See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Video games have received more attention over the past several years as their revenue has grown faster than any other form of digital entertainment. Gross revenue from video-game hardware and software sales has surpassed revenues from movie ticket sales, video rentals and concert tickets, according to Mike Goodman, senior analyst with the Yankee Group. —Katie…
By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text. | But not only does this prevent people from getting inside the machine…
The PDA is Dead… Long Live the PDA!Literacy Weblog) The Palm has changed a lot in six years. When I bought mine in 1997 (or was it early 1998?) it was called a “Pilot.”
—There is no website configured at this address (Google?!) Aahhh! Somebody tell me there’s a virus on my computer! I don’t want to believe this… I noticed it at about 1:20 am EST.
On the same day she spoke about media panics to my journalism class, Torill Mortensen introduced my “Writing for the Internet” class to hypertext theory. (This is going to be a long post and I’ll probably be too lazy to link everything properly, so see Torill’s online lecture notes, “Hypertext, class and power.”) She began…
It’s not hard to imagine the power of millions of people each taking pictures and attaching them to physical places. You’re headed into Helsinki, and you want to see what the Esplanade looks like in mid-August. Or you wonder what the inside of the Intercontinental hotel looks like. | There’s immense potential for people to…
Torill ‘thinking with my fingers’ Mortensen @ Seton Hill UniversityLiteracy Weblog) For the past few days, I have been showing Torill’s “thinking with my fingers” blog to my new media journalism students. Around the time that our own “New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University” blog was lagging, Torill posted about the lack of personal…
The Internet is coming of age, and the era of innocence is gone. while the digital axis of evil takes over. It’s high time we leave the term ICT (information and communication technology) behind unless we claim that it stands for “indifferent capitalist thrash”, or “infamous crime technology”. —finn —Infamous Crime Technology (Saywords)
Kitty Kelly has sold it to CBS. No, just kidding. A tremendous night. It’s the beginning of a second media century, Joe, where it’s much more of a people-driven media. And I say that not lightly. It was the Internet, it was talk radio, it was cable that put pressure on CBS, and heretofore, there’s…
Software which enables e-mail writers to choose the image they want to portray is being developed by a team of Scottish researchers. —How to Become an E-Mail Extrovert (BBC) Hi!!!! This new software sounds cool! ;) Its supposed to make your writing more cheerful and outgoing!! The article is a bit vauge — maybe the designers…
A while back Michael Lesk wrote a paper called “How Much Information is There in the World?” That work has now been updated by a team led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian: “How Much Information 2003?” —How Much Information? (Via MGK)
The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find “the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon” or “where to find the best airfare to Cuba” by using Amazon’s search feature instead. —Monica Soto Ouchi —Amazon’s inside look irks authors: Search function previews any…
Please — Never Do This!E-Mail) This message, with the uninformative subject line “November Hours,” an empty body, and a 45K MS-Windows attachment (see tips #1, #2 and #3 of “Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips“) went out to about 450 people By my count, this single message consumed 20MB of storage space on computers across…
I know this is probably a very uncool and politically incorrect thing to say these days, but I am going to brave it anyway. | I have wondered why, with all the briliant people writing in the different group blogs, am I not toally enchanted with them? —Torill —No Personal Touch (Thinking with My Fingers) The…
For the last few months, Google has been courting publishers, hoping to convince them to turn over book content that could be used in Google’s database, say people close to the discussions. | How that content would be presented is not clear, but it would likely not be provided in excerpted passages to customers, as…
The problem of spam or unwanted commercial e-mail is usually attributed to outlaws and hucksters — peddlers of pornography, get-rich-quick schemes and pills of dubious merit — who use hackers to send their fraudulent messages in ways that cannot be traced. | But the torrent of spam that is flowing into people’s electronic mailboxes comes…
Microsoft’s menu bars are awash in anachronistic images, and it’s especially evident in the latest edition of the Office 2003 application suite. This struck me as I was authoring my 364th “Inside PCMag.com” newsletter. Clicking on the Save icon, I found myself wondering why it’s still an image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk. When was…
Books take time to transport. Their text vanishes and their pages yellow in a rash of foxing. Most important, it’s still shockingly difficult to find information buried in books. Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark…
1.) Weblogs deal in the golden rule, modified to read: link unto others as you would have them link unto you. 6.) The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments (virtues) like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly. And…
Putting computers in classrooms has been almost entirely wasteful, and the rush to keep schools up-to-date with the latest technology has been largely pointless. —Bob Blaisdell reviews Todd Oppenheimer’ s The Flickering Mind —Why Computers Have Not Saved the Classroom (CS Monitor) Oppenheimer argues that when technology is working, it is because enthusiastic teachers have made…