Some weblogs are really just private diaries intended only for a handful of family members and close friends. Usability guidelines generally don’t apply to such sites, because the readers’ prior knowledge and motivation are incomparably greater than those of third-party users. When you want to reach new readers who aren’t your mother, however, usability becomes…
Links are now devalued. Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning. It won’t be long before Google itself is infested. Tim Bray is right, below, it’s time for Google to get on top of this. They’re both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank. You could drive…
So for instance, shows like Law and Order, CSI, and all their different versions can fetch more than 1mm dollars per episode. Most other shows fall in mid six figure price ranges and can go as low as 50k to 75k for hit reality shows like Survivor. The reality shows go for far less because…
One of the key characters in this film is Toby (played by Toby Froud). Froud is a midget who has been given a Muppet head to wear. And although the head is a good special-effects construction, I kept wanting to see real eyes and real expressions. The effects didn’t add anything. —Roger Ebert —Labyrinth (rogerebert.com) Er,…
“It’s important to emphasize story and emotion and character. This is one of the things that games don’t do,” Spielberg said. “Currently, what games do is they give you the entire story in the run-up to the actual game play from level to level. You get to see a movie, and you’re supposed to remember…
—Teaching Carnival II is here! (Scribblingwoman) A great collection of teaching links, highlighting what teachers who happen to blog are saying about their work. Similar:Interpretation and Intellectual Inquiry: A Charge To KeepI took a little break from evaluating a …ArtKate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the SequesterApparently these are two famous and phys…AestheticsStudents are trusting software…
The industry and the market are bewitched by the idea of more pixels and polys. Higher visual quality is fair enough, but why is it equated with better stabs at photo-realism? What’s the point of aesthetics at all? If they don’t matter, how come E3 can sucker-smack a “wow” or two out of so many…
The Internet is now teeming with some 15 million blogs. Although the medium first drew mainstream attention with commentary on high-profile events such as the presidential election, many now use it to chronicle intensely personal experiences, venting confessions in front of millions of strangers who can write back. Nearly half of bloggers consider it a…
Audience members, mostly senior-level editors and writers for women’s magazines, joined the panelists in voicing many familiar complaints about the industry: too many skinny models, even more emaciated feature stories, and too much advertiser influence on editorial content. Laurie Abraham, executive editor of Elle magazine, however, had something else on her mind. The worst thing…
Jack: So …. [pause] Jack: So he won then. [pause] Jill: Yes. Jack: Yes. [longer pause] Jack: He waited long enough. Jill: Yes. Jack: Yes … he did. [pause] Jill: Yes, he certainly waited long enough. Jack: Words. [pause] Jill: What? Jack: Words, in conversion, he was good at that. [pause] Jill: Yes … he…
Fuzzmail records the act of writing and lets you send it as an email. Dynamic changes, typoes, pauses and writeovers are captured and communicated. We created fuzzmail because we wanted a more emotionally expressive alternative to email, so that an emailed love letter does not have to look the same as a business letter. —Fuzzmail (fuzzmail.org)…
I am also not claiming that IF should self-evidently be assimilated under the umbrella of “games,” but instead is being cruelly excluded. There is plenty of ambivalence about whether or not IF belongs in games on all sides, both from within the IF community and from without. As “fiction” that is experience by playing a…
Google is dumb: it places so much trust on its relevance ranking in its presentation of search results as a simple list of Web sites. Users don’t have access to suggestions of alternate concepts or terms or all the tools that other search engines provide. Our clients are placing too much reliance on the first…
Settle thy studies (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve written before about using circle games in my teaching. Since students are wrestling with midterm projects and other major assignments, and since I’m teaching a large number of freshmen in 200-level courses this year, I’m seeing lots of worn-down students. In my Drama as Lit course, up to now…
Blogs are all the rage, and I encourage their use as part of the external – and internal – communications process. Unlike press releases, which tend to read as if they’d been composed by the mating of a computer and lawyer, good blogs have a distinctly human voice. They are conversational almost by definition. But…
Jacobs decided to craft an article about Wikipedia, complete with a series of intentional mistakes and typos, and post it on the site. The hope was that the community itself would be able to fix the errors and create a clean version that would be ready for publication in Esquire’s December issue. The original version…
The way I read a letter ‘s this: ‘T is first I lock the door, And push it with my fingers next, For transport it be sure. And then I go the furthest off To counteract a knock; Then draw my little letter forth And softly pick its lock. Then, glancing narrow at the wall,…
The ?word daemon?, Leonard ventures, ?however spelled, uncovers a provocative and useful dualism. An intermediary with another world doesn’t have to be beneficient. Yet neither is it compelled to be nefarious. It can be both, flip-flopping between positive and negative states?depending on context or perception, on the vagaries of polities, or the whims of the…
Morgan Spurlock, whose movie Super Size Me documents what happened to his body when he ate nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days, spoke at Seton Hill earlier this evening. I asked him to autograph this burger. My journalism students were required to attend the class, and have a short article due tomorrow. I asked…
I see students calling me over to their desks to ask about a word problem, and half the time me reading the word problem aloud to them is enough to answer their question. I see students skimming over paragraphs of text (not that I blame them) and then asking me what they really needed to…