RSSMix.com Mix ID 25843

Rackspace Hosting Makes Some Service Improvements

When it comes to the highly competitive world of web hosting, innovation is often a necessity to maintaining the edge. To that end, Rackspace is relaunching its e-mail exchange hosting and application reseller partner program to add ...

Rumors Confirmed: Facebook to Add Location Service

Facebook has been working on a location-based service for close to a year, but held off on an announcement until it was completely ready for mainstream adoption, fearing potential privacy concerns. However, it looks like the time for ...

Opera's Popular Browser Comes to Android

It's tough to argue the fact that any operating system's success or failure has much to do with third party support. To that end, things are looking up for Google's fairly new Android OS as Opera Software has decided to come on board ...

Sr. Recruiter Job, Citrix Online - Mashable Jobs

The Sr. New Media Manager role serves as a coordination point for all corporate social activities. This position supports our core brand initiatives, providing consistency in our organization's social presence. ...

Marketing Intern Job, TMG - Mashable Jobs

Would you value the opportunity to gain a wide range of marketing experience at a top custom media company? Want the chance to work on award-winning digital and print custom media programs? If so, then TMG wants to hear from you. ...

Digital / Social Media Director Job, Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter ...

Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates (CLS), a Washington, D.C.-based public affairs, crisis and international communications consulting firm, is seeking a [Digital / Social Media Director] a management-level position overseeing ...

Online Community Director Job, Share Our Strength - Mashable Jobs

Organizational Overview: Share Our Strength is a national organization working to make sure no child in America grows up hungry. Share Our Strength weaves together a net of community groups, activists and food programs to catch children ...

Web Producer Job, Share Our Strength - Mashable Jobs

Bing is Live now in the open : Locally Type*

Bing is Live now in the open Posted on June 1, 2009. Filed Under Bing | Leave a Comment. Live was going to be bing and now bing is live :). Go check it out! Bing.com Bing on the Roof Bing is looking for Smart(est) Minds ...

Stockholm Syndrome 53% of users expect to be disappointed but ...

Stockholm Syndrome 53% of users expect to be disappointed but still love search. Posted on April 28, 2009. Filed Under Conferences | Leave a Comment. This is a short clip of the SMX Munich Keynote held by Stefan Weitz last week. ...

Video Interview: Stefan Weitz talks about the future of Search ...

Video Interview: Stefan Weitz talks about the future of Search. Posted on April 28, 2009. Filed Under Microsoft | 3 Comments. When Stefan was here last week he did give a couple of interviews. One was recorded on video linked below. ...

Facebook targeted ads : Locally Type*

Facebook targeted ads. Posted on April 1, 2009. Filed Under SEM & SEO | 3 Comments. Pretty good targeting. Ads shown on a Yahoo! eployees Facebook profile page. fb ads yahoo. Facebook the new White Pages? ...

Check Out This Poll Widget

This is from Urtak and looks a lot like Hunch. I think it's a pretty compelling user experience. Poll creation is pretty weak, but easy. Let me know what you think and I'll tell you what I think of it once we're on the other side. ...

5 Cool New Blogs You Might Like

I've been meaning to share links to some of the blogs I've been coming across a lot lately and really enjoying. Check these out, you might like them as much as I have been. Got suggestions for other blogs that readers here and I should ...

How to Use Twitter Tonight Without Seeing Lost Spoilers

Tweetdeck offers exclude filters! Now my Netflix TV viewing much later will not be spoiled! Awesome! Or, if you have stuff like that (iPad?) well there you go. Thanks, again, Tweetdeck!

My New Bio, What Do You Think of It?

Working on a new bio, anybody got any feedback on how this reads? Marshall Kirkpatrick is the lead writer at ReadWriteWeb, one of the top technology news blogs on the internet and syndicated daily online by the New York Times. ...

My New People Tracking System

I'm experimenting with a new system for discovering and getting to know important new people. I'm pretty excited about it. Of course it's about Twitter because Twitter is paying my mortgage. I wrote a little song about it, ...

Readings: Water, Flu, Debt, Bubbles, Airports, etc.

Deceptive arguments are being made in California's water wars (Source); Hit Entertainment 'at risk of breaching bank covenants' (Source); Are Pink Slips Better Than Flu Shots? The Effects of Employment on Influenza Rates (Source) ...

Michael Lewis on 60 Minutes

Writer Michael Lewis got a bonanza of press for his new book this weekend. The television show 60 Minutes profiled him and his The Big Short in a piece called Inside the Collapse. Watch CBS News Videos Online ...

Apple, Wal-mart, and the Market Capitalization Bigger Than Thing

I always snicker when I start hearing stories about some company or sector's market capitalization being bigger than some other better known thing. It usually means that something's value has grown to absurd levels, and that's why we're ...

The Database of Intentions Is Far Larger Than I Thought - John ...

Way back in November of 2003, when I was a much younger man and the world had yet to fall head over heels in love with Google, I wrote a post called The Database of Intentions. It was an attempt to explain a one-off reference in an ...

Art and Media Sharing Apps Top This Week's List of Gainers by ...

Slide FunSpace is once again a leader on our weekly AppData list of fastest-growing applications by monthly active users. However, some of the growth is beginning to appear problematic for Slide. While gaining about 12 million new MAU ...

New Logo Thanks OBX Design Works! | HPC

Thanks William of OBX Design Works (who also designed the awesome Whuffaoke site) for the new banner!

Jambool Talks About Localized Currencies, User Statistics and Fraud

Jambool, the payments startup that offers in-game payments on Facebook through a product called Social Gold, recently announced that it has begun offering international currencies for players in other countries. Localized currencies are ...

The Post-Notification Era on the Facebook Platform: Viral ...

There was a lot of hand-wringing by developers prior to Facebook phasing out application-based Notifications on March 1st, especially among smaller developers who relied heavily on them to remind users to come back to their game or ...

HitWise: Facebook's US Traffic Continues to Grow, Takes Over ...

Facebook saw a couple traffic spikes over the winter holidays that temporarily made it the largest site in the US, according to Hitwise. But now, the web measurement firm reports, Facebook now represents 7.07% of all US internet visits ...

10 Reasons TEDActive Rawks

2010 was my third year of being a TEDster, although I've been watching TED Talks since they first went online in 2007 and first heard of the amazing conference from my friend Austin Hill in 2006 (was following his inspirational posts). ...

Hyderabad, India to Get the Newest Facebook Office

India hasn't seen that much Facebook usage until the last few months, when it's been taking off. We noted that the service recently reached 7 million monthly active users in the country of 1.2 billion people. ...

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: How Google sets goals and ...

Google sets impossible bodacious goalsand then achieves them. The engineering mindset of solving the impossible problem is part of the culture instilled in every group at Google. Tough engineering problems don't have obvious answers.

InnoDB and 4k page size benchmarks?

Has anyone done any more work on recompiling InnoDB with 4k pages and benchmarking under SSD? We're building out a new DB that uses very small records (around 32-64 bytes) so reading a whole 16k for this record should have a performance ...

Netflix Cancels the Netflix Prize 2

Today, Netflix announced it is canceling its plans for a second Netflix Prize contest, one that reportedly would have involved the release of more information than the first. As I argued earlier, I feared that the new contest would have ...

Open MySQL Meetup at Oracle Open World

Spinn3r will be hosting an Open MySQL meetup at Oracle Open World (which is right down the street). This would be on Wed 10/14 2009 at 7pm at 580 Howard Suite 301 (Spinn3r HQ). Oracle owns MySQL, InnoDB, etc so I suspect a lot of ...

Best Practices for Government Datasets: Wrap-Up

[This is the fifth and final post in a series on best practices for government datasets by Harlan Yu and me. (previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4)]. For our final post in this series, we'll discuss several issues not touched on by earlier posts, ...

Still Suspended On Twitter. No, I Don't Have a Koobface Infection.

So, as Louis Gray discovered (to my shame), my Twitter account has been suspended. I understand that I'm in some company, and it probably predated a human-related error that occurred several days ago. I have no idea why this is the case ...

A Wealth of Woman-Founded Startups, from a Twitter Shout-out

I haven't been a heavy user of the Twitter shout-out before, but I had such great response and feedback yesterday that I wanted to share. Before chatting with a reporter this morning about woman-founded startups, I thought it would be ...

