November 2007 Archive Page

NY Times:

On one hand, as children we're taught that everyone makes mistakes and that the great thinkers and inventors embraced them. Thomas Edison's famous quote is often inscribed in schools and children's museums: "I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won't work."

On the other hand, good grades are usually a reward for doing things right, not making errors. Compliments are given for having the correct answer and, in fact, the wrong one may elicit scorn from classmates.

We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.

Here is the beginning of a poem that recent SHU graduate Moira Richardson read at her father's funeral this morning.

I am the twinkle in your eyes,
Eternal laughter sparkling,
Strong and silent,
My father.

Jeremy Douglass has published a Creative Commons dissertation on interactive fiction. I recently brought a printout into my "Writing about Literature" class in order to help my undergrads (English majors, some of whom want to be professional writers or literature professors) see their homework assignments as points on a scale that includes books and beyond.

I ran the PDF through a text-to-speech program, and have been listening to it during my commute. I'm currently at 7 hrs 49 minutes of a 10-hr document. (I didn't include the index and the bibliography when I converted the file to sound.) 

Douglass does an excellent job acknowledging the debt that IF scholarship owes to the pioneering work of Janet Murray and Espen Aarseth (each of whom have treated IF as part of a larger study on digital narrative), and he also offers a good analysis of the full-length studies of IF by Buckles, Sloane, Montfort, and Maher.  He politely but unflinchingly points out how the limited number of IF works chosen for close readings has led to oversimplifications and assumptions in later scholarship.  Because IF is a rather obscure topic, scholars have to present a lot of formal exposition and generic exposition in order to clear a path to their more advanced insights, but Douglass moves beyond the basics very quickly, so there is much of value to ponder. (I will give it a traditional read-through when I'm finished listening to it...  depending on the audio version for the first read is an experiment that I'm rather enjoying.)

For me, the greatest pleasure in reading this work is the insightful close readings of moments, scenes, puzzles, and specific interactions that illustrate the greater theoretical point. I also felt challenged (in a good way) by his re-thinking of the categories into which the history of IF tends to be placed.  I will very likely assign at least

The Interactive Fiction (IF) genre describes text-based narrative experiences in which a person interacts with a computer simulation by typing text phrases (usually commands in the imperative mood) and reading software-generated text responses (usually statements in the second person present tense). Re-examining historical and contemporary IF illuminates the larger fields of electronic literature and game studies. Intertwined aesthetic and technical developments in IF from 1977 to the present are analyzed in terms of language (person, tense, and mood), narrative theory (Iser's gaps, the fabula / sjuzet distinction), game studies / ludology (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and filmic representation (subjective POV, time-loops). Two general methodological concepts for digital humanities analyses are developed in relation to IF: implied code, which facilitates studying the interactor's mental model of an interactive work; and frustration aesthetics, which facilitates analysis of the constraints that structure interactive experiences. IF works interpreted in extended "close interactions" include Plotkin's Shade (1999), Barlow's Aisle (2000), Pontious's Rematch (2000), Foster and Ravipinto's Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003), and others. Experiences of these works are mediated by implications, frustrations, and the limiting figures of their protagonists.

Ars Technica:

Earlier this month, Pennsylvania's Express-Times reported on a local school librarian who put up her own "Just Say No to Wikipedia" signs in the computer lab. The entire Warren Hills Regional School District in New Jersey has also blocked access from all school computers. The basic problem, according to officials, is that Wikipedia's unverified accuracy and ease of use are making it too tempting for students to use as a primary source.

Wikipedia officials certainly don't dispute that characterization and have never held the site up as a tool for academic work, except as a jumping-off point. But the New Jersey response is interesting in that it represents an extreme response to the problem.

Perhaps it's a necessary one, though. I checked in with my wife, a college professor who assigns plenty of papers to her students. Despite an unceasing stream of comments about how Wikipedia cannot be used as a scholarly source, students without fail will use it every semester and cite it in their work, even in upper-level classes. The site is just so easy to use that the temptation to do so can be overwhelming... especially when it's 1 AM and the library has closed.

Students are still citing Wikipedia even after the professor says it's not an acceptable source? If the students are simply dropping off their papers on the last day of class, and they have no chance to get feedback or correct their mistakes, then it's no wonder that each new set of students will make the same mistakes.

But if the same students keep doing it, perhaps that needs to add a homework assignment where students have to submit their sources two weeks before the paper is due, so that students who bomb that assignment have time to learn what other sources are available.

Many students have heard their teachers warn them against using the site, but only after I show them how easy it is to edit an article, and they realize that they, too, could add whatever they want, does it really sink in that they have to be critical about what they read (not just on Wikipedia, but everywhere).

Banning the site deprives them of the chance to learn that lesson.

