It’s September, and I’m unleashing another crop of bloggers on the world. But some have been blogging already for years, and have developed a culture all their own. They’re going to trample a few of my flowers and track a little dirt on my carpet, but that’s okay, because I don’t live in a museum.…

NVu

Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a “new view”) is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editing. Nvu is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web…

A blog is like a sofa

I’m sitting with my Newswriting class in A309, because everybody is getting a blog today! To the newbie bloggers, a blog is like a sofa. You have to get used to it, you have to break it in, and eventually blogging will become comfortable. Sometime I think my fellow students are intimitated by blogs, but…

The demise of the geek bloggers

[T]he geek bloggers are in decline and there is very little they can do about it. But before the flames start let me explain further because I’ve been tossing up the title of this post for about 24 hours, some of the other titles included: time for the geek bloggers to get a reality check,…

You say ''Looting,'' I say ''Finding''

You say ”Looting,” I say ”Finding” (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Two interesting discussions on Flickr, regarding the ethics of captions that accompany stories about the looting in New Orleans. See: “Racism on Flickr.” It’s certainly worth noting that in one picture, a black an is identified as “looting,” but in a different picture, two other people (initially…

The Dream of a Lifetime

Engelbart encountered the idea of the Memex while serving as a radar technician in the U.S. Navy during World War II. It took root in his imagination and, in 1950, he had an epiphany, one that guided him and his work for the next two decades. Markoff writes that Engelbart “saw himself sitting in front…

Desperately seeking wonder.

As an avid gamer for over 20 years, I’ve begun to wonder if I’ll ever feel the immersive sense of wonder brought on by Infocom or the old Sierra adventure games. Maybe I have become jaded over the years—many a gamer lost faith during the dreaded CD-ROM/Full Motion Video ‘Game’ era—and look at today’s over-licensed,…

WTF is a Podcast?

Podcasts get their name from combining iPods with radio broadcasting. It all started when a few folks started recording indie talk radio programs and releasing them online, intending them to be uploaded to iPods and listened to on the road. Of course, Apple, knowing what was happening, decided to push the technology into the mainstream…

Bye, Bye, Library

The fact is, there will be no more books to restock. The UT library is undergoing a radical change, becoming more of a social gathering place more akin to a coffeehouse than a dusty, whisper-filled hall of records. And to make that happen, the undergraduate collection of books had to go. This summer, 90,000 volumes…

Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents

User interface agents are increasingly used in software products; perhaps the best-known user interface agent is the Microsoft Office Assistant (“Clippy the Paperclip”). This thesis explores why many people have a negative response to the Office Assistant, using a combination of theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative studies. Among the findings were that labels–whether internal cognitive labels…

>Read Game

If you’re older than about 38, words and phrases like “frotz,” “xyzzy,” “maze of twisty passages all alike,” and “eaten by a grue” trigger sharp remembrance, like Marcel Proust eating a madeleine. You’ll instantly reminisce about text games like Infocom’s Deadline, Suspended, Infidel, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and a zillion Scott Adams titles from Adventure…

Playing with words

Text games circa 2005, however, are called interactive fiction or interactive storytelling. Some are book-length, requiring 20 to 30 hours to play and read. Others are more akin to short stories and can be completed in a half hour. “The goal is to make you forget you’re sitting at a computer and to make you…

Google launches Sidebar in latest attempt to make 'push' model work online

Like a zombie from a George Romero flick, the PointCast model refuses to die. The latest incarnation? Google Sidebar aggregrates news headlines, plus custom local weather reports and stock quotes in a desktop application window. Sidebar also adds new features, including the ability to read messages sent to a Gmail account and reader-selected RSS feeds…