Part of an Ars Technica review of Google's new operating system.

Longtime Ars readers may be familiar with my periodic rants about the increasing disutility of the "volume/directory/file" metaphor for modern networked machines. Saving files, copying them, syncing them--this is all pointless clerical work that I want my computer to do for me.

Bravo.

I guess I won't be linking to any many more NYT articles.

NYT has disabled their special access for webmasters

One of my students posted this on her blog... she'll be presenting it tonight in class.  I'm looking forward to it!  Here's a parody, by Meagan Gemperlein

At the beginning of the semester, I had blogged about hating blogging, but really in the end it wasn't that terrible. I came to see how it can be useful in a classroom setting and help promote classroom discussion. So the song parody is a realization that blogging can only help you understand something and not hurt you.

BLOGGING IN THE USA

A Song Parody of "Party in the USA" sung by Miley Cyrus

I started reading Huck Finn mid October with a hope to understand the text

But then who's this dude who's talking weird

Woah, gotta be a dialect

Figured out it's Huck an he's the main character

The book's his adventure down the Mississippi River

But this is all so crazy

Cause I can't understand a word he's saying

My head is hurting and I'm feeling really confused

Too much reading and I'm uptight

That's when I mark the page and just move on

I'll just blog it later on, I'll just blog it later on, I'll just blog it late on

CHORUS:

So I sign on to my blog and I write my thoughts away

My classmate comment like yeah

And I get new ideas like yeah

So I sign on to my blog

Now I'll write a thesis that will be OK

Yeah, I'm just blogging in the USA (more)

Via Jay is Games

We are pleased to announce a very special Casual Gameplay Design Competition, one focused entirely on interactive fiction! For CGDC #7, we're calling on IF authors to craft one-room games incorporating the theme "escape". It's text-only this time around, so you can spend your time polishing puzzles instead of pixels. Full details are below, so fire up your Z-code compiler and get to writing!

• Design a one-room game of interactive fiction in Z-code that incorporates the theme: "escape".

• 1st place:
  • $1,000
• 2nd place:
  • $500
• 3rd place:
  • $250

The deadline for entries is
Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 11:59PM (GMT-5:00).

unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, "I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight."

"It has both currency and potential longevity," notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most "un-" prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar "un-" verbs (uncap, unpack), but "unfriend" is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of "friend" that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal." --Oxford University Press blog

Sadly, I haven't had time to play any of the IF Comp games this year, but here are the winners.

Vote Summary
Place	Game	Avg.	Std. Dev.	No. Votes
1	Rover's Day Out	7.96	1.65	92
2	Broken Legs	7.39	1.72	92
3	Snowquest	7.37	1.41	101

Many have defined the problem -- people are abandoning old media for new in droves -- but nobody has come remotely close to figuring out the formula to monetize this audience in a way that ensures the range and level of news and periodical content and offers the rich experience advertisers will pay a premium to be part of.

Pulling it off would take characteristic Apple hardware/software flair -- and a bit of uncharacteristic magnanimity. But the "X" factor is Jobs himself. Whatever you believe about his health, Jobs will not live forever. We're guessing that he, like all high achievers, believes that yesterday's accomplishments, however fantastic, are also yesterday's news. If he is looking for One Last Thing, saving journalism would be the Holy Grail. --Wired

Welcome to the "fakeosphere." Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs - or flogs - fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it's a $500 million-a-year industry - and he compares it to the explosive growth of spam a decade ago.

"I don't think people realize how big this has become, and how quickly," said Weintraub, adding that a popular top flog campaign can generate 10,000 daily sales. --MSNBC

I certainly realize it. Now that a lot of the conversations that used to take place on blogs are taking place on Twitter, I'm getting far more comments from spammers than from visitors. I'm glad to see someone's writing about this advertising trend.

At the 2009 Educause Conference, Inside HIgher Ed reports on The Cloud.

Woo, who took the anti-cloud position, said that just because higher education is moving en masse toward outsourcing services such as e-mail and data management to external providers does not necessarily mean it is moving in the right direction.