As preparation for writing a traditional research paper, students could add to the Wikipedia entry for their school or community, or they could look for other acceptable sources and add them to the Wikipedia entry.

When students are writing about some areas of popular culture, culture, user-authored sites such as Wikipedia and Urbandictionary, or game databases like MobyGames are actually far more useful than academic sources (which take months or even years to appear).   

Regardless of the subject, a reading assignment could involve reading a discussion about "neutral point of view" or "notability" in a contested article, so that students can see for themselves just how knowledge is constructed in Wikipedia. They could compare the "neutral" Wikipedia article to a pair of articles that argue "for" or "against" a particular interpretation

Gamers with Jobs reviews Amazon's Kindle.

Now that Jess has finished vampire romance novel number 324, I spend some quality time goofing around with the Kindle. It's surprisingly easy to get non-Amazon material on it. I just plug it in to the USB cable which perpetually hangs off the back of my laptop, and it shows up as a hard drive. I drop .txt and .mobi files into the "Book" folder and they show up. I convert a handful of PDFs to .mobi files using Mobi Creator and they work perfect, Tables of Contents and all. Sweet.

Earlier I blogged about the skeptical reviews on Amazon's site, but the knowledge that I can read student papers or classic literature on this thing makes me much happier. The price is too much for me, though...

Guardian (UK):

Police forces should issue comical caricatures of the criminals they are hunting instead of standard photofits, according to a team of scientists who found that cartoon-like faces are better at jolting people's memories.

The article has a great illustration -- a defenestrated couch on the ground outside the psych building. Patricia Cohen, NYT.

For decades now, critics engaged in the Freud Wars have pummeled the good doctor's theories for being sexist, fraudulent, unscientific, or just plain wrong. In their eyes, psychoanalysis belongs with discarded practices like leeching.

But to beleaguered psychoanalysts who have lost ground to other forms of therapy that promise quicker results through cheaper and easier methods, the report underscores pressing questions about the relevance of their field and whether it will survive as a practice.

Given how psychoanalytic ideas have shaped the culture, the issue reverberates far beyond the tiny cluster of psychoanalysts. They worry that the gradual disappearance of psychoanalytic theory from psychology curriculums means that those ideas are bound to be applied incorrectly as new advances are neglected.

This story brings Facebook shaming to another level.

It tells the story of an intern at a bank who emails his bosses about needing to take a day off work in October to take care of some family business in New York City. But his bosses discover a picture of him at a party in Worcester, Massachusetts, uncovering his duplicity. Worse, his boss attach ed the picture to a response email to him and BCC the entire North American staff of the bank. And, even worse, in the picture the intern--a young man named Kevin--is dressed a fairy--complete with green wings and a star-tipped wand. "Nice wand," the boss adds in his email.

Uh, no, it doesn't.

Interesting rhetoric, via YouTube. It re-mediates an animation that takes far too long to load, which is credited to Vishal Agarwala, who is apparently an undergraduate at the University of Florida.

The presentation is a useful tool for informing young people exactly why Facebook works so hard to get young people to love Facebook. A call for action, it is naive (right up there with the perennial freshman comp thesis statement, "Advertisers should stop hurting women's self-esteem by publishing images of idealized women"), and when judged by the standards of journalism, it is alarmist and one-sided.

Yes, young people should know why corporations want their personal information.

Sorry, but you can't put the real you on Facebook if you want to protect your privacy.

In Game Design Review, Krystian Majewski takes a common creative writing mantra and rips it a new one in a way that I haven't been able to get out of my head for some time.

It seems counter-intuitive but actually, LESS emphasis on some parts of the story create MORE emotional response. This is something which goes well with Rowan Kaiser's recent article in The Escapist. He suggests applying the admonition "Show, don't tell". I would go even further and change it into "Do, don't show" to avoid any misunderstandings. The problem is, as always, that games aren't movies.


Nooo! Look behind you! Turn around! .. Gaaah! Give me that controller, you incompetent idiot!

When we watch a thriller, and we see Janet Leigh take a shower and the killer waiting outside it creates suspense because we foresee what will happen but we have no means to change the course of events. We are doomed to watch the murder happen and thus can do nothing but feel sorry for the victim.
Games are different. In games we CAN do something. The player IS Janet Leigh and the only way she would make the decision to take that shower is if she didn't knew that there is a killer outside. In games the emotional connection does not happen through emphaty but through responsibility. As soon a the player realizes a decision was made by somebody else in advance, he disconnects emotionally: "Oh, ok, it is is not my fault, it was meant to happen".

The phrasing's a little off... "do" is a command for the player, while "don't show" is a warning to the designer.  So to make sense, the catchphrase should be "Don't show, make the player do" or "Don't show me, let me do," but I admit that's not as catchy as "Do, don't show."  

It's times like this that the world needs Latin. I'm a bit rusty, there, but with a little help let's see... "[something] to enact, not [something] to be shown" would probably be "agere, non manifestandum." (See my recent blog which included an aside praising obscure terminology.)

On Gamasutra, John Hopson says academics should not bother trying to get game designers to listen to any research that doesn't translate into more money for game companies.

When a researcher presents a product team with a set of research findings and recommendations, they are asking the team to invest time and money implementing their proposal. In order to convince the audience to spend that time and money, the researcher has to show clearly how that investment is going to pay off. This needs to be something beyond "this will help players identify more strongly with the main character".

The researcher must lay out the entire impact of the idea, from the cost of implementing the proposal to the resulting changes in player experience and the metrics for measuring that impact. Getting players to identify with the main character is great, but researchers have to finish the rest of the sentence: "This will help players identify more strongly with the main character which will result in an improvement in measures of overall player satisfaction and an increase in total playing time."

By the way, if the research doesn't include specific practical recommendations or a measurable impact on the final product, don't bother trying to sell it to the industry. From the average industry professional's perspective, there are only two things of value being said in a research presentation: the recommendations and their predicted effects. Everything else, the background research, the brilliant theoretical breakthrough, the clever development of the ideas, falls on industry ears like the "wah wah" noises made by Charlie Brown's teacher.

This is, of course, very practical. Game developers have to explain to their bosses why they should attend your academic talk on the history and social value of computer games instead of the one across the hall that tests a new formula for pixel shading or introduces a new technique for creating the reflections of flickering torchlight in fountains of blood gushing from an enemy's skin. (Okay, I'm exaggerating -- but not by much.) 

In the humanities, small groups of people (often grad students who are trying to find a footing for themselves) will organize a regional conference on a particular subject, and they will do it for the practical experience of learning how to run such a conference; they will do it in order to make a name for themselves in a small, emerging field; or they will do it to call attention to a subject they themselves are passionate about.  But industry conferences are, like industry itself, about money. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I learn quite a bit when I attend industry conferences  but I confess when I walk into an interesting session and find only a sales pitch for a product or company, I'm very disappointed. In my line of work, I most value the theory and background and insights, exactly what Hopson dismisses as "Wah wah."

Douglas McLennan (Arts Journal):

Newspapers have not traditionally been mass market. In fact they were the classic niche subsidy model. The genius of newspapers was that they aggregated lots of mini-content - comics, bridge columns, stock tables, crossword puzzles, the arts, business, sports - and built enough of a combined audience to subsidize the content that otherwise would not have paid for itself.

I don't know a single journalist who got in the business because they wanted to make sure Garfield or Dear Abby got delivered every day, but the fact is that the content that journalists think counts most - coverage of city hall, foreign reporting, investigations - does not have a big enough audience to pay for itself on its own.

Yet somewhere along the way, this idea of niche aggregation slipped away from the local paper and was replaced by the sense that every story ought to be comprehensible by every reader. The problem: in a culture that increasingly offers more and more choice and allows people to get more precisely what they want, when they want, and how they want it, a generalized product that doesn't specifically satisfy anyone finds its audience erode away. The more general, the more broad, the more "mass culture" a newspaper tries to become, the faster its readers look elsewhere.

Tom Brokaw, via businessandmedia.org:

"I was at The Washington Post earlier today," Brokaw said. "And in the lobby they've got a wonderful graphic describing how the printing press works and where it is ... 75,000 copies an hour it can turn out. Its last run is at 2:15 in the morning and [has] an automatic paper roll that comes when they run out of paper and the ink is recharge and I looked at all that and I thought - 'Ten years from now, will it be here?' I don't know. Probably ... if you would do a hardcore analysis - probably not. It'll be probably digital 10 years from now."

In 2000, Salon posted an amusing spoof of Ginsberg's Howl.

I saw the best minds of my occupation destroyed by venture capital, burned-out, paranoid, postal,

dragging themselves through the Cappuccino streets of Palo Alto at Dawn looking for an equity-sharing, stock option fix,

HTML-headed Web-sters coding for the infinite broadband connection to that undiscovered e-commerce mother lode in the airy reaches of IP namespace,

who poverty and ripped Yahoo tee shirts, cubicle-eyed and wired on Starbucks sat up surfing in the virtual ether of one-million-dollar, one-bathroom condos next to the railroad tracks, skipping across the links of killer Web sites contemplating ... Java,

An excerpt from a story about The Laptop Club, a group of kids who crafted their own laptops from construction paper.

Name: Mandy
Age: 8 How often do you use a computer? Five times a week.
What do you like to do when you're using a computer? Play games and write stories and poems.
What will computers look like in the future? Well you see, if we had whole days to work on it, and bigger paper, I think we could make it way more detailed.
Who is better at using a computer, you or your parents? Games + me = good. Parents + trying = bad. I am better at using games and if you guys try them, you get crushed.
[ After being told this interview would be published on the internet ] "I'm going to be popular! I should make a blog button, right now."

