See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
That’s cut and paste journalism, taken in large part from Wikipedia – the online encyclopedia to which any member of the public can contribute. Here’s where freelance journalist Tom Winterbourn took the exact same words and sentences from Wikipedia. —Community Papers Anniversary Lift (ABCTV (Australia) MediaWatch) An interesting article about a print journalist accused of plagiarizing…
[Y]ou’re running around on a big circuit board, powering up at transformers, dodging resistors, your path barred by ROM chips. This probably seems pretty weird to The Youth of Today. In the years since Tron we’ve been trained to think that a journey to “the inside of the computer” might entail running around on a…
No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he accumulated were really just acquaintances. He’s also phasing out his profile on Facebook, a popular social networking site that, like others, allows users to create profiles, swap message and…
—[E-Mail is for Old People] (User Friendly) Thanks for the link, Josh.
But it turns out that even when I try to live an Apple life, that is a pretty lousy experience too. How could that be, you say? The apparent point of Apple’s existence is to create a beautiful and polished user experience. Well, it turns out that what Apple does is beautiful and polished *graphic…
The games are now available for downloading. —IFComp 2006 Mmmm…. interactive fiction.
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has…
—Asskicking Device (YouTube) Amazing. A…ma…zing. Thanks for the link, Karissa.
Who doesn’t wish to keep a record of a beautiful sunset that particularly impressed us in childhood, our first kiss or, for that matter, an important conversation with the boss that took place a few months back? One of our shortcomings is a constant struggle to remember. How difficult it can be sometimes to recall…
Truth is: The flow goes both ways. We don’t move invisibly through the links, we leave a fine trail, much more real than pixie dust, but as intangible. Gathering information, we leave a trail of information. The ivory tower does not protect us here, and there are no sets of information gathering ethics protecting the…
The 40-hour gamers are able to play in a way that I used to when I was a teenager, but can’t anymore. They devote full evenings and entire weekends to marathon play-sessions. They get into the zone — that Csikszentmihalyian state of “flow” where all distractions drop away, and you focus with lizard-brain survival intensity…
—White and Nerdy — Weird Al Yancovic (YouTube) E-mailed to me by a student who knows me well. P.S. Kirk, definitely.
“(Video games) are a little bit like documentary films were in say the ’60s or ’70s,” says Suzanne Seggerman, co-founder of Games for Change, a support organization in New York for makers of video games dealing with social issues. “Film had been a popular medium for a long, long time, (but) it took quite a…
This discovery, if validated, will be one of only 10 remaining pages left in existence today, and according to unnamed sources at Seton Hill University of Internet Sciences, could expose the true reasons behind the almost complete depletion of both public and private schools circa 2300. Though several prominent scientists at the competing University of…
YouTube, You To Be, To Be You, You Be Too. (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Jay Leno and Videos he found on YouTube. About 3 minutes. The first clip looks like a scene from America’s Funniest Home Videos — nothing new there. Two of them are just clever video tricks, and while they’re nicely done, they don’t show…
Documents to Go and VersaMail Woes (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I love my Tungsten T3 handheld computer. I also love Documents to Go, which is bundled software that lets me edit files (mostly word processor, but also spreadsheet and slide show) on my handheld, and then synch my changes with the version of the file on my…
Firefox Upgrade 1.5.0.7 Resets Personal Settings (and keeps resetting them) (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My preferred web browser is Firefox, but this morning when I logged in, Firefox had upgraded itself automatically, and it wiped all my bookmarks and personal settings. I was able to reload the bookmarks pretty easily, but the darn thing is resetting to…
Last week, the Lonelygirl15 videos were indeed exposed as a hoax. The girl depicted was an aspiring actress named Jessica Rose. She subsequently discussed the videos on CNN, The Tonight Show and MTV — not bad exposure for a previous unknown. The creators of the video were revealed to be film professionals who describe their…
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. —F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Useit.com) Your goal as a web author is to put your best stuff in the hotspots. Obviously you can direct the user’s attention somewhat, using whitespace and graphics. But…
In Writing for the Internet, I had my students read some articles about e-mail and power relationships in the classroom. They are raising some very good questions in response. One asked me whether professors expect their students to send thank-you messages after every e-mail exchange. I just checked with two colleagues, and their reactions confirmed…