See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
“We wanted a true persistent world. If you walk into a room, turn on a light, and then leave, when someone else comes along three days later that light should still be on. There are a lot of games that clean up after themselves. If you open a door, it closes itself. If you kill…
“The most common way for a story to get started is for mainstream media to comment about the world of blogs, Google, websites, or the development of some new facet of the Internet. Of those stories we traced, the least common way for a story to get started is for a blogger to start a…
“[F]or the Web to flourish it needs to remain open, nonproprietary, innovative, free and inclusive. “‘Oh my God, the entire world is inside my laptop,’” Berners-Lee shrieked in pretend shock toward the end of his speech while pointing to the need to develop new ways to organize and access data. “He also tried to assure…
“I’m following best practices for e-mail campaigns. I’m producing interesting (I think), well-designed newsletters. I’m including viral marketing within my newsletters, hoping to encourage pass-along. The Weblog landing page is pretty well designed and easy to use. I think the content is compelling. Why wasn’t my traffic growing at the same rate as my coworkers’?…
Search Engine Rank Inflation: A Morality TaleLiteracy Weblog) Lately I’ve been coming across some strange search engine results, that look as if someone has taken information from my web pages — perhaps even dumping a Google listing for keywoards — and used it to inflate the search engine results of pages that have nothing to…
From the tens of millions of consumer reviews posted on retail giants like Amazon.com to the more specialized message boards of Motorcycle.com and Macaddict.com, Piersall estimated that 80 percent of all human discourse now takes the form of product reviews on the web. While some online reviewers give little more than basic pros-and-cons of a…
“Blogs are one big fat op-ed section for the news organizations out there. Thanks to the ethics of linkage (crediting sources — a polite grace learned from orthodox journalism and years of compiling footnotes and bibliographies for term papers in high school and college) and of Google’s PageRank algorithms, the blogosphere is a vast watershed…
“Live web cam video from the dentist office.” —DentCam (Pearly Whites)
Progress: Since its inception almost 30 years ago, the internet has been transformed from a primitive device for sharing thoughts and ideas, into a massive network where people pay to connect and read advertisements they don’t want, while calling each other “asshats”. —History of the Internet (The Lemon) I presume “The Lemon” is a takeoff on…
“This video was uploaded to humiliate an awkward and overweight computer geek. But the truth is, he’s not too different than many of us (were) in 10th grade. I was furious at the hypocritical comments being posted to my site … all these geeks and dorks were trashing one of their own…. I’m hoping he…
I posted this Friday to KairosNews: Several years ago, a student in one of my tech writing classes needed a bit of extra credit, so I asked her to write up a set of tips on e-mail etiquette. I’ve modified and expanded it since then, and now it’s one of the most popular pages on…
“What we can know, just by reading his blog, is that this Salam is up to no good. He is spreading “inside views” of the new Iraq, not only to the blogosphere, but directly among the journalists still encamped at the Meridian (formerly Palestine, formerly Meridian) hotel. Not the “embeds” who’ve gone home after remarkable…
“Yes, Neo has to save humankind. Yes, it is a job for the mind over computer-simulated matter. And yes, he is Jesus….There is no end to the biblical parallels that have been found. There are names like Trinity and Zion. There is a baptism and a betrayal. After a while though, the parallels start to…
“Despite the crash and the resulting disruption, more marriage licenses were granted in 2001 in San Francisco than any year prior. In Santa Clara County, more babies were born in 2002 than in any year of the boom, and house purchases have bounced back to near-record levels, despite the massive evaporation of wealth. The culture…
“A high school teacher could be out of a job in a dispute over a personal web site he created before he was hired by a western Pennsylvania school district…The Grove City Area School District placed music teacher and assistant band director Dan Konnen, 24, of Hermitage, Pa., on an unpaid suspension in March when…
—Open Anarchy or Closed Dictatorship: Methods of Producing Collaborative Teaching Texts (KairosNews) I won’t be blogging much today, not only because of exams, but because I’ll be contributing instead to this online conference session. Update: Will writes, “I’m greatly amused that you wrote ‘I won’t be blogging much today…’ on your weblog. Notice that it’s the…
Sheila Webber blogs thus: “Lowe, who teaches in the Media Department of Thames Valley University, describes how he simulates a breaking news story by using email, audio and video tapes. The students have to put together a story and reflect on the experience. Variations on the exercise, including using the internet to search for background…
“When lawmakers and companies fight spam, they’re not up against teenage hobbyists and pranksters. They face thousands of pros like Shiels, who have high-tech tools and an immense network of knowledge that is difficult to overcome.” Jeffrey Kosseff —Confessions of a Former SpammerOregon Live)
“grandtextauto is about computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms, including interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, and shared virtual environments. The discussion, by people who all work as both theorists and developers in these forms, considers questions of authorship, design, and technology, as well…
“Police found another away message on Lucien’s account on March 20 that also said he could provide alcohol. Part of the text of the message read: ‘U wanna drink?… U tell me what u want, gimme the cash, and I’ll get you the bottles like lickety split, yo.’ The message included his room number, police…