See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
“After many painful review meetings, and hearing advice from seasoned designers, I learned the right way to present ideas – you have to show the other candidates in order to help support the good ones. I began the habit of presenting three to seven different ideas, culling from my total set of ideas the ones…
“Google is to create a search tool specifically for weblogs, most likely giving material generated by the self-publishing tools its own tab….” Andrew Orlowski trolls bloggers by taking a tidbit from a Reuters article from last Monday and gleefully spinning another anti-weblogging story. —Register to Fix Orlowski Noise Problem? (Register) Under the subheading “Unearned Reputations,”…
“Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It’s easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers. | Unfortunately, beautiful things…
“I suppose from my perspective I don’t really care what people think. If I say it’s not fiction, then that’s just part of the hoax. If I say it is, I’m just covering up to stay safe (both of these possibilities have been suggested). If I don’t give details it’s because this is an elaborate…
“Infogrames bought the right to the Atari name when it bought toy maker Hasbro’s Hasbro Interactive division. Hasbro got it from JTS in 1998. JTS, in turn, bought Atari in 1996. Before then, Atari had many owners, including AOL Time Warner, known as Warner Communications back then. Warner bought Atari in the early 1980s, splitting…
“Okay, now the big question: Do we turn this student in? (has anyone already?) I think the idea of having your work reviewed by a large viewing public is cool, especially if it helps enforce better scholarly standards. That is one thing no one ever mentions when they talk about online journals–the ease with which…
“Myst is not a novel or a feature film, it is instead a different sort of creation whose nearest non-electronic relative may be diorama. Any approach to this work must take account of this fundamental difference from familiar forms. World matters more here than characters or conflict, and in Myst the world is suffused with,…
“Through the interlocked network of weblogs, information can spread like wildfire. Very few blogs have a large audience – the largest, Instapundit, attracts only some tens of thousands of readers. But the network of weblogs forms a set of interlocking communities, so that on the whole, a new idea or a link to a new…
“For more than a decade, the consumer electronics and technology industries have awaited the collision of media that would bring television, the computer, the video-game console and the stereo into one tidy convergence box.|Turns out, we’ve been looking in the wrong place. Convergence has already happened — inside the minds of kids who’ve grown up…
[An article I wrote on Vannevar Bush is second on the list of 23,800 hits. It’s just a fluke, really — the word “George” is in there because of hypertext theorist George Landow. But that’s part of what makes it so amusing. Thanks for the chuckle, Elwyn. –DGJ Update: Added vidcap.] —Who Blogs Better Than…
“To suggest, then, that a newspaper has the right to force a newsroom staffer to kill his weblog is tantamount to saying the newspaper has the right to prevent newsroom staffers from publishing any personal website, or perhaps even from posting comments to an online-news mailing list. Woe to ye who enters a newsroom —…
“It’s about making sure an employee is doing the job he was hired to do, not getting caught up in some overgrown, overly opinionated diary/hobby that unfairly treads on his association with his employer and has the potential to damage his employer’s reputation.” Eric Meyer —Meyer: Employers have Right to Ban Blogging (CyberJournalist)
“What the heck is Jakob Nielsen doing goofing around with a lightsaber? Or is he conducting a useability [sic] study of it, perhaps?” filmgoerjuan —Star Wars KidMetaFilter) Be sure you watch the original first, and then the remix.
“The first federal antispam bill was introduced in 1997, and after six years of closed-door wrangling and repeated delays, Congress still has not acted. But consumer outrage and complaints from legitimate businesses have been keeping pace with the growth of bulk e-mail. Now it’s open season on spam in Washington.”Dellan McCullagh —Lawmakers: It’s Open Season…
“We studied several of the best bloggers and their styles. The best blogs, we found, are not those that actually get the most page views in a day, or that get the most links. In fact, the blogs that get the most links are the ones who find the best blogs and then point the…
“Virginia enacted a law Tuesday imposing harsh felony penalties for sending such messages to computer users through deceptive means….Public outrage at spam is causing states and Congress to start looking at stronger measures against it. The Internet industry estimates that spam represents nearly half of all e-mail sent. And a new report by the Federal…
“I bet Hector would be more fun if we dipped him in gasoline. But, most toys are…….” Chad —Hector the Hectopus (Catch.com) My (completely pointless and out-of-date) Rainbow Hector Weblog has been metablogged by Catch.com. I don’t know why, and the Catch.com folks don’t seem to know either. Life goes on, and Hector keeps smiling.
“Say you were trying to find instances of when Bill Gates testified between May 15 and June 1. Using existing tools like full-text search engines, natural language query or speech recognition, you’d have to transcribe the audio into a text file, then index it with a lexicon of terms that included ‘Gates.’ Such an undertaking…
“Online advertising software vendor Unicast is introducing a new kind of Internet ad that doesn’t just pop up over a portion of the browser but rather fills the entire screen of the computer user.|The New York-based company described the new unit as a ‘full-screen, 15-second, 300k online ad.’ Unicast promotional materials suggest the new format…
“For years Slashdot has had an abundance of game related content. Unfortunately, we’ve also had limited space to post those stories. We strive to cover a wide range of tech news, and this often means passing on a good game story because something else is more important. But today I get to announce the creation…