Until now, the web has been space-based, like a magazine stand; we use spatial terms such as “second from the top on the far left” to identify a particular magazine. A diary, on the other hand, is time-based: One dimension of space has been borrowed to represent time, so we use temporal terms like “Thursday’s…
Blogging this mostly because of the good writing. Facebook is a continuing nightmare of privacy disasters. It’s the bathroom door that resists all efforts at locking, swinging open again and again while you’re trying to poop. When even Mark Zuckerberg’s own sister (and also the company’s former marketing director) can accidentally share photos in wider…
When you click “like” for a cause in Facebook, you may be helping scammers make money. People buy and sell fan pages. That “like” that you clicked gives whoever owns the page more access to your Facebook feed; the more feeds the page can access, the more money it’s worth. Structure of a Facebook scam…
The honeymoon with MOOCs is over. The reality check has finally arrived which was inevitable. MOOCs will not solve all the woes of higher education. It is unfortunate it had to be a class on how to design an online course; it was the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application [FOE] offered through Coursera…
Great example of investigative journalism, piecing together a coherent narrative from conflicting bits and pieces culled from various sources. A reminder that journalists — even when they are fighting deadlines, and even when they are writing more-fluffy-than-the-crime-beat pieces — must verify claims before going public. Too many sports journalists reported unconfirmed bits and pieces of…
While blogs still exist as convenient ways for authors to compile and archive their writing over time, commenting has long been driven (by spammers) into other social media, like Twitter and Facebook. What follows is an interesting snapshot of the Cyberculture change, as it was happening. What really changed between 2005 and 2009 was that…
My first-year writing students generally know they aren’t supposed to use Wikipedia as a source in a research paper, but many can’t quite articulate why. A willingness to trace a citation to its source and evaluate the source, rather than accept the source uncritically, is crucial to intellectual competence in the Information Age. An article…
The WordPress extension Jetpack provided me with thus chart, showing a million hits to an instructional web page (on formatting a paper in MLA style) stretched out over about 16 months. The weekly traffic peaks on Mondays and bottoms out on Fridays (with a sharp spike late Sunday, stretching past midnight, thus puffing up the…
I just noticed a mild traffic spike over the past few days, and after a little digging, learned a page on my blog is currently first out of 2 billion hits for something I blogged about in July. A different, related search returns the same page first out of 2.4 billion hits. Thanks to traffic…
Explore – Laconic history of the world in a typographic map….
My high school experience was very analog. I had been word-processing most of my school papers and doing some recreational coding/hacking since I was in middle school (around 1982), but didn’t start using email until I went to college (1986), and then only sparingly until I left the country for grad school. So it was…
The New York Times debuted a new multimedia feature Thursday so beautiful it has a lot of people wondering — especially those inside the New York Times — if the mainstream media is about to forgo words and pictures for a whole lot more. Unlike a standard words-on-page article that doesn’t diverge too much from print in the design department,…
30 Web Designs Featuring Vintage Style Typography.
Something else has changed, too, beyond the proliferation of screens. Today, I don’t think—and I’m almost afraid to write this, because it’s like the tolling of some great bell—today I don’t think the amateur’s best effort is good enough. We as internet users have less patience and less charity for janky, half-broken experiences. (Which is…
Unexpected consequences, when a developer slims the size (in terms of data) of the YouTube video-watching page from 1.2M down to under 100kb. Having just finished writing the HTML5 video player, I decided to plug it in instead of the far heavier Flash player. Bam! 98KB and only 14 requests. I threaded the code with…
Reaction to the cover: – Newsweek’s last print issue has just a hashtag on the cover. Like using your final breath to ID the killer. @sacca – Newsweek’s last cover: one more flippant stunt. Ooh! A Hashtag! I’m proud to have worked there 1985-93. @jswatz – Glad to see @Newsweek going all digital! Love the…
If you’re a veteran gamer you’ll remember the golden era of text-based adventures. The Hobbit, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Zork… titles that conjured whole worlds out of narrative descriptions and two-word player inputs. That genre never went away, of course – interactive fiction communities still thrive on the web (a good place to look is…
Have I mentioned lately that I have awesome students? For a “Creative Critical Presentation” in my online American Literature survey, English major Tyler Carter created A Message from Hester Prynne, a 9-minute video that explores Hester’s psychology and spirituality, through music, dance, poetry, and cinematography. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivxfKoZmF5k All the technology Seton Hill offers to its students…
It’s funny because it’s true. Senior Tech #1: How To Master Texting