See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Teenagers, in particular, provide a moving target for Internet researchers, remarks psychologist Kaveri Subrahmanyam of California State University in Los Angeles. “By the time you publish research on one type of Internet use, such as blogging, teenagers have moved on to something new, such as myspace,” she says, with a resigned chuckle. —Bruce Bower —Growing…
A 14-year-old girl who says she was sexually assaulted by another user of MySpace.com sued the social networking Web site Monday, claiming it does not take sufficient steps to protect underage members. —Girl, 14, Sues MySpace.com Alleging Assault (AP|MyWay)
The whole idea of episodic stories was born in the 19th century when the printing press made cheap magazines possible. Writers like Charles Dickens hit upon the idea of delivering a big story in weekly chunks, each with a cliffhanger to keep the audience in anticipation. (The cliffhanger is essentially a technological invention — a…
Hollywood knows that it needs new ideas. The games industry doesn’t know. Hollywood goes out of its way to provide itself with a seed stock of new talent and ideas, the games industry doesn’t. Hollywood spends an enormous amount of money supporting colleges and universities, and training programs at those settings. The games industry does…
—Weblog: een doe-het-zelf medium — Chronologische ordening in de informatiechaos? I’m assuming the language of this site is Dutch. At the bottom is a list of over 100 early articles about blogging, most of them popular (rather than academic) and most of them in English. Just blogging it for future reference. Lots to learn here.
Do you have what it takes to create a LiveJournal? Well, ask yourself this question: Are you able to put words together? Not in complete, grammatical sentences, mind you. Are you able to take a word and another word and place them one after each other? Then you’re set! —Lore Sjöberg —You and Your LiveJournal…
Mr. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water. “They say, “Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia’” and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he…
Curious about the candidate, Ms. Homayoun went to her page on Facebook. She found explicit photographs and commentary about the student’s sexual escapades, drinking and pot smoking, including testimonials from friends. Among the pictures were shots of the young woman passed out after drinking. “I was just shocked by the amount of stuff that she…
What McGuirk said he’d rather see is administrators using Facebook to get students thinking about how they want to craft their public persona. One picture McGuirk displayed was from the profile of a Fitchburg student pointing a gun at another person. The gun turned out to be a water gun, but McGuirk said he had…
Vaporizing VR Hardware (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Last year, my brother-in-law asked me what I would do with a bunch of virtual reality gear his employer had packed in crates in a warehouse. VR headsets, sensors, software to get them working together, and computers to run them all — enough to fill “a big closet.” I started…
Programming games is an activity. A programming language is a kind of thing. Inform 7 is a kind of programming language. It is either the single-most important advance in interactive fiction in a decade, or an interesting idea doomed to fail. —Liza Daily —Natural Language Game Programming with Inform 7 (OnLamp.com) I’ve been teaching myself Inform…
—The Song Tapper Tap out the rhythm of the lyrics on your space bar, and this website will try to guess the song. It will serve up a set of pre-loaded links to where you can buy the song. I was unsuccessful in getting it to recognize “Lola,” but I had more luck with “Happy…
Every student will soon be a blogger at the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts and Sciences — and the authors won’t just be filling their pages with party anecdotes. As part of summer registration, members of the class of 2010 are receiving from the college personalized “academic blog” pages, where they are asked to…
Words: Redfield Clarke Music: J. Bodewalt Lampe Lyrics: As I sit here in my office chair and watch the dying fire, I think of all the messages that flash along the wire. I hear the constant clicking, the clicking of the key, And while in the mood I’ll tell you what the wires tell me.…
The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do: 1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It’s reporting. 2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant. 3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the…
The robot in the classroom, which displays a live picture of Achim, provides what its inventors call “telepresence”: It gives the boy an actual presence in the classroom, recognized by teachers and classmates. It can move from class to class on its four-wheel base and even stop at the lockers for a between-periods chat. “The…
Efforts are afoot to not only make IF more accessible, but to make it more modern and attractive in appearance. Along with all of the other innovations of Inform 7, for instance, a facility has now been added by which the author can easily include a “book cover” of sorts for her work, which is…
—Online chess video about two pawns that fall in love (Chess Maniac) This was a cute computer-generated story. It’s about six or seven minutes long. I wish I knew more about it.
The codes, called captchas, are also showing up more often amid a boom in new Web services, ranging from blogging tools to social-networking sites. The trickiest ones “make you not want to go to those sites anymore,” says Scott Reynolds, a 29-year-old software architect in Ocala, Fla., who lambasted the devices on his blog last…
“It shows that these forgotten people of the ’90s had many of the same concerns as modern man, such as b-days, and slow periods at work,” Caspari said. “The presence of the archaic slang verbalization ‘what’s up’ appears to indicate that they cared about the immediate welfare of others in their closely knit community, much…