"I'm not sure why every conversation about cloud computing always has to do with 'When?' " Woo said. "Why aren't we asking, 'Why?' "

She cited recent Gmail outages and an anecdote from an organization she had advised who had said a cloud storage provider lost its data. "There are security risks, there are privacy risks -- where is that student data being stored? Where is that research data being stored? .... How is the private sector going to feel when when we can't guarantee that our research data our faculty are generating for them is safe?"

Dieckmann laid out the pro side first from an economic perspective, noting that economy has become a watchword as many IT departments seek to maintain a high level of service even as their budgets are pared down.

Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What's most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that are in XML into PDF to release them to the public, thinking that that's a good thing for citizens. Government: We can turn XML into PDFs. We can't turn PDFs into XML.

Flash isn't off the hook either. Government has spent lots of time and money developing flash tools to allow citizens to view charts and graphs online, and while we're happy the government is interested in allowing citizens to do this, Government's primary method of disclosure should not be these visualizations, but rather publishing the APIs and datasets that allow citizens to make their own. Only after those things are completed to the fullest extent possible should government be working on its own visualizations. While Adobe may say in their open government whitepaper:

"Since the advent of the web, an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information. Such technologies include HTML, Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology."

This is nonsense. --Sunlight Labs (via)

I just excerpted and linked to a story from the Huffington Post Blog, and after I checked my blog I found a strange link floating above all the rest of my text, making both my own text that was under the link and the link itself illegible.

I had already included a link to the HuffPo. I had to spend extra time locating and removing this extra crap that appeared in my clipboard buffer.

<div style="position: fixed;"><div id="new_selection_block0.017883485913577468" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><br /><br />Read more at: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html" target="_blank_">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html</a></div>

I feel bullied, or at the very least treated with the assumption that anyone copy-pasting from HuffPo intends to steal the content.

The next time I think of driving traffic to The Huffington Post, I'll remember how their CSS trick messed up my layout, and I'll probably pass.

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender. --Jim Whitehead

Peter Mawhorter offers up a reading list on games:

For anyone curious about what I've been reading, here's the list of what I've read to get an introduction to this area:

• "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story" by Nicole Lazzaro.
• "GameFlow: A Model for Evalucating Player Enjoyment in Games" by Penelope Sweetser and Peta Wyeth.
• "An Experiment in Automatic Game Design" by Julian Togelius and Jürgen Schmidhuber.
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster.

One other thing that I've not yet read but am interested in is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It's not targeted at games, and in fact looks at fun from a psychological perspective, but it's cited by most of what I've read so far, and is the product of some very thorough research.

I don't usually link to sites that collect a bunch of links and serve them up on a page full of ads, but this is a pretty good list from Squidoo.

Here you'll find the educational sites where my kids play online, and that are most often recommended by other parents who value fun learning games for their children.

1. Jumpstart Online Virtual World
2. PBSKids
3. Sesame Street
4. Disney Preschool
5. Nick Jr.
6. National Geographic Kids
7. Kaboose Funschool
8. FunBrain
9. Starfall
10. iKnowthat.com

Will I miss Geocities? No, not really. In 1998 or possibly 1999, I was teaching web authorship as part of a freshman composition class, and this page from a student project made me keep the "make a Geocities home page" and "make a creative hypertext" project around, even though every semester, a certain chunk of students complained about it. The plug has been pulled on Geocities, but I'm preserving a chunk of what it meant to me, as a teacher.

Miraculously, I, [Name], am able to create my own web pages.  The unthinkable is possible.  My ignorance about the computer world is coming to an end.  I am a student at the University of Eau Claire and I'm creating several web pages for English 110.  Come and check out my first web page at meet the family.  This link briefly summarizes a few childhood memories, personality traits, and individual hobbies. 

At the University of Eau Claire's home-page, you find information on UWEC's registration process, available classes, student services, job opportunities, blugold system, International exchange, and much more.  Search the UWEC home page to get a look at what the college has to offer.   

My English Professor, Dr. Jerz, and some of his students have created several web pages for faculty members and students to benefit from.  The Online Reading Room will guide you to helpful information on how to create a web page, how to write effective e-mails, top 5 tips for note taking, and more.    

