The Elements of Clunk

The grammar/punctuation flames from not-all-that-well-informed posters at the end of this article are quite interesting for he or she who likes such things. Four years ago, I wrote an essay for The Chronicle Review cataloging “The Seven Deadly Sins of Student Writers“–the errors and infelicities that cropped up most frequently in my students’ work. Since…

Get Lamp? Just got one, thanks.

Great little story from robohara.com. This morning for Christmas, I got a box from Dad. Inside the box was a treasure chest. The treasure chest was wrapped twice with a chain, and the chain was fastened with a combination lock that uses letters instead of numbers. Also inside the box was this: A map. Similar:The…

Mobile Economics Will Trend Toward Web Economics

Restricting access to content doesn’t work. Someone else’s content will get filtered and curated instead of yours. Scarcity is not a viable business model on the Internet. —Fred Wilson, AVC Similar:Brian Williams is Giving NBC an Opportunity to Bravely Break with TraditionNBC has a marketing decision to make, no…BusinessThomas Jefferson on "newspapers without government" vs…

Book publishers see their role as gatekeepers shrink

For more than a century, writers have made the fabled pilgrimage to New York, offering their stories to publishing houses and dreaming of bound editions on bookstore shelves. Publishers had the power of the purse and the press. They doled out advances to writers they deemed worthy and paid the cost of printing, binding and…

"interactive fiction" Trumps "text adventures" in Google Books Corpus

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The Most Awesome 450 Page Presentation Ever

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"It is now 88 followers, and I have just been retweeted. Sweet!"

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Link Attribution, the Early Blogosphere and the Arts & Letters Daily

Fascinating discussion of the evolution (and violation) of the emerging blogosphere convention for citing links, in the late 90s. A few years ago, I was exploring what happened to the canonical first blogs, a short list of frequently updated web pages that  Jesse James Garret identified as weblogs, and I mentioned in passing that I…

Breakfast with Santa

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Quick Reaction to the Google Books App: No highlighting? No thank you.

If you like highlighing, you can pass on Google Books. The press coverage I’ve seen is mostly about how Google’s new ebook store will likely threatens Amazon, but Google’s reader software is just meh. All politics about Google’s digitization of library archives aside, I love the ready access to full-page scans from out-of-copyright titles. The…