While the second-most-common rating that Amazon customers have given this product is five stars, some 40% have given the Kindle one star.  The vast majority have not purchased the product, but are simply warning other would-be customers about bad experiences with previous e-book purchases, including e-books purchased from Amazon.

I still want one...

Via Newsweek:

It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

"The book," says Jeff Bezos, 43, the CEO of Internet commerce giant Amazon.com, "just turns out to be an incredible device." Then he uncorks one of his trademark laughs.

Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books professionally and personally--he's a big reader, and his wife is a novelist--he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf all media. "Books are the last bastion of analog," he says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We're in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world's largest virtual store. "Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn't." Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0.

Lost Pig wins Interactive Fiction Competition 2007.

Pig lost! Boss say that it Grunk fault. Say Grunk forget about closing gate. Maybe boss right. Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget. Boss say Grunk go find pig, bring it back. Him say, if Grunk not bring back pig, not bring back Grunk either. Grunk like working at pig farm, so now Grunk need find pig.

Second place: An Act of Murder

"Frederic Sheppard." Chief Inspector Duffy pulls at his moustache mournfully and stares up at the house through the windshield. "Theatrical sort, usually has a finger in some play or other. He bought up Gull Point about ten years ago. Never any complaints from the neighbours, never any scandals." He pulls at his moustache again. "He was found dead in the cove at the foot of the cliff behind the house about half an hour ago. Caller said it looked as though he fell from his study window."

Third Place: Lord Bellwater's Secret

As an aspiring groom in Lord Bellwater's household, recklessness has not been one of the qualities for which you, Bert Smith, would wish to be noted. However, desperate times call for desperate measures, and here you are in the early hours of the morning of Saturday 20th June 1863, undertaking the most reckless venture of your life.

Inside Higher Ed has an interview with Christine L. Borgman

The scholarly communication system has evolved over a period of centuries -- it doesn't shift quickly. Scholarly journals still look a lot like they did in the 17th century, for example. The tenure system is a much stronger driver of scholarly infrastructure than is technology. Scholars are rewarded for publishing journal articles and books, in the right places. They are not rewarded for good data management, except in a very few fields. Rewards for open access publishing are indirect, such as more citations, and recognition of these benefits has been slow to emerge.

Politico.com:

Only 20 percent said they'd exchange their vote for an iPod touch. But 66 percent said they'd forfeit their vote for a free ride to NYU. And half said they'd give up the right to vote forever for $1 million.

BBC:

A Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from "rooms" in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website. The 17-year-old is accused of stealing 4,000 euros (£2,840) worth of virtual furniture, bought with real money.

Joe Napsha writes in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Downtown Greensburg could have a hands-on science center for children and adults at the former Mellon Bank building if two natives can make their dream a reality.

An interactive science center would feature a wide range of exhibits featuring sight, sound, motion, light and gears -- "anything with science involved," said Douglas Lingsch, 43, a businessman who lives in Bedford in Bedford County. He and his wife, Mari-Pat, hope to open the Discovery & Interactive Science Center in the fall of 2008 or 2009, he said.

They anticipate creating an attraction similar to the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Douglas Lingsch said.

Sign me up to volunteer!

Mike Edwards, a civilian instructor at West Point, reflects on the academic reaction to a new army field manual that plagiarizes large swaths of complex material, sometimes verbatim, from published sources. Part 1, Part 2.

The scandal, though, is this: according to anthropologist David Price, the published version of the Army's FM 3-24 on Counterinsurgency is deeply and thoroughly plagiarized, particularly in its Chapter 3, which patches together a wide range of verbatim or minimally edited passages from prominent sociological and anthropological texts without any sort of sufficient documentation in order to establish a series of definitional terms for use by officers, NCOs, and soldiers seeking to implement counterinsurgency tactics in the field.

Now, initially, when I saw this, I immediately got out all my old FMs: not a single works cited among them. David Price writes that "The cumulative effect of such non-attributions is devastating to the Manual's academic integrity," but apparently fails to grasp that this is in some ways a matter of genre: FMs are manuals for use in the field rather than the library, and the sergeants and lieutenants and captains who will put them to use are far less interested in where ideas come from than in matters of implementation. Some officers I've spoken to have echoed the observation that Army writing is community property and definitionally in the public domain, which likely contributed to the habits of mind that led to the failures of documentation. I don't believe that excuses the plagiarism -- particularly given Price's point that "The most damning element of the Manual's reliance on unattributed sources is that the Manual includes a bibliography listing of over 100 sources, yet not a single source I have identified is included" -- but it does help to explain it.

