See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
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…
From Inside Higher Ed: An Enthusiast’s View of Academic Blogs A Skeptic’s Take on Academic Blogs
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.…
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…
The New York Times has published more details about Google’s plans to compete with Facebook: On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and…
Students are starting to ask questions about the online course I’m planning to teach in January. I was very happy with the way the course went the last time I taught it, in 2006. I’m sure I will tweak the course here and there, but here are the course objectives and some other details about…
This quote from a Gizmodo interview caught my attention. There is considerable attention given to John Wilkes Booth as the central figure in the majority of the artworks. For instance, I have been rewriting the code (story line) for the interactive fiction game ‘Adventure!’ to include Booth as the lead antagonist.
For the past year or so, my main job in our homeschooling family has been to teach Carolyn (5) how to read. Now I’ve picked up the task of teaching Peter (9) computer programming. Last week I wrote a few simple BASIC programs to teach a very basic concept that some of my college students…
Rock, Paper, Shotgun prints an assessment of the function of text in recent computer games. Some good discussion of the effect of talking movies, the fact that having good voice actors means you don’t need to write as much dialog (which is a good thing since recording dialog is much more expensive than writing text)…
A brief MacWord item on Facebook security changes: Facebook users can now report complaints about pornography, harassment or inappropriate contact either by clicking on links on the Web site or by sending email to the abuse@facebook.com address. The company will respond to these complaints within 24 hours, and it will allow an independent examiner appointed…
Blogcosm offers a good round-up of online reaction to a NIH agency’s not-so-useful method of citing a weblog. Several bloggers noticed yesterday that the US National Library of Medicine (NLM, which is part of the NIH: National Institutes of Health) has a style guide for citing blogs… The NLM’s definition of a blog isn’t bad……
TiddlyWiki is a complete wiki in a single HTML file. It contains the entire text of the wiki, and all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML goodness to be able to display it, and let you edit it or search it. Without needing a server. I played with TiddyWiki a bit, but wasn’t able to edit…
Michael J. Roberts, creator of the TADS interactive fiction system, offers a thoughtful reflection on contemporary interactive fiction. Yes, nostalgia is part of the reason why some people like interactive fiction… But for many of us, that’s not it at all; there’s a lot more to IF than fond memories of classic games on antique…
I got an e-mail this morning from a multimedia developer who found my online version of Emily Short’s Metamorphoses, asking some technical questions about whether it is possible to give web-based users tasks to perform in an interactive fiction game, and have the game notify the outside world when the task is completed. I’m reproducing…
Josh Olsson relates a fascinating tale of internet deception in the LA Weekly. “Audrey, this is Harlan Ellison. It’s imperative that I talk to you and Tania as soon as possible about Josh. I’m very worried. Tania’s on her way to your house right now, and I’d like the two of you to come here.”…
A project called StupidFilter is trying to weed out stupid internet comments. Hoax? At any rate, it’s amusing. Do you really expect to be able to detect and filter anything that’s conceivably stupid? No, of course not. You’d need real AI for that, and beyond a certain point it’s simply subjective; after all, a sufficiently…
Newsweek: The assumption that all videogames are toys for children rather than entertainment for a variety of different audiences is one of our pet peeves. It may seem innocuous, but it’s not only the foundation of continued attempts at the state and national level to regulate the sale and marketing of videogames, it’s also an…
Wired’s gaming blog ponders how one might play an official The Princess Bride game. Will you have to defend yourself against ROUSes? Perhaps duel against the six-fingered man? Maybe if you collect a certain number of buttercups you unlock a mini game where you have to figure out what the hell Fezzick is saying. We’ll…
A Yahoo! developer reflects on the missed opportunities caused by the economic demands of the recording industry: If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and…
Mark Dery, on 10 Zen Monkeys Reporting — especially investigative reporting, the lifeblood of a truly adversarial press — is labor-intensive, money-sucking stuff, yet even The New York Times can’t figure out how to charge for its content in the Age of Rip, Burn, and Remix. To be sure, newspapers are hemorrhaging readers to the…