See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
—Name Voyager (The Baby Name Wizard) Very cool site, that illustrates the popularity of baby names over time, from 1900 to 2003. For every million babies born in 2003, about 1600 were named “Xavier,” while about 84 will go through life with the head-scratch-inducing label “Xzavier.” Thanks for the link, Rosemary.
Humans specialize in distraction, especially when the task at hand requires intellectual heavy lifting. All the usual “Is it lunchtime yet?” inner voices, and external interruptions like incoming phone calls, are alive and well. But in the era of e-mail, instant messaging, Googling, e-commerce and iTunes, potential distractions while seated at a computer are not…
Search engines are some of the most commonly accessed Web sites online. Millions of people turn to search engines daily to find information about news, health concerns, products, government services, their new neighbors, natural disasters and a myriad of other topics. At the same time, recent trends suggest that the search engine market is shrinking,…
If you’re designing a website aimed at teenagers, you’d better not make the text too small. That’s not because teens have bad eyes, but because teenagers tend to lean back in their chairs when they’re at their computers. That advice and much more about how websites for teens should be different from those for adults…
—Wahoooooo! We’re off and blogging, getting er done! (John Haddad) One of my students demonstrates his enthusiasm for a new semester of blogging.
There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced…
blogs.setonhill.edu Hacked (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Many of the pages on the blogs.setonhill.edu website have been taken over. As far as I can tell, the blogs are operating correctly and the data are all safe, but the hack is taking over the display. Very frustrating, I am sure, for SHU bloggers. I’m seeking help right now. Update:…
Deni Rust, 34, of McCandless, continued her husband’s journal after his death, using the Web site he created to immortalize his writings, to establish a guest book where friends and family can share memories, and to post her thoughts as each day passes. A year later, Deni Rust still struggles to live with her grief.…
When I recently asked a group of librarians how they thought Google organized its search results, the first suggestion was that Google counts the number of clicks on the links, and adjusts its rankings accordingly. Most of the people in the room seemed satisfied with that answer, but one person volunteered the clarification that Google…
When a sheet of paper covered in doodles was found on Tony Blair’s desk at the Davos World Economic Forum, handwriting experts delighted in analyzing it, concluding the prime minister was stressed and under pressure. Experts who examined the tangle of boxes, circles, loops and notes on debt and trade variously described Blair as “struggling…
“People who are savvy about how the Internet works don’t even try to find breaking news on the Net.” — Richard W. Wiggins —The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine (First Monday) Wiggins made this throwaway statement in an article published October 1, 2001. How quickly things change! In his defense, Wiggins was…
While it was once believed that Marxism would overhaul notions of ownership, the combination of capitalism and the Internet has transformed our ideas of property to an extent far beyond the dreams of even the most fervent revolutionary. Which is not to say that anything resembling a collectivist utopia has come to pass. Quite the…
Web publishers and bloggers are already stealing readers, advertisers and classifieds. Particularly for young people, journalism has become, in the words of NYU professor and PressThink.org blogger Jay Rosen, more of a conversation than a lecture. That conversation, at least for now, almost always begins with a traditional news story, which is then subject to…
A computer that learns to play a ‘scissors, paper, stone’ by observing and mimicking human players could lead to machines that automatically learn how to spot an intruder or perform vital maintenance work, say UK researchers. CogVis, developed by scientists at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, teaches itself how to play the children’s…
Google greatly advances its web search by raising the word limit to 32 words. Previously, only up to 10 words were allowed. —Google Raises Word Limit to 32 (Google Blogoscoped) The casual user probably won’t notice a difference. It was really hardly any trouble to cut out some of the words in a string that Google…
After 130 years of typing the same way the keyboard has finally grown up. [Who or what was doing the typing? The subject of the sentence is “the keyboard”. The word “typing” is a dangling modifier.] Standard Keyboards of Santa Maria, California announced [missing word — “an”] “alphabetical” keyboard that offers user-friendly benefits and quick…
Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not. This finding is ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if…
The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a free telephone service that links users via a broadband internet connection using a headset and home computer. —Elizabeth Judge —Google gears up for a free-phone challenge to BT (Times Online) The acronym BT isn’t explained in the article… from the context, I’m assuming…
While acknowledging that the new nofollow tag will not do anything — immediately — to stop comment spam, I think most of the criticisms are off-base in one way or another. —More on the Google nofollow tag (Dave Does the Blog) One blogger’s reaction to the new “nofollow” tag, which is aimed at denying spammers the…
In probably the biggest break from tradition, the paper may solicit content from readers, asking them to write their own stories about topics that interest them, whether it be a Scout leader writing about a volunteer activity his scouts undertook or a local politician writing an alternative story about a government program the paper’s reporters…