If you like to play amusing, addicting computer games, try playing Eliza.  You make conversation with Eliza who listens and talks back.  She asks a lot of questions about your problems and sometimes does not make sense. 

English 110 with Dr.Jerz is not like the other English 110 classes.  His course page is the student's syllabus explaining the guidelines to assigned papers and projects.  Helpful examples of problems students run into when writing papers and creating web pages are also found at this site.  

My essay on how the Internet has affected my education. The challenges that I came across at college with computers were frustrating, but later greatly appreciated.  Computer skills are critical for college classes and in the end the frustration turns into gratitude.  

Read Martha's essay  one her web page about how the Internet has affected her education. She used the Internet in high school for fun and for note taking.  In college she now uses her computer skills for academic purposes.  Even though Martha uses the computer daily, she still feels much has to be learned.

 Danielle's essay is about her experience with the Internet.  She had some computer experience in her high school anatomy class looking at a fetal pig, but she came familiar with e-mail in college.  Now Dr. Jerz is challenging her and every student in English 110 to become less ignorant about the computer world.

For my creative hypertext, I wrote three essays from three different perspectives.  I wrote one essay from my dad's point of view, one from my point of view, and one from my point of view if I would still be living in Kansas today instead of living in Minnesota.  The three blurbs below give a brief summary of each essay.

Most students spent their spring break somewhere warm while I spent my break in Kansas visiting relatives.  A little conversation never hurt anyone even if it's farm talk.  With age comes an appreciation of understanding to not take history for granted.

Read from Dad's perspective of Kansas.  He tells how the vacation was through his eyes telling the highlights of the trip were seeing his sister, brother, and old friends.  Abilene recaptures old memories and by visiting he creates new.

Just imagine what life would be like if I would have remained living in Abilene.  Read the what if life where lived differently.   I go to college in Kansas, I am going to school to become a Vet (I hate animals), and I never had the chance to travel.  For my spring break, my brother and I take a trip to New York to visit my sister and trust me cowboy boots and hats don't fit in with the New Yorkers.

Looking forward to this promising resource.

I've wrapped the blogs up,  tidied them up, corrected & updated them and put them into 1 handy ebook for you to download and take home. It means you have have an all-in-one desktop reference to giving your multimedia journalism more spark, and getting in the entrepreneurial mindset.

Chapters include: video, audio, storytelling and branding.

It'll be available from Monday, it's 100% free and there's no registration or anything. Just click on the button and you'll be able to download it outright. --Adam Westbrook

Great stuff from Mark Marino... not only is the content fascinating, but the blog-sized presentation, for discusison, of a fundamental theoretical concept is a great example of what the blogging medium can do for (and to) scholarship.

Item for today: =

In Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo's article on the history of computers, the note the moment at which = moves from equivalency to assignment. Here is a moment where mathematical notation and code separate on the basis of assignment, where it moves from a real that represents abstractions to a realm that controls memory locations.

For all intents and purposes
Algebra: x = 0; and computer code: x=0;
seem to mean the same thing.

However, on the most fundamental levels, they are not. The one establishes equivalence of signs. The other tells the computer to store the value 0 in the location represented by x.

In CCS, we have not just a mathematical system, for surely much of algorithms is mathematical. However, when critics talk about the materiality of these performative declarations in programming languages, they are talking about this latter notion of x=2.

Again, I don't want to rule out the possibility of critically analyzing mathematics. I just want to talk about this moment of the separation, where the computational instructions gain additional semantic meaning because there signs are not just representations, but commands with material ramifications. --Mark Marino, Critical Code Studies

Clearly, the computer re-energized Bukowski and gave him new life as a writer. Yet much of Bukowski's late writing was about old age and death. The computer fit into this. In poems, letters, and in The Captain, Bukowski chronicled his struggles with the computer. The shutdowns, the lost poems, the time at the shop for repairs. This mirrored Bukowski's own health problems and trips to the hospital. The computer represented the writer in old age. The computer and the digital revolution also suggest the end of the book and of print. As a result, the computer spelled the death of the traditional author, a fact that must have struck Bukowski as he faced death himself. Yet all was not doom and gloom as the computer (old age and death) also provides the material and means for new poems. So the computer also represents the old writer's creative impulse. Jed Birmingham, Reality Studio

Although I explained how I track and archive my students' Twitter activity, I didn't describe what they actually do on Twitter.

