Why Google Has Become Microsoft's Evil Twin
Google Buzz combined the openness of Twitter with the “whoo-hoo look at me!” aspects of Facebook. The result? A total face plant. —PC World
Critical Code Studies Working Group — Colossal Cave Adventure Annotation
This week, I’ll be facilitating a week-long collaborative annotation project, as part of the Critical Code Studies Working Group online conference, on the source code to Crowther’s original Colossal Cave Adventure (a classic text-only computer game from the 1970s). According to Donald Knuth, designer of the “literate programming paradigm,” Colossal Cave Adventure is the “ur-game…
Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service
“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to…
Typography and Textuality
Zach Whalen is turning his dissertation into a blog-web-thing, in the hopes of developing a book-thing. In whatever form it takes, it’s an interesting approach to a textual study of video games. This study asks how the design and configuration of text in videogames contributes to their textuality. I argue that videogames are texts in…
The Superbowl, Technology, and the Police State (1984-2010)
There’s a dissertation in here. All I have the energy to do today is imply a connection. Using a police state to market technology in 1984: Using a police state to market technology in 2010:
Social Media and Young Adults — Pew
None of this is a surprise to me, but I’m glad to have statistics to back up my impressions. A very small handful of students whose first introduction to online social networking was the SHU blogosphere, before blogs went really mainstream around 2005, are still blogging here, after they have graduated. In 2003-2005 it was…
Google’s Super Bowl Ad: A Romance in Search
I didn’t watch the game, but I did catch the buzz about this ad. Yes, I did tear up. (Wired has details.)
Doom Iphone code review.
Fascinating software study of the Doom iPhone port.http://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/index.php
The Videogame History Timeline (beta)
I wish I’d seen this a few weeks ago, before my Video Game Culture and Theory class ended, but it’s still a welcome find.
Misreading Apple and Amazon
I know, I know: Amazon relied on those $9.99 prices to give it a head start in the digital books market. And raising prices to the $12.99 to $14.99 being talked about could certainly slow sales if consumers don’t bite. But here’s the thing: it’s not as if Macmillan is only raising prices for Kindle.…
iDunno
Studying the faked predictions was more fun than finding out the actual gadget. I’m very interested in seeing how this shakes up the competition, but I’m not going to be one of the early adopters. Plato’s Phaedrus tells the story of Theuth, inventor of the alphabet. The god Thamos said, “O most ingenious Theuth, the…
Live Apple "Come see our latest creation"
I have not been ravenously following the streamed coverage of the iPad release, but I did note that the NYT was the first site Jobs presented during the demo. I really hope someone from Improv Everywhere runs up the center aisle, whirling a hammer around her head. It’s very significant, of course, that Apple is…
The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word
While the Bible does present Jesus as being able to read, and there is a story of Jesus drawing something unspecified in the dirt, the first followers of Jesus lived in an oral culture. The Gospel of Luke begins thus, identifying to the difference between oral culture and print culture: Since many have undertaken to…
Learning the art of creating computer games can boot [sic] student skills
“Worldwide, there is increasing recognition of a digital divide, a troubling gap between groups that use information and communication technologies widely and those that do not,” the team explains. “The digital divide refers not only to unequal access to computing resources between groups of people but also to inequalities in their ability to use information…
Is the NYT meter really a navigation fee?
It seems to me that they’re simply asking everybody to use external aggregators as a replacement for the nytimes.com homepage as the best tool for reading the site. Even people using the NYT’s own RSS feeds to find the stories they want to read might well be able to consume an unlimited amount of online…
The Future of Thinking
Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes…
Howard's Butt, Why is Howard's butt blogging? (Start here)
Diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma of the rectum, author and cyberthinker Howard Rheingold responds with humor, and a new blog. http://howardsbutt.tumblr.com
Amazon Invites Devs to Write Programs for Kindle
Amazon.com unexpectedly announced the Kindle Development Kit Thursday morning, which will allow developers to develop “active content” for the Kindle platform, to take advantage of the e-reader’s electronic ink display, Whispernet 3G technology, and days-long battery life.–PC Mag Somebody, please create a Z-code interpreter. I want my Kindle to guide me through a maze of…
Digital Humanities and the case for Critical Commons
A little context… a popular internet meme involves adding creative subtitles to a movie in which Hitler reacts to some very bad news. Here we see the evil dictator responding to some recent developments in academia.
Cut This Story!
On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory. Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined…