See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Wired has published an article about the open source encyclopedia Wikipedia reaching its 100,000th article. This item first started appearing in weblogs last week. Once it’s made its way to Wired, it will be read by the editors of more mainstream publications, who may want to feature it in articles for the general public. (Blogdex…
“My mother used to say that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing; the Internet demonstrates this point beautifully. Oh sure, these days everyone is concerned about the proliferation of porn, but the medical information on the Net is also widespread, disturbing and… — for those prone to, shall we say, extreme concern…
“Only cranks, mystics, revolutionaries and wealthy dilettantes wrote without some form of pecuniary support, whether patronage, salary, direct sales, residuals, or the penny-a-word piecework compensation offered by pulp-magazine editors…. The Internet changed all that.” —Independent Content Providerv-2 Organisation)
“The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and the users of MS-DOS-compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the “ratio studiorum” of the Jesuits. It is cheerful,…
“The problem may be that they are simply bored with the conventional curriculum, says the study, titled Morphing Literacy: Boys Reshaping Their Literacy. The study found it is a myth that boys do not read. While they are less interested in fiction or traditional literature than girls are, they read more on the Internet and…
Vocation“I want to be a Bohemian, Rachel.” “A what?”“A Bohemian, a hanger onner around the arts”“I thought you already were – all that cafe society poetry stuff”“Yes, but it’s kinda hard on your own – do you want to be one too?” “Erm, can’t I be a bum instead?”Elin Merriman —Fifty Word FictionAlistair Fitchett) Click…
“I went on a mission of etymological research. In this article you’ll learn how the term, born of canned ham, moved into BBSs and MUDS and then was applied to USENET postings and E-mail. I’ve put in a short history of the earliest big spams, including a special page about the first E-mail spam from…
“Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org ), a community-built multilingual encyclopedia, is announcing that the English edition of the project has reached a milestone of 100,000 articles in development…. Wikipedia is a public WikiWikiWeb, a website where anyone can edit any article at any time. Users build upon each other’s edits, and vandalized articles are quickly repaired by…
“This is all part of the Big Flip in publishing generally, where the old notion of ‘filter, then publish’ is giving way to ‘publish, then filter.’ There is no need for Slashdot’s or Kuro5hin’s owners to sort the good posts from the bad in advance, no need for Blogdex or Daypop to pressure people not…
“Rightly or wrongly, record companies are detested by politicians (for corrupting youth), by webcasters (for demanding royalties), and by their customers (for inflating prices). Musicians and songwriters are famous for loathing the labels… Radio and MTV aren’t in the industry’s corner… And the electronics industry’s attitude toward the labels is summed up by an Apple…
“[B]eing innovative flies in the face of what almost all parents want for their children, most CEOs want for their companies, and heads of states want for their countries. And innovative people are a pain in the ass…. [S]ome things?the nature of higher education among them?will have to change in order to ensure a perpetual…
Minimally Invasive Education: “This is a system of education where you assume that children know how to put two and two together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene only if you see them going in a direction that might lead into a blind alley.” Sugata Mitra put a computer with a high-seed…
“I think it’s possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their message. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up. They have so far, at least. But they have to deliver their message, whatever it is. If we can write…
On 18th January 1903 Marconi sent a wireless transatlantic message from U.S. President Theordore Roosevelt to England’s Edward VII: “In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting the system of wireless telegraphy, I extend on behalf of the American People most cordial greetings and good…
“The public water system is somewhat unpleasant to think about. Basically, the stuff you flush down the toilet gets sent through a filtering system. That system ‘treats’ the sewage until what remains is sufficiently pure to send back to you as drinking water. As content intermediaries, publishers perform an analogous function. Individual software writers, authors,…
On Jan 17, 1998, maverick webmaster Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story on his weblog. (Actually, Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” only a few weeks earlier, so I doubt anybody used that term for Drudge’s website back then.) Drudge has posted an understandbly self-congratulatory piece about his website. To refresh your memory, here’s…
“Most writers know the value of an informative title, but many beginning web authors don’t know that each web page needs two kinds of titles. The in-context (IC) title always sits at the top of a page, with the rest of the document immediately beneath it…. The out-of-context (OOC) title is frequently displayed by search…
“An act of reading electronic language involves: Setting up an electronic language environment; Selecting particular input into the electronic text; Receiving the output; Analyzing what the electronic text does.” —Someone Writing about Their Reading of GoogleTechnacy Weblog) I’m reminded of Espen Aarseth’s definition of Cybertext — a system that includes not only the array of…
“2002 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year’s major events and hottest trends based on more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year by Google users from around the world.” Top 5 gaining Google queries from 2002: spiderman shakira winter olympics world cup avril lavigne Top 5 declining Google queries from…
“There may well be people who abandon Neuromancer on the grounds that it’s riddled with sentence-fragments, but, in a sense, the sentence-fragments are there to scare off readers who aren’t ready for that, and to encourage those who want to see the envelope of language pushed even further, the pedal taken even closer to the…