Author, blogger, and unrepentant geek Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley "The Writers Make Me Save the Ship Every Other Episode" Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, uses an interactive fiction trope for a little comparative media analysis.

LOOK
>A twisty maze of passages, all alike, is behind you. You face a wall with four doors.

EXAMINE DOORS
>There are four old doors: Movies, Television, Books, and Games.

(Misleading title... it's not actually a review of the Infocom game "A Mind Forever Voyaging." Oh, and the ">" should be before what the player types, not before what the computer prints out, but Wheaton does show a nostalgic familiarity with the medium.)

According the Beeb:

A supposed asteroid, which it was feared was going to have a near-miss with Earth next week, has been identified as a spacecraft.

Just in case you were heading to the kitchen to make a tinfoil hat, I should clarify... that's an Earth spacecraft -- the European Rosetta.

Someone bought a collection of old slides from a second-hand shop, scanned them and posted them online, then got in touch with the photographer -- who had tossed them into a trash bin 30 years ago.

I was an artist in Vietnam and served with the Department of Information, Mac Headquarters. During my time there I shot hundreds, if not thousands, of 35 mm slides and photos. Years ago we moved from Siloam Springs Akansas to Hawaii. I had boxes and boxes of slides, photos etc. I had all this stuff in storage for years and upon moving decided it was time to move on and get rid of it. I tossed all the slides and numbers of photos in a dumpster by the alley of our old business - Grantree & HIll Gallery and Framing in Siloam Springs. You are the second person to contact me that purchased slides at an antique shop in Arkansas. She was a professional photographer and appreciated my work also. It seems someone had to climb into the dumpster, sort them out and then sell them to a shop where you and others purchased. What a story. I appreciate your interest and my time in Vietnam was needless to say a life experience.

In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd reflects on the show biz writers' strike.

Hillary Clinton had the bad luck to fumble a debate before the writers' strike knocked late-night comics off the air.

"I shudder to think what's happening to all the kids who keep in touch with world news by listening to reports of late-night comedians," said David Thomson, the film historian.

I watch so little TV that this strike will little impact on the way I spend my leisure time... but I am following the story because one of the issues is how writers will be compensated for online remediations of their work.

I spent a few minutes enjoying Homestarrunner's Peasant Quest.  The text-and-image hybrid is not something I played as a kid -- I guess I just missed that stage.

Well, Google didn't say "glarbifulous" on its own, but I had a good reason to search the internet for a nonsense word.

In order to confirm my feeling that the Associated Press's preference for "Web log" is far less popular online than the traditional "weblog," I did a quick Google search.

12,900,000 Google hits for ["weblog"]

I expected that. For years, my own blog has been ranked anywhere from 99 to about 180 out of however many hits there are for "weblog," and I've been tracking that number every year when I submit my annual faculty report. I thought that maybe that number was a little lower than I remembered, but I realize that Google's numbers fluctuate as it re-indexes older sites.

I wasn't surprised when I found only a paltry

250,000 Google hits for ["web log"]

... since only AP writers format the term that way. But when I tried to exclude the AP articles that use "web log," I found... 

24,700,000 Google hits for ["web log" -AP]

Why do I get ten times more hits  for what should be a more restrictive search? 

The Googly weirdness does not stop there. When I include AP, why do I get 25,000 more hits than when I exclude it?

275,000 Google hits for ["web log" AP]

The nonsense word "glarbifulous" appears nowhere on the internet (though that will change once Google notices this post). I was quite surprised, then, to see that after excluding "glarbifulous" from my search, I find...

175,000,000 hits for [weblog -glarbifulous]

That's more than ten times as many sites as I get when I don't exclude the nonsense word. How can so many more pages NOT have a word that doesn't exist?

Maybe Google has paid closer attention to the quality of pages that contain the word "weblog," removing a lot of junk results that it figures are pointless. But maybe when I ask Google to do a search for something less popular, it thinks I might actually be interested in some of the sites it would otherwise ignore. Suddenly, every single page in its database that doesn't include "glarbifulous" becomes potentially relevant, since each of those pages has met a criterion that I have specified.

That seems to make sense, but it also seems, well, twisted. I just did a search for "the" by itself, and "the -glarbifulous" and got similar results.... about twice as many hits for the more restrictive search.

According to Rebecca Blood, in early 1999, Jesse James Garrett posted a list of 23 web sites that posted links and brief commentary. The Wayback machine's archive of Garrett's site returns this list from early 2000.

bradlands
bump
camworld
flutterby
genehack
gulker
hack the planet
honeyguide
jjg.net infosift
linkwatcher metalog
ltseek
macronin
nowthis
obscure store
peterme
psyberspace
rasterweb
rc3.org
researchbuzz news
robot wisdom
scripting news
windowseat
whump.com more like this

It might be interesting to see what happened to each of these sites.  When I started blogging later in 1999, I hadn't heard of a single one of these, though I was very familiar with the genre of what was then called the "list of links."  In February of 1998, while working at the University of Toronto' s Engineering Writing Centre, I urged web authors to "Annotate Your Lists of Links."   Later that same year, one of the e-school staff members e-mailed me a link to Arts & Letters Daily, which was precisely that -- an annotated list of links, carefully selected and always worth visiting. 

