See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Since the dotcom bust in 2000-2001, nearly a quarter of California technology workers have taken nontech jobs, according to a study of 1 million workers released last week by Sphere Institute, a San Francisco Bay Area public policy group. The jobs they took often paid less. Software workers were hit especially hard. Another 28 percent…
Google’s desktop search is integrated with the familiar Web search, with a new Desktop tab appearing at Google.com, and results culled from a search of the local drive are added to the top of any search through the Web. The local results are displayed at the top of the list, marked with a new logo…
What exactly happened to the link-and-node hypertext novel? We don’t have to carry out that much of an investigation to see what‘sgoing on with Flash poetry, or the network novel, or interactive fiction. But what‘sup with the venerable form used by the soi-disant wunderkinder authors of The Unknown, the one in which Victory Garden took…
This summer, sitting in the Tank and reading campaign blogs, you could sometimes get a half-giddy, half-sickening feeling that something was shifting, that the news agenda was beginning to be set by this largely unpaid, T-shirt-clad army of bloggers. A few blocks down Eighth Avenue, thousands of journalists with salaries and health benefits waited for…
As our hard drives fill up with thousands then tens and hundreds of thousands of digital snapshots, we’re all going to face the same basic challenges as the Bettmann Archive. Of course, you won’t haul 19 semitrailers full of your decaying family photos into cold storage, as the Bettmann did in 2001. But you can…
One thing that has struck me is that many, if not most, of the people I’ve met from the community who are involved in managing Wikipedia seem to be women. I haven’t conducted any scientific analysis or anything, but Wikipedia seems much more gender balanced than the blogging community. I know many people point out…
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the world’s information isn’t yet online, we’re helping to get it there. Google Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily; right in Google search results. To use Google Print, just…
Technology has come a long way since the washing machine, but somewhere along the line it lost relevance to women. Now gadget makers are striving to win back the female market…. [O]ne can pick up lipstick memory sticks, mini iPods in pastel hues, mobiles with mirrors in them, and slim cameras, all intended to pull…
Information Literacy: One Faculty View (Moveable Types of Information Literacy) My interest in information literacy, as a teacher: The credulity with which students accept what they read online. Their uncritical use of the Google search engine. Their over-reliance upon online sources of questionable value. I lead the program in New Media Journalism at Seton Hill University…
Whispering the News to Marian: Libraries on Fire (Moveable Types of Information Literacy) Librarians get furious when someone from the outside tries to suppress a text. A library must have order. A patron reshelve a book? Never! “Heaven help us, if the library caught on fire,” sings Harold Hill “and the volunteer hose brigademen / Had…
Specificity vs. Abstraction: The Library as Mediator of Humanities and Technology Values (Moveable Types of Information Literacy) While deconstruction and postmodernism have challenged the traditional dusty-tome humanities methodology that aims to construct a specific “correct” text, by continuing to react against the ideal text, contemporary humanities scholarship reveals its dependency upon the central ideal. That ideal…
Postmodern Peer Review and Emerging Genres (Moveable Types of Information Literacy) We find it quaint that Vannevar Bush would try to do hypertext with an automated, user-writeable microfiche. It is similarly quaint that a library database be optimized to deliver PDF documents or other facsimiles of the printed page. Native electronic journals offer cutting-edge, peer-reviewed scholarship,…
Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer Review (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Presented Oct 9, at the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy Information Literacy: One Faculty View Whispering the News to Marian: Libraries on Fire Specificity vs. Abstraction: The Library as Mediator of Humanities and Technology Values Postmodern Peer Review and Emerging…
Children as young as two are the target audience of a new software that will enable toddlers to both surf and send e-mails safely without help from their parents. —New software lets toddlers e-mail and surf (BBC) So… who’s going to develop the blogging plug-in? Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.
Examples of systemic bias: Because so many Wikipedians do their research on line, topics not already well covered on the Internet tend to be under-covered in Wikipedia. Because so many English-language Wikipedians live in a very small number of countries, topics pertaining strongly to those countries are disproportionately covered. Because so many Wikipedians are interested…
Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far…
The games begin: you can now download entries in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition. —Nick Montfort —IF Comp 2004 Unleashed (Grand Text Auto)
Recommended reading: “Descriptions Constructed” by Stephen Granade, a just-posted close-up look at IF output text, and “Crimes Against Mimesis” by Roger Giner-Sorolla, a broader essay from 1996 on what can go right or wrong in IF, still worth a read today. —Nick Montfort —IF Essays, New and Old (Grand Text Auto)
—Interactive Fiction Workshop 1 (Writing for the Internet) This morning I introduced my Writing for the Internet class to Pick up the Phone booth and Die and 9:05. I always enjoy this class period. Most get to at least one of the endings in 9:05. About five minutes before class ends, I ask the students for…
With a clean, no-nonsense interface and existing search engine traffic, Google News didn’t take long to attract a loyal following and elbow its way into the top-10 news sites, pulling in some 6 million unique visitors a month. Of course, executives at rival online news publishers couldn’t help but wonder why they shouldn’t just imitate…