When Text Messaging Gets Ugly
Another use for 24/7 text messaging services: bullying children in the British school system. —When Text Messaging Gets UglyWired)
See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Another use for 24/7 text messaging services: bullying children in the British school system. —When Text Messaging Gets UglyWired)
“…Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By…
“A blog works if it addresses its audience, whether that audience is five or 500 or 5,000. In fact, many blogs, by their precise nature, are never going to get that big. So, why worry about the bigger fish? Enjoy yourselves.” Andrew Sullivan —Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?Slate) “What the relentless focus of bloggers like…
“If all you have is a hammer then everything is a nail. How else can you explain why web sites are so incredibly painful to use? If I were paranoid I’d assume there was a conspiracy to assure that the Internet is kept lame. But perhaps it is a combination of ignorance and laziness.” Bob…
“When a game is done well, the motion picture industry can’t compete. Last year, people spent $14 billion worldwide on films, but Americans alone spent $8 billion on games for their homes and another $7 billion in arcade playing.” Brad King —They Weren’t Meant to be Games (Wired)
“Citing creative differences, SatireWire’s founder and sole employee, Andrew Marlatt, announced that as of today, the site will no longer be updated. Unlike everything else on the site, this is not a joke.” Andrew Marlatt —SatireWire Has LandedSatireWire) SatireWire was never quite as good as The Onion, but it did have a pleasant “doing this…
“Navigating through digital texts was one of the e-book users’ biggest complaints. They found moving from page to page ‘tedious.’ They also found it difficult to find specific chapters in texts and to find particular words.” —Students Complain About Devices for Reading E-Books, Study Finds (Chronicle)
“U.S. federal Judge Colleen McMahon has dismissed a claim by British Telecom that it developed and holds a patent to the hyperlink technology used to whisk Web users from one site to another. ” Michele Delio —Judge Tosses BT Hyperlink Case (Wired)
“Tiny text tyrannizes users by dramatically reducing task throughput. IE4 had a great design that let users easily change font sizes; let’s get this design back in the next generation of browsers.” Jakob Nielsen —Let Users Control Font SizeUseIT.com) This apparently the Week of Cute Headlines. Why not “Tiny text type terribly trashes task throughput”?…
The recording industry blamed cassette tapes for killing disco in the 70s. Along came MTV, which found a brand new way to make money off of music. The recording industry is blaming file-sharing for the slumping sales in teen pop. Sound familiar? Mark Jenkins —Hit Charade: The music industry’s self-inflicted woundsSlate)
Latest weapon against junk e-mail: poetry. —Haiku’da Been a Spam Filter (Wired) The title of the article wins the prize for “Most Obscure Reference to Marlon Brando.”
“Welcome to the world of a half million (and counting) Weblogs, where anyone can instantly publish his passions and favorite Weblinks. And the fun’s just begun.” Steven Levy —Living in the Blog-osphereNewsweek) Levy is a computer historian and insightful observer of geek culture.
“Instead of a library, the school has a resource center equipped with computer workstations that can access the Web, e-books and online journals. The resource center also houses several meeting tables, audio-visual materials and a few paper magazines — but no books.” Katie Dean —Who Needs Paper? Not Iowa College (Wired)
“Soon. Like in the next half hour or so. Given that I can’t do anything about it, I thought it might be interesting to stay online as long as I can and tell you what transpires…. I taste salt and something else. I exult in these moments. it’s the payoff for the bad times, the…
"Several years ago, the State University of New York at Buffalo took stock of its proliferating Web sites and found more than 250,000 pages spread out across 17 different servers. Not surprisingly, students and faculty members were having a hard time finding information they needed, even though they knew it was probably online — somewhere." Florence…
Weblogs are vehicles for debunking inaccurate, biased reporting–exposing the media giants like never before. "A favorite target is the [New York] Times, which has developed the habit of running front-page editorials posing as news reports." John Leo —Flogged by Bloggers (U.S. News)
Google has reversed the economy of links; linking to a document makes that document more valuable to page-ranking systems. “The link has a clearer value to B than the content of Bs page has to me or to my readers. I pay B for Bs content with my link.” Jill Walker —Links and Power: The…
"The Internet makes it ungodly easy now for people who wish to be lazy," says a librarian in this article about the pitfalls of relying on the Internet for research. —Point. Click. Think? (WashPost) You can often find good information online, but novices should know how to recognize a peer-reviewed journal.
Yahoo has admitted that it has been changing some of the words inside attachments accompanying messages sent to users of its web-based e-mail system. —Yahoo Admits Mangling E-MailBBC)
"In an age of big-budget titles and state-of-the-art technology, Skotos wants to revive the old text genre." Brad King [See also the sidebar: "Games Started Off Without a Bang."] —No Bells, No Whistles: Just Games (Wired)