When I first started blogging in the spring of 1999, I closely copied the format of A&L Daily, which used multiple columns, did not date its entries, and used "[more]" as the link. (I first dated an entry on July 20, 1999, because I was writing about the 1969 moon landing, and I wanted to emphasize that the event took place exactly 30 years earlier, and I've dated every entry since then -- about 5500 separate entries.)

Arts & Letters Daily, which did not focus on technology issues, was not on the early 1999 list of 23 sites that have become accepted as the canonical list of early blogs. There must have been many, many other sites that were not part of this particular subnetwork; I seem to remember Blood's claims that

Before the weblog genre had a name (the term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger, 10 years ago next month... his site, "robotwisdom," is one of the canonical 23), home pages had guest books, web-based discussion boards had postings and threads, and in the pre-Google days when new content was hard to find on the web, a "What's New?" page (with a collection of short links) was an important part of large, active websites.  Many sites featured a "link of the day" or a "link of the week," though you often had to click the link to find out what was on the other end.  Dating from about 1995 was the concept of the "Web Ring," which was a standard interface that webmasters put on their home pages, with "next" and "previous" links that went offsite, to other pages in the "ring" (populated by a centrally-hosted database). 

After Googling for a bit, I just learned that the Web Ring concept was invented by Sage Weil, apparently in May 1994. In 1995, he started a company that was eventually bought out by GeoCities, which was in turn bought by Yahoo!  I remember now that the Yahoo! Webrings was a bit controversial, since Yahoo! didn't implement all the features of the original WebRing concept, though recently a Webring 2.0 concept was spun off from Yahoo!

One final note... an undergraduate student of mine, Kirsten Schubert, wrote a term paper on weblogs in 2002, which was well before there was any published scholarship on the subject. It's a good time capsule of what was available at the time -- general articles on hypertext rhetoric and digital authorship. (When teaching that class, I hadn't yet come across Mortensen and Walker's 2002 article, Blogging Thoughts -- the first academic essay focusing on blogs.)

WCBS-TV:

The spam scam involves users unknowingly sending their MySpace friends e-mails and posting comments on their profiles that plug a ploy for the supposedly free gift card that they'll never actually see, touch, or spend.

In fact, to lead the younger members on, the ads are written in "kids-speak." One such posting starts off by telling the victim, "Hey dude, check it out! You ain't gunna believe this!"

[...]

"It is an epidemic on MySpace," PC Magazine Executive Editor Jeremy Kaplan tells wcbstv.com. "It is a big problem particularly because of the pervasiveness of MySpace. If you're in junior high, high school, college -- half the world seems to have MySpace pages -- so the younger you are, the more frequently you use it and the more likely you are to encounter this thing. It is a huge problem."

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, spoke at Stanford last June:

Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure--humor, thrills, emotional titillation, or even the odd delight of being vicariously terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenges us with a vision of who we might become. A child who spends a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and transformed the way that child would be spending the time rehearsing a play or learning to draw.

If you don't believe me, you should read the statistical studies that are now coming out about American civic participation. Our country is dividing into two distinct behavioral groups. One group spends most of its free time sitting at home as passive consumers of electronic entertainment. Even family communication is breaking down as members increasingly spend their time alone, staring at their individual screens.

The other group also uses and enjoys the new technology, but these individuals balance it with a broader range of activities. They go out--to exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about three times the level of the first group. By every measure they are vastly more active and socially engaged than the first group.

Hmm... multiplayer online games do involve social skills, teamwork, leadership, and many other things that I would consider a social activity, rather than passive entertainment.  The culture of gaming is a spectrum, like all cultures.  It includes those who sit slack-jawed before the screen for hours, mesmerized by bits; but it also includes those who trade tips and write reviews online, and those who write fan fiction, remix videos, or teach themselves 3D design so that they can build their own game levels. The child who, inspired by an encounter with a computer game, spends a month learning how to draw with a 3D design tool can be awakened and transformed as much as a child who spends a month drawing with pen and pencil. 

But I do share Gioia's humanistic assumption that technology is best understood and most welcome as one element of a rich and diverse society, rather than a replacement for human interaction.

Thanks, Mike, for the e-mail.

Clive Thompson, from Wired:

I know I'm the underdog; I know I'm probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I'm poor.

