLY BEEN HIT WITH A VARIATION OF THE "NIGERIAN 419 SCAM".

I tell you, what with e-mail spam, pedophile-hunting viligantes, and the 419 scam, even the most far-out science fiction authors couldn't predict just how convoluted and endlessly strange the world would become, all thanks to the wonders of technology.

Some experts charge that the $1.4 billion antivirus industry is content with perpetuating a business model that is profitable for the companies, but onerous for the user. --Michelle Delio --Cashing In on Virus Infections  (Wired)

Using voice-recognition middleware developed by ScanSoft, Lifeline can recognize over 5,000 words and 100,000 phrases. In practice, that means that the game's main character, Rio, will understand anything that's relevant to her predicament, as well as many things that aren't.

Lifeline is thus a unique step toward deeper player immersion in the game world, but not simply because of the technology. It's because although Rio is the main character, "you" are not Rio -- "you" are another survivor, trapped in the security room of the space station, who is watching Rio on the security monitors and giving her advice. --Talk Your Way Out of Trouble  (Wired)

>Crowther's text-parser reborn? This particular game doesn't interest me very much, but the technology seems promising.

A new object has been discovered in the Solar System; it's nearly as large as Pluto, but 13 billion kilometres away. Tentatively named Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the Sea, it's approximately 1,700 km in diameter, which makes it the largest Solar System object found since Pluto was located in 1930. --Astronomers Find a Second Pluto (Universe Today)

On a platform before a crowd of curious onlookers, the scientists eagerly ripped open a box of CDs containing data from a newly released million-second-long exposure taken by two cameras onboard the Hubble telescope, and struggled to transfer the data to nearby computers as they answered a multitude of questions shouted out by reporters and middle-school students.

So began Science Live: The Race to Decode the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

--Michelle Delio --See Astrophysicists in Captivity  (Wired)

Odd... According to the museum website, this is "an unprecedented opportunity to watch competitive space science in action, as teams of astrophysicists from the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, and Stony Brook University race to decode strange space objects revealed in a newly released Hubble Space Telescope image."

I wonder... if this is supposed to get kids interested in science, will they be bored when they realize that "real" science doesn't offer this kind of artificial adrenaline injection? What if a "Bill Nye the Literature Guy" dressed up in a funny costume and pretended to do literary research in front of a camera, with a modest budget for special effects and gallons of caffeine for the editors to use when they stitch the show together?

Oh, well... maybe that's what poetry slams are...

Nobody won. Nobody even came close.

But that didn't stop organizers of the DARPA Grand Challenge from declaring an unusual race across the Mojave Desert a spirited success. --Marsha Walton

--Robots fail to complete Grand Challenge (CNN)

We're safe, for a little while longer, from the robot rebellion that will inevitably overwhelm us.

The effects of music on performance on a computer-mediated problem-solving task were examined. Participants completed the task in anonymous dyads as they were exposed to either Classical music, Punk music, or No Music. Results indicate that those in the Classical music condition performed better on the problem solving-task than those in the Punk music or No Music conditions. However, those listening to the Classical music offered more off-task comments during the task than those listening to No Music. Implications for website designers are discussed. --Christine Phillips --Does Background Music Impact Computer  (Usability News)

Via the reborn Webword. (Welcome back, John.)

I Want My Jerz.
Tough on Dirt, Gentle on Jerz.
Today's Jerz, Since 1903.
The Appliance of Jerz.
When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Jerz.
Hope It's Jerz, It's Jerz, We Hope It's Jerz...
Make Fun of Jerz. --The Advertising Slogan Generator (The Surrealist)

About that last one... Huh?

For decades, elementary schoolbooks have maintained that the Great Wall of China could be seen from space - but now the books are being rewritten. --China ends Great Wall space myth (BBC)

You've probably seen, heard or even used the term "spamming" to refer to the act of sending unsolicited commercial email (UCE), or "spam" to refer to the UCE itself. Following is our position on the relationship between UCE and our trademark SPAM.... Let's face it. Today's teens and young adults are more computer savvy than ever, and the next generations will be even more so. Children will be exposed to the slang term "spam" to describe UCE well before being exposed to our famous product SPAM. Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, "Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?" --Spam and the Internet (Spam.com)

I can't say I'm alarmed by the notion that children will be exposed to e-spam before they taste SPAM, but this article is remarkably free of the administrative and legalistic bluster that one usually associates with companies offended by misuse of their trademarks. A tip of the hat to Hormel -- this article makes me more sympathetic to a different victim of the spam onslaught. (But the lounge-lizard music on the SPAM home page has got to go.) (Found via KairosNews.)

In the 20th Century, making the news was almost entirely the province of journalists; the people we covered, or ?newsmakers?; and the legions of public-relations and marketing people who manipulated everyone. The economics of publishing and broadcasting created large, arrogant institutions -- call it Big Media, though even small-town newspapers and broadcasters exhibit some of the phenomenon's worst symptoms.

Big Media, in any event, treated the news as a lecture. We told you what the news was. You bought it, or you didn't. You might write us a letter; we might print it. (If we were television and you complained, we ignored you entirely unless the complaint arrived on a libel lawyer's letterhead.) Or you cancelled your subscription or stopped watching our shows. It was a world that bred complacency and arrogance on our part. It was a gravy train while it lasted, but it was unsustainable.

Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we're only beginning to grasp now. --Dan Gillmor --Making the News: Book Introduction (Draft)  (eJournal)

Gillmor has posted part of his forthcoming book, and is inviting comment. Today's a heavy grading & teaching day for me, and I've already got a backlog... maybe I'll come back to this later.

The day is saved when the Enterprise arrives, along with its commander, Adm. Janeway (Kate Mulgrew (news)), and the doctor (Robert Picardo (news)) from the "Star Trek: Voyager" TV series. --Vegas 'Trek' attraction could revive franchise (Hollywood Reporter)

Urk! Since when did Janeway command the Enterprise? Her ship is the Voyager.

The technical details of this attraction are enough to freak your inner geek: "Kasanoff and Johnsen assert that it is the first "Star Trek" production to be shot digitally; the first all-digital motion picture to incorporate live action and animation within a 3-D cinema environment; the first multiple-angle 3-D cinema production with 3-D effects from the front, overhead and both right and left sides of the participant; the first time a Steadicam has ever been used in a digital 3-D production; and the first worldwide attraction to use 2K digital cinema projection, which produces the highest-resolution digital projection commercially available."

What woman could resist a wedding proposal in the form of a brand-new computer? Johnson popped the question by etching the message, "Will you do me the honor?" into the side of the machine.
Photo: Courtesy Michael Johnson
--With This Rig, I Do Thee Wed  (Wired)

Found via Work in Progress, where Julie Young prays, "Let this never happen to me."

Miss Dyson, a student careers adviser, thought she was sending a private email to Alex Hewson, her boyfriend. By accidentally clicking on the "reply all" command, however, she distributed it to everyone on his original recipient list.

The message went to 30 friends of Mr Hewson, a PR executive with the firm Carat International. Many then forwarded it to their friends. --Roya Nikkhah --Red faces as email to boyfriend is seen by thousands (The Telegraph)

This story is a good example of how electronic text complicates the old categories of public and private communication.

I do think the headline suggests the content of the e-mail is a bit racier than that suggested by the quotations in the story.

David Thomas sent me some pictures of me from the Princeton conference... he promises more photos (and, if he hasn't had second thoughts), a long blog post soon.

Update: David's Princeton video game conference notes are up now.

Here is the lineup for session 2. (Note the joysticks in the foreground.)

• Dennis Jerz / You are standing at the beginning of a road: examining Will Crowther's "Advent" (c.1976)
• Christy Wampole / Electronic games as a constrained medium
• Robert Bowen / Musical by-products of Atari 2600 games

Playing something (probably "Atari Adventure") on the projection screen, courtesy the Atari 2600 brought by Nick Montfort.

A Few Photos from Princeton Video Game Conference

Blips, bloops and beeps emit from the room that houses the exhibit, where a dozen video-arcade games from the late 1970s and '80s are lovingly arranged in chronological order, each lit with a single spotlight. Three free tokens, good for one game play each, are included with museum admission. Additional tokens may be purchased for 25 cents each.

Buy a bagful of those tokens, because these games are just as addictive as they were back in your misspent youth. --Michelle Delio --When Space Invaders Ruled Earth  (Wired)

From the online exhibit:

Back on store shelves, video-game companies are discovering what the music industry has known for a long time: the past can be mined for profit. The classics are being cloned, emulated, compiled, enhanced, and updated for a home market made up of children craving novelty and post-boomers binging on nostalgia. --Carl Goodman

those in the humanities tended to distrust the technology, and those in the sciences often considered humanities-applications to be wasteful of a precious resource.

Specific kinds of projects, however, were more readily assisted by 1960s technology, even if character-sets were inadequate because computer-printers had either an all-uppercase or upper-and-lowercase character-set that was designed to represent standard English language. Nonetheless, medievalists, despite their graphic needs, generally made the heaviest use of the technology, often to assist preparing editions of manuscripts --A Brief History of Computer Concordances (CCRH)

Just taking a little break from videogame blogging...

It's a dangerous mistake to believe that statistical research is somehow more scientific or credible than insight-based observational research. In fact, most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science: ethnography is its closest analogy in traditional fields of science. --Jakob Nielsen --Risks of Quantitative Studies (Alertbox)

Note... he's specifically talking about research into design -- he's not saying qualititaive research is always better than quantitative research.

44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files

In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Some 44% of the nation?s adult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:

• 21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.
• 20% say they have allowed others to download music or video files from their computers.
• 17% have posted written material on Web sites.
• 13% maintain their own Web sites.
• 10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.
• 8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.
• 7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups.
• 7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.
• 6% have posted artwork on Web sites.
• 5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.
• 4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.
• 3% have contributed video files to Web sites.
• 2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone survey. In other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in early 2004, we have heard that between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have created diaries or blogs. In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. About a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog.

--Content Creation Online (Pew Internet Trust)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I'm not sure that permitting file-sharing should be in the same category as providing original content to the web, but it's still an impressive set of statistics.