In March 2000, I was blogging about Palm V handheld computers for Navy officers Teaching with bells and whistles Stephen King selling a short story online NCAA banning online journalists Great moments in bureaucratic history Diploma mills Maps of imaginary lands
In February 2000, I was blogging about The 1995 Walter Sorrels hypertext story “The Heist“ The “Instant Muse Poetry Generator“ A London Metropolitan police raid on a Kurdish community theater group rehearsing a Harold Pinter play about the persecution of Kurds The number of active weblogs increasing from 50 to 500 in the past year…
In January 2000, I was blogging about Dancing paperclips and telemarketers A “100 best novels” list published in 1899 Updike’s prequel to Hamlet The “bafflegab” jargon generator “Bookseller Barnes & Noble is teaming with Microsoft to build a new online e-book store.” (but the link is dead)
In December 1999, I was blogging about: The death of Joseph Heller (author of Catch-22, which invented the term) “On the Internet, every page is hot off the presses… or could be, if editors and publishers simply realized that ‘[i]nteractive media eliminates the holy deadline.’ What’s left over feels more like gardening.” Dot-coms hiring journalists,…
In November 1999, I was blogging about John’s Book Pages (by a CS grad student who had recently read Gene Wolfe and Anthony Bourdain, among many others) What camomile tea has in common with the attack squadron over Skylon 4 (rec.humor newsgroup reference to a disastrous “tandem story” assignment) “Nimoy is, to say the least,…
Jessica found herself wishing that somebody — anybody — in her family had died: ”Because then I could write about it.” — College application essays. >As a young man I needed someone to look up to, someone to emulate. I was something of a nerd: I needed someone who’d integrated highly technical talents with the…
In September 1999, I was blogging about What makes a play worth seeing twice, according to Tom Stoppard The then-unrealistic expectations of voice-recognition software A critique of the “information wants to be free” mantra A Microsoft exec who predicted that digital publication would eclipse print publication within a decade How marketers are pushing your buttons…
In August 1999, I was blogging about Conservation efforts at Poohsticks Bridge A Penmanship camp in Philadelphia Recovering the only known copy of a lost work by the Greek mathematician Archimedes (erased by a 10th-century monk who scraped off the writing to reuse the parchment) Fourth-graders using e-books at Resurrection Catholic School in Dayton, Ohio…
In July, 1999, I was blogging about: (July 19) Florence, Italy — Librarians stumble across a bag of Dante’s ashes, lying on a shelf. [more | Digital Dante (U.Va)] (July 20) “That’s one small step for [a] man“…one grammatical goof for mankind? [RealAudio] [transcript] Did Neil Armstrong flub the first sentence spoken on the soil of the moon?…
After I read Mark Sample’s blog post “What about Blogging Keeps Me from Blogging,” I tried to post a comment lamenting that I miss blog comments. I ran into these fun problems.
On this date in 1999, I first dated an entry in the collection of web links I had been curating since at least that January.
In its efforts to combat the spread of false news online (whether by malicious people who knew it was propaganda, or through the wishful thinking of overly-credible sheep who saw a post as confirmation of a value they already held), Facebook experimented with flagging stories as “disputed by third-party fact-checkers.” It turns out that a…
Me: It took a few days for the spool of microfilm to arrive via interlibrary loan. I’d use this steampunk contraption to manually seek the right page in the book. But I found it. Crying stock photo child: (Sniff) Checking sources was scary ‘n’ hard in 2006! Me: Yes it was, crying stock photo child. Yes…
I paid a little attention to a long-neglected RSS aggregator for student blogs. It had stopped working at some point, and was no longer recognizing the RSS feeds generated by WordPress. Fortunately, the Feed Creator for WP RSS Aggregator does the trick — it generates RSS feeds automatically. I’m blogging this in part because every semester…
Interesting guidelines, phrased as suggestions and best practices rather than rules, from a project designed to help bloggers and independent journalists — and professional organizations too — develop their own codes of ethics. Celebrities know a loss of privacy is a cost of fame. Politicians and other public servants know their power brings public scrutiny, and…
This is why I still blog. While commercial platforms like Facebook and Twitter are designed to keep you churning out new content that attracts shallow attention, a weblog encourages reflection, the exploration of lateral thinking and deep linking, and the accumulation of ideas (your chronologically sorted, taggable history of posts) over time. Mark C. Marino…
A third alum in the last few weeks has contacted me to thank me for challenging her while a student: When I look back on my time at SHU, I remember sometimes being annoyed with all of our blogging assignments, but yet again, this is proof that the skills you taught us so a few years ago…
This is why I have been encouraging blogging for years. Unlike social media posts, that are fodder that generate income for someone else, a blog lets you accrue content for yourself, on your own terms, building up your personal credibility as a source of reliable and timely links, commentary, and perspective. Of course you can…
That feeling when you hit a million followers, make more money than your mom, push a diet pill scheme, lose your blog, and turn 16. | When I began reporting on the world of Tumblr teens, I first wanted to explain the absurdist comedy of Pizza and dozens of other Tumblrs like hers. But I soon…
I’ve been doing this since 1999. Why do academics blog? What do academic bloggers get from blogging? Discussions about scholarly blogging most often centre on the need for we academics to write in ways that attract new audiences. If we write blogs, we are told, we can communicate our research more effectively. Blogs enhance impact;…