The newspaper, founded in 1645 by Sweden’s Queen Kristina, became a Web-only publication on Jan. 1. —World’s Oldest Newspaper Goes Digital (Guardian) Yes, you read that right. 1645. Similar:How Zuckerberg’s Facebook is like Gutenberg’s printing pressHistorian Niall Ferguson notes that Sili…BooksFilmmakers fighting “Happy Birthday” copyright find their “smoking gun”Who owns the copyright to the “Happy Bir…Business5…
You currently have no blogs. (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) When my students and I log into MovableType, we get the message “You currently have no blogs.” (I’ve put in a support ticket, and can’t do anything until they respond.) I’m supposed to be taking items off my to-do list… Similar:the history of computer games: from 'pong' to…
—Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us Fantastic content. No time to comment on it — not until my to do list is clear. But this is definitely worth a link. I will say that this is a far more optimistic depiction of The Machine than E. M. Forster had in “The Machine Stops”…
To Do List (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) No recreational blogging for me until I’m done with everything on this list. Write letter of ref for recent grad (deadline was Feb 1; turned in letter Jan 31) Finish new article on a classic work of interactive fiction (deadline was Feb 1; I’ll have it done in a few…
To gather up a few logs, it might seem like lunacy to deploy the same kind of sophisticated and pricey ROVs used to explore the Titanic or investigate 9,000-foot-deep geothermal vents along the mid-Atlantic seafloor. But do the math and Godsall’s method starts to make good financial sense. Operated by just one person, a so-called…
—Boston Ad Prank Suspects Talk About … Hair (Fox | Youtube) I sense these two fellows might be worried their 15 minutes of fame might be receding faster than my hairline. It was a nice try by the reporter who asked a question about whether the suspects felt their hair would be safe if they went…
What makes Ledonne think that a video game is the best way to try and deconstruct the tortured minds that led to Columbine? Gaming is essentially escapist entertainment and while there are plenty of violent games out there to help you get off, if that’s what gets you off, no one has ever confused a…
A front page article about the sexual assault appeared on the front page of this week‘sstudent newspaper, The Argonaut. The paper was distributed Thursday and sometime before Friday morning nearly 500 copies of the paper showed up with the article snipped out. The papers were apparently stolen, vandalized and returned to the display boxes, said…
So I admit it. I got caught up in all the hype about blogs — about their potential for communication, for creating global connections, for expressing oneself, for extending face-to-face discussions, and for building community in online environments. In most cases, my initial excitement has not borne fruit. I don’t fault my students. I am…
Quite bluntly, if your web application can’t easily be adapted as a classic text adventure, your application has serious problems on multiple levels. Applications that can’t be easily adapted likely suffer from application structure and design problems and UI dependency, to organizational politics and bad decisions. —Michael Buffington —Your Web App as a Text Adventure (ETech…
We thought that we would never see A suit to compensate a tree. A suit whose claim in tort is prest Upon a mangled tree’s behest; A tree whose battered trunk was prest Against a Chevy’s crumpled crest; A tree that faces each new day With bark and limb in disarray; A tree that may…
“The Little Book of Plagiarism” is inspired by several recent literary scandals, starting with the Kaavya Viswanathan affair. At 17, Viswanathan was paid a $500,000 advance for a deal that included a “chick-lit novel,” but when that novel was published, attentive readers noticed that she had copied at least 13 passages from a novel by…
I was alone and fueling my own self-destructive spiral. Now, I did have one thing which granted me solace: my MUD. For those of you who don’t know, I have invested several years of my life into an online roleplaying community. Yeah, I’m a geek. I own 20 sided dice, too. Anyway, what offered me…
YouTube wanted to build a large enough community before beginning to pay users for their content, he said. “We didn’t want to build a system that was motivated by monetary reward. When you start giving money to people from day one– the people you do attract will just switch to the next provider that’s paying…
Sequatchie County High School Principal Tommy Layne said that he initially considered it a joke, but that authorities then found the ninth-graders’ online MySpace pages and postings that included the word “kill.” […] There was no evidence that the girls had weapons or that an attack had been imminent, Huth said. The girls, ages 14…
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions…
It’s hard to imagine what freshmen think when they wander into Professor Banzai’s lecture hall. Weller reports that he loses a lot of students after the first class. “They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop,” he says with a laugh. The 450-page course reader tells them otherwise. Those who…
I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually…
My partner once worked at a college in South Carolina. Her chair was from the Northeast, and when she had first arrived on campus, she was very concerned about fitting into the Southern culture of politeness and manners. When the first student came to her to explain that her grandmother had died, and that she…
While plenty of professors have complained about the lack of accuracy or completeness of entries, and some have discouraged or tried to bar students from using it, the history department at Middlebury College is trying to take a stronger, collective stand. It voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a…