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 offer worlds for players to explore. Parents and politicians aren’t always happy with what goes on in digital realms, but now universities want to use gaming technology to build better teaching tools for schools.” — Wired’s blurb for an article by Brad King —Educators Turn to Games for Help (Wired)
“How can you boost your web site’s credibility?|We have compiled 10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people.” —Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility (Web Credibility) My former student Anne Wendt, who suggested the site, did a project for me on…
“Surveys show that about half of 20 to 29 year olds read the newspaper every day in 1972; by 1998, just 20 percent of twenty somethings read the paper every day.|’The younger audience is not subscribing to the newspapers. This is a major concern for us,’ said Noe. ‘But we also know where they are…
“Although it does make a reasonable anecdotal case for investing in usability, the report methodology is so fundamentally flawed that any financial analyst worth her salt would immediately question its findings. Very simply, the authors do not make a strong business case for usability?a requirement for passing the muster with the accountants and senior managers…
“Most of the Web’s content today is designed for humans to read, not for computer programs to manipulate meaningfully. Computers can adeptly parse Web pages for layout and routine processing?here a header, there a link to another page?but in general, computers have no reliable way to process the semantics: this is the home page of…
“I’m no more “unprotected” from spammers on my WiFi node (something I’ve yet to see a single published account of, despite the continuous warnings about it) than I am from spammers sending Nigerian 419 letters from the next terminal at the library. It’s like saying that restauranteurs are “unprotected” from bank robbers who use a…
“There were no traffic helicopters swooping down to get a better look at the crash and no reporters dispatched to the stretch of highway where the pileup took place that morning. Instead, Japanese TV viewers first saw the crash thanks to another truck driver who used his camera phone to shoot video of the wreckage.”…
“The rule of thumb is: you need to give before you receive. That is, you need to give other people loads of links, point to them, talk about their sites and have your readers go and check them out. When your readers appreciate that you have pointed them to some good sites, and/or they fell…
“The study found that young adults spend more time on the Web than with any other media source and are not likely to be partial to one medium, as older generations are. Teenagers surveyed spent an average of 16.7 hours online per week, excluding e-mail. The next most popular medium was television, which teens turned…
“The number one criticism of Johnson is that he’s a dipshit who can’t work Google: if only the poor fool were slick enough to type ‘apple fruit’ or ‘granny smith’ in the search bar, he wouldn’t get three pages of computer links. That may be true, but that’s the point: apple, the fruit, is conceptually…
“Once you start, you will be presented with two poems. In all likelihood they will both be abysmal pieces of nonsensical garbage. That’s ok. All you have to do is read them both and pick the one you find more appealing, for whatever reason. Your decision might be based on a single word that you…
“The parents of Ghyslain Raza, the Quebec teenager who became a celebrity this spring after classmates posted on the Internet a video of him mimicking a Star Wars character, allege that their son was so humiliated by the experience that he had to get psychiatric care.” —Parents File Lawsuit over Star Wars Video (Globe and…
“Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you’re doing research online, Google is…
Slashdot Poll Yes. No. ! Worst Poll Ever. No, there’s been a worse one. No, there hasn’t. Yes, there has. No! Yes! No! —? [Slashdot Poll] (Slashdot) Nearly 70,000 people took the time to vote in this poll. This is beyond stupid — so far beyond stupid that it approaches significance. It’s impossible to deconstruct this…
“The Complaint states that through use of such Fake User Interface (“FUI”) dialogs that gave the false appearance of being computer error messages, DoubleClick tricked millions of Internet users into interrupting the work they were performing to respond to the fraudulent error message, only to unexpectedly find both computer and computer user thus hijacked to…
“Lileks is widely linked to and commented upon, and his fans stretch across the vast political spectrum of the Internet’s chattering class. This is a sure sign of broad appeal because the weak are never recognized by the blogosphere and the old and the lazy are mercilessly culled from the herd. Lileks is prospering on…
“Back in the day, having a board with more than one phone line was huge. Two lines meant more than one person could be online at the same time. This was heavy. But it was the end of something, too: the end of that amazing solitude you felt when the busies stopped, and the carrier…
“A Taiwan man who used a different identity through the Internet to double-date his girlfriend, has committed suicide after the girl fell for his email-based alter ego, a Taiwan newspaper reported on Wednesday.” —Woman Dumps Man for Online Alter Ego (IOL) Sounds like an urban legend, but then again so does “Escape” (better known as “The…
“Goodbye ‘e-mail,’ the French government says, and hello ‘courriel’ — the term that linguistically sensitive France is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.” —France Bans ‘E-Mail’! (Wired) What a difference quotation marks can make! And for those of you who are sneering at the silliness of the French, Samantha tells KairosNews…
“Yes, in the world of blogs there are people who specialize in writing for the web. One of those is Dennis Jerz, a good weblog friend of mine. What do I mean by a weblog friend? A weblog is where people are turned into webpages. Dennis has turned himself into webpages in Literacy Weblog. I…