That's because I wasn't sure myself what they do.

I mean, of course I've reading their tweets and sending my own, but I hadn't considered in a systematic way how my students use Twitter. That lack of reflection on my part echoes my initial guidelines to the students: my instructions were only that students should tweet several times a week at a minimum. I was deliberately vague about what they should tweet about. I didn't want overly specific guidelines to constrain what might be possible with Twitter. I wanted my students' Twitter use to evolve organically.

Now, six weeks into the semester, clear patterns are discernible and I can begin to analyze the value of Twitter as a pedagogical tool.

My most surprising find? Twitter is a snark valve. --Mark Sample

I'm not quite sure why anyone would be surprised to find snark on Twitter, but I think Sample's greater point is that snark requires some level of engagement. A student in my journalism class tweaked me for publishing an editorial a few years ago that didn't follow all the guidelines I provided to the class. The result was an opportunity for me to model an appropriate response to criticism, and I ended up revealing a bit more to the class about my reasons for writing that editorial.

BTW, I would not say the student was being snarky; his oppositional stance does, however, demonstrate the kind of energy that an opposing view brings to the discussion, which is part of the reason Sample recognizes and celebrates snark... not to encourage meanness and the knee-jerk rejection of nuance, but rather in the line Matt Barton's celebration of plagiarism as a means of forcing those of us who teach writing to confront our own limitations as authors and our need for power structures to wall of what counts as unacceptable stealing of ideas, so that we can continue the very different kind of stealing of ideas that we can masque with citations and present as acceptable academic discourse).

When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages--from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening's plans--being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

Such noise makes us even more dependent on technology to help us communicate. Without software to help filter and organize based on factors we deem relevant, we'd drown in the deluge.--Jessica E. Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal

The article is more about the rise of microcommunication tools than it is about the end of e-mail, but it does a fair job explaining the difference. 

Robin Burkinshaw has finished Alice and Kev, an interesting exercise in computer-assisted storytelling, using screen shots from The Sims 3 to tell the story of a homeless father and daughter.

Originally the story was told serially, with a few posts a week; then there were a few very long gaps, but the story is finished now, and you can read it all at once.

It's not a literary masterpiece, and I would have enjoyed it better if the story had progressed without interruptions. Nevertheless, it's worth a look.

This is Kev and his daughter Alice. They're living on a couple of park benches, surviving on free meals from work and school, and the occasional bucket of ice cream from a neighbour's fridge.

The AP recently raised eyebrows last year when it announced its intent to charge bloggers who quote from an AP story, and again more recently when it announced vague plans to track the spread of AP stories through secret embedded codes.

The AP's position is that if search engines are making money delivering customers to AP content, then the AP should get a piece of the action.  Here's a suggestion that might actually work, without trampling the fair use doctrine in the dust, and without relying on magic digital pixie dust tracking technology.

Financial wires have long charged higher rates for the timeliest delivery of such information as stock quotes, so the approach is not without precedent. As more and more news organizations wrestle with the need to create premium products, the AP's experiments will emerge as valuable case studies in high-stakes bets.

Time-based pricing could take any number of forms, including early access to an index of stories that would enable participating search engines to begin crawling the news sooner than the other guys.

Another option under discussion is the earlier release of actual stories, in effect setting up some AP customers as places that users would come to rely on for the earliest look at AP content.

What's interesting about these ideas is that they could generate much-needed revenue without jeopardizing journalism's civic purpose of wide distribution of news. --Bill Mitchell (Poynter)

Course management systems (CMSs), used throughout colleges and universities for presenting online or technology-enhanced classes, are not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. They influence pedagogy by presenting default formats designed to guide the instructor toward creating a course in a certain way. This is particularly true of integrated systems (such as Blackboard/WebCT), but is also a factor in some of the newer, more constructivist systems (Moodle). Studies about CMSs tend to focus on their ease of use or how they are used by faculty: their application, for good or ill. Few discuss the ways in which they influence and guide pedagogy, and those that do only note their predisposition for supporting more instructivist methods. Current research also ignores the fact that many of the new wave of online teachers are Web novices entering the field without a deep understanding of online technology. A closer look at how course management systems work, combined with an understanding of how novices use technology, provides a clearer view of the manner in which a CMS may not only influence, but control, instructional approaches. --Lisa Lane, First Monday

Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of "newsgroup" postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft, as well as more trivial matters.

