Relaxing in bed on the first Sunday morning of my summer break, I web-surfed across the name of something I was interested in, on a “Top 5” list. I host some “Top #X Whatevers” pages on my website, but I put all the items (writing tips of some sort) on one page, and include a…
[N]o matter how good the design, and despite rigorous tests of impact, I have never seen technology systematically overcome the socio-economic divides that exist in education. Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else. Many people believe that technology “levels the playing field” of learning, but what I’ve discovered is that…
This Time magazine article is a good one, but that “what you think you know is wrong” headline is more of the same obnoxious clickbait that the article itself critiques, so here’s a bit of what I found useful. Scrolling is more acceptable behavior than it used to be. We’re all much more used to…
I have no particular opinion about how to close an email. I just checked my “outbox” and I see that I haven’t closed any of my recent messages. Several were responses to requests from other people, so “Thank you” would be out of place, and even “Here you go” would be so unnecessary it would…
“Hi. I’m Jason Scott, and I am trying to collect every AOL CD variation ever made.” Scott works for the Internet Archive, which is kind of like a museum for the Internet. And to him, these CDs are precious artifacts. “They are, in some ways, little time capsules about what online life was and why we wanted…
One of journalism’s most treasured clichés, spouted by seasoned editors who ruthlessly slash other clichés from stories, is: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” But the cliché doesn’t tell the journalist, or humanitarian professional, how to check it out. Verification is the essence of journalism, but it also illustrates the difficulty…
Just as young people in journalism school five years ago learned that Twitter was important to reporting, soon enough they might be learning how to film with a 360-degree camera. The same goes for documentary filmmakers. “As these younger journalists are coming out of J-school they’re all learning how to use every single way of…
We didn’t start the flame war. Scandalous satirical pamphlets were once cranked out by writers and sold at train stations, like so many primordial blog posts. Political cartoons have a long and vicious history. Incivility is our legacy, not our invention. It is part, but only part, of who we are. And have always been.…
When Board examinations are due in Bihar, parents tighten their belts, pull up their socks and transform overnight into expert rock climbers. They scale walls made of brick and mortar without any fear. Where Spiderman needs a web to swing from one building to another or a spider bite to grow tiny hair on his…
I found that when an app did sell girl characters, it charged on average $7.53, which is a lot in the world of apps. After all, each of the apps I downloaded only cost an average of $0.26. In other words, girl characters cost about 29 times more than the cost of the apps themselves.…
Now I’m going to bed.
Jeffry built himself a harmless little Twitter bot. His intent was to create something that remixed his previous tweets into new — and hopefully coherent — sentences. No big deal, right? Except that when his bot happened to pick up on a tweet from another Twitter bot and made mention of a specific event, the…
However, there’s a silver lining for Mark Zuckerberg, as his company owns Instagram and WhatsApp, a popular messaging service. Whereas the company used to try to “clone the competition,” according to Bosker, Facebook has started acquiring its heirs. If teens are fickle and always looking to the next big thing, it’s smart to make sure…
Justine Sacco is the PR exec whose tweet about AIDS went viral last year. It turns out that the angry Twitter mob that called her racist and unprofessional just might have been uninformed about the whole story. Imagine that! An apology to Justine Sacco had been itching at my throat from the moment I saw…
This article featuring reflective clothing designed to overload cameras is actually more interesting to me because of the focus on how the crowd-sourced idea process works. Glass nanospheres are bonded to the fabric and act as little reflective lenses, which gives the clothes their shine. “It’s taking light and shoving it right back into the…
A PR professional should have known better. But mistakes can have serious, disproportionate consequences enacted by vigilante mobs. It may not be fair, but labeling it unfair doesn’t undo the consequences. Sacco’s Twitter feed had become a horror show. “In light of @Justine-Sacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today” and “How did @JustineSacco…
The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, a task the San Francisco-based nonprofit has tirelessly done since 1996, two years before Google was founded. The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web. For most people, it ends there. But that’s barely scratching the surface.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. The original, “’Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle,’ was the tender Christmas message sent by Ian Maclaren to the readers of The British Weekly” (1898) uses an unfamiliar definition of “pitiful” and uses the gender-specific “man,” so the modernized version is understandably more popular.
“We hope these helpful new alerts will improve our users’ experience by prompting them to revisit the site in the event they momentarily turn their focus elsewhere,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Twine games look and feel profoundly different from other games, not just because they’re made with different tools but also because they’re made by different people – including people who don’t have any calcified notions about what video games are supposed to be or how they’re supposed to work. While roughly 75% of developers at…