Specifically, I'm poor in time. The best players have dozens of free hours a week to hone their talents, and I don't have that luxury. This changes the relative meaning of death for the two of us. For me, dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me.

Or to put it another way: The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes -- haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away -- just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3.

I do not mean, of course, to trivialize the ghastly, horrific impact of real-life suicide bombing. Nor do I mean to gloss over the incredible complexity of the real-life personal, geopolitical and spiritual reasons why suicide bombers are willing to kill themselves. These are all impossibly more nuanced and perverse than what's happening inside a trifling, low-stakes videogame.

But the fact remains that something quite interesting happened to me because of Halo. Even though I've read scores of articles, white papers and books on the psychology of terrorists in recent years, and even though I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, something about playing the game gave me an "aha" moment that I'd never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act.

Scott McLemee writes about an intellectual brownout that came to him during a party, when he was asked to comment on a book he knew well.

People who consume two or three books a month, for example, might be less susceptible to moments of total overload than those who read two or three a week. Some situations require learning to handle texts like a meat packer carving up pigs on an assembly line. Certain skills are involved, and they are good skills to have. You can learn to wield the blade with some precision without losing a finger. But efficiency counts, because there's always another pig coming at you.

Patti Dobranski, Tribune-Review

"The secret state police were at the door. They came to arrest my father. On Nov. 9, at 8:30 p.m., I lost my German citizenship. I said 'Let's get out of this hellish country.' I just wanted to go somewhere else."

But Nov. 9, 1938, was more than Blaustein's personal hell. It would become known as "Kristallnacht" or "The Night of Broken Glass," full of screams of despair as the Nazis began their attack on the Jews by burning synagogues and looting homes and businesses. This night would mark the beginning of the end of 6 million Jews across Europe at the hands of the Hitler's Nazis.

The 81-year-old Mt. Lebanon, Allegheny County, resident told his story Tuesday night to a crowd that gathered inside St. Joseph Chapel at Seton Hill University for the 19th annual Kristallnacht Remembrance service sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.

I was in the back of the room, where the acoustics were not very good, so I was glad to find this account of Blaustein's speech.

In The Escapist, Tom Rhodes takes a stab at W.B. Yeats/Gordon Freeman slash crit. It's more of a nice try than a slam dunk; yes, it's possible to make these connections, and the insights are, well, insightful... but what the article lacks is an argument for why this interpretation is necessary, why it offers a better solution than so many other possible comparisons.

Half-Life 2 is the antithesis to Yeats' system, swapping the beast's triumphant aristocracy for Freeman's strive for equality and freedom. The name "Freeman" gives his mission more meaning than in the first game. In the original, he was a man trapped in extreme circumstances beyond his control, forced to fight not only extraterrestrial creatures but also contend with a military force dedicated to quashing the incident. In the sequel, he is so much more: a folk hero, a political icon, a quasi-religious figure, wielding his crowbar like God's wrath. When resistance members greet him in the game, they speak to him as if he's almost unreal, helping him in his cause, regardless of personal consequences. He has awakened after a "stony sleep," bringing a nightmare to the Combine's "rocking cradle" and its all too human figurehead. Both military commander and preacher, Freeman has come from "somewhere in the sands of the desert," and he is "a shape with lion body and the head of a man." His body is decked in orange and golden colors, much like a lion, but his head is that of a man, quietly contemplating his next move, your move, through the shadowy recesses of this ruined world in which he's been dropped.

I welcome any literate analysis of a video game, so I was happy to come across this.

But how do we apply the lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity"?  Freeman is the best, but he doesn't do anything unless the player directs him; is the player, who is full with "passionate intensity" for the game, really "the worst"?  The Combine hardly counts as the "Mere anarchy... loosed upon the world."  Freeman seems to be the one sowing anarchy, since the surviving humans seem so willing to follow Freeman, but the game doesn't give us any background information about Freeman that suggests he has any goal other than to survive.

The essay focuses on what the poem might possibly mean, but it quotes only selectively from the work; literary analysis is only partly about what a text might mean; it's also about how the text communicates that meaning (word choice; form; use of or rejection of or modification of or creation of convention; ), and it needs to make an argument for why the author's proposed interpretation is not merely possible, and not merely plausible, but necessary.

Someone, get his crowbar.

On Grand Text Auto, Andrew Stern writes a good post about the distinction between character-driven games and purely linear narrative (which makes for a poor gaming experience).

No one can disagree that games should be "player-driven", another way of saying games with high agency. I take a purist's view on this; I quickly lose interest in games that tell me a linear story, especially in large fixed chunks of exposition, such as cut scenes. I'd rather play a good action game with no storytelling, or if I want a linear story, I'd rather read a good book or watch a good movie.