In February 2001, Google rescued that history when it acquired the New York-based Deja.com, and with it a Usenet archive going back to 1995.

[...]

Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins.  --Kevin Poulsen, Wired

Walkthrough

pifie Errol

On Wednesday, a federal district court in Los Angeles dismissed Brown's claim against Electronic Arts for the use of his image in its Madden NFL series. Judge Florence Marie-Cooper essentially found that video games are "expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment." Such works are protected by the First Amendment. --Kotaku

I've been a journalist for 27 years, and I love that romantic old notion of the newsroom as much as the next guy. But I recently canceled my two morning papers--The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal--because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without even looking at them. Fact is, I only care about a tiny percentage of what those papers publish, and I can read them on my computer or my iPhone. And I can rely on blogs and Twitter to steer me to articles worth reading. --Daniel Lyons, Newsweek

Our students are transcendentalists, but they don't know it.

Speaking metaphorically, Thoreau writes "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."  Rather than treating children as wild creatures that needed to be tamed and civilized, Thoreau seesorder and meaning in nature, which is threatened, worn down, and buried by civilization.

At a time when being educated at Harvard meant reciting verbatim from establishment experts, Bronson Alcott in his Temple School taught through dialogue with his young pupils, asking them to express themselves by answering gently (but relentlessly) probing questions that nurtured their creative capacity, without shutting it down by training them to settle for answers. (Isn't that what we do in our seminars? Isn't that what part of the allure of being part of a small college, where you'll never be taught by a graduate student?)

I captured an example of Socratic dialogue a few weeks ago, when my 7-year-old daughter suddenly brought up free will and animism during an afternoon of birdhouse-building.  I didn't tell her what to think, I asked questions that encouraged her to think things through for herself.  (When she was six, she would sometimes stamp her foot and scream, "You can't punish me!  I haven't yet reached the age of reason!")

The last time I taught Thoreau's Walden, I noticed just how much time I was wasting matching my socks, so I bought a set of 12 identical black socks and a set of 12 identical white socks.  Presto change-o, I spend a lot less time sorting socks. 

I'm curious to find out what my students have to say about this book, since it's not a novel, or a biography. It's more than a collection of hastily composed, inter-connected and competing thoughts, but there's a level of spontaneity and emotional serendipity that might seem familiar to them.

This time around, I couldn't help but think of Mitch Maddox, who during the calendar year 2000 changed his name to DotComGuy, and retreated to a wired and webcammed home, where he lived the simple life cyberstyle, dispensing with all this tedious travel and engagement with the outdoors, and instead aiming to live by selling advertising space on his website, and ordering all that he needed online.  (Walter Kirn of Time wrote, "Like a switched-on Thoreau at a virtual Walden Pond, he devised the stunt to teach mankind that the age of e-commerce is here--and that it is good."  But the dot-com crash happened during the year 2000, and the bloom was off the cyber-rose by the time he finished his experiment in advertiser-supported and venture-capital-funded digital self-reliance.)

One last detail.  In 2004, Eric Eldred decided to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Walden by driving his Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond Reservation and handing out free copies of the book.  A state park supervisor ordered him to stop because he hadn't requested a permit, on the grounds that his free copies would interfere with sales from the gift shop. (Boston Globe)

When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. --Fox News

Videogames may be economically formidable, but they remain a byword for crass, shallow thrills. A game, it's understood, can look spectacular, but it will have little to offer its audience in the way of values, insights or craftsmanship. It's a curious and increasingly untenable situation, given that, to the increasingly large percentage of the population who play them, games are rapidly establishing themselves as the single most exciting and vigorous creative industry around: a sector able to boast not only booming revenues and growing audiences, but a melting pot of talents and new ideas that is increasingly attracting some of the biggest-hitting figures in film, television and the other arts. --Tom Chatfield, Guardian