But Yohalem's suggestions are misguided in not leaving room for games that make incremental innovation toward being both character-driven and player-driven. Surely there are stepping stones, without the glaring imperfections that can frustrate players, that make progress toward procedural characters with narrative intelligence. For example, The Sims 3 looks to be doing this. I'm guessing those characters will go further towards creating high-agency interactive stories than previous versions, while still speaking abstract Simlish, not natural dialog.

There's not a whole lot more to this short article from the Press Gazette, but it's another sign of Google's power:

Google is "hugely dangerous" and is one of the major preoccupations of News Corp, according to the editor-in-chief of Times Online.

Anne Spackman, speaking as part of a panel about the future of newspapers at the Society of Editors conference, said "the number one topic of conversation at News Corp is Google."

"Its move into DNA is a massive threat and I wonder whether we will all start feeling that they are behaving a bit too much like big brother," she said.

Cringely

Google Personalized Search now uses the terms from previous searches to help fine-tune the next search, which seems good in principle, but if someone searches first on "childcare" then later on "insurance" they are likely to be served ads for insurance for children, which might not interest them at all.

There are other issues like problems with Google Analytics, and the blogosphere, if you know where to look, is full of this stuff (check my links to the right, please). But what's worst is that this is all taking place in the context of a Google customer support system that is effectively broken. They say it isn't broken, but if it takes weeks to get an answer, customer service is broken.

Google's defense, of course, is that the company will make everything right once you prove to them that they made a mistake. But Google is defendant, judge, and jury. And even if they face reality and do the right thing, it may already be too late for smaller advertisers. An algorithmic change by Google can result in AdWords budgets that worked well for years becoming suddenly depleted. All of the advertiser's money is gone, often with little to show for it. Worse still, there is no money left for ads that might generate revenue. Google says it will do the right thing, but doing that six months later has no effect for a merchant five months out of business.

Google appears to simply not understand this. Maybe with so many big jets parked at Moffett Field they've forgotten what it is like to run a business on little capital. Maybe they don't care.

From Inside Higher Ed:

• An Enthusiast's View of Academic Blogs
• A Skeptic's Take on Academic Blogs

Spit & Polish:

When this game was first released in 1880 it was so hugely popular in taverns and inns that the bank of England was forced to mint more threepenny bits to keep up with demand.

Gotta love the mustaches and bowler hats.

Anthony Grafton, in The New Yorker

The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing. We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other electronic formats. But magazines and books still sell a lot of copies. The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.

In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jonathan D. Silver waxes poetic:

Where do all the pumpkins go, post Halloween's big costume show?
Are they left to rot and molder, as the weather trends ever colder?
Or is there some more organized scheme, to dispose of leftovers that aren't the crop's cream?
Wherefore do they, might they go? Inquiring minds want to know!

Silver is a clever writer, though his meter could be tighter.
It could use another edit, but I'm smiling 'cause I read it.

Jessica Mintz writes of University of Washington-Bothell professor Martha Groom's Wikipedia assignment:

"I would find these things on Wikipedia," she said, and would think, "Gosh, this is awfully thin here. I wonder if my students could fill this in?"

Wikipedia has been vilified as a petri dish for misinformation, and the variable accuracy of its articles is a point Groom readily concedes. Since the advent of the Web, she said, the quality of sources students cite has deteriorated.

For her students, the Wikipedia experiment was "transformative," and students' writing online proved better than the average undergrad research paper.

Knowing their work was headed for the Web, not just one harried professor's eyes, helped students reach higher - as did the standards set by the volunteer "Wikipedians" who police entries for accuracy and neutral tone, Groom said.

The exercise also gave students a taste of working in the real world of peer-reviewed research.

Kate Luce Angell writes an entertaining feature on my next-door officemate and his work in Seton Hill's Writing Popular Fiction MA program.

Award-winning author and Seton Hill University professor Michael Arnzen demonstrates that in horror, as in life, it's often the little things that matter most.

Take his short-short piece "Nightmare Job #3," which begins "Wanted: Town Sewage Treatment is now hiring expert diver."

It's only 100 words, so brief you could almost miss the part where he adds that job benefits include "free diving suit with harpoon gun."

[...]

Part of Mr. Arnzen's success has been the result of his use of new technology to distribute his work. He came up with the mini-poems he calls "gorelets" as a literary form that could be downloaded and read easily on the screen of a computer or personal digital assistant.

"I'm interested in potent nuggets of narrative, and horror has always been a shorter genre," he said. "Look at Edgar Allen Poe's stories and poems."

The little things also loom large in the subjects of his work, in which he finds the frightening in minutely observed, everyday details, like a janitor's glove (or IS it a glove?) and a pair of too-real bunny slippers.

"I'd like to think I'm doing the same thing comedians are, exploring our hypocrisies through observational humor," he said, adding that horror is often funny as well as fear-inducing. "I crack myself up all the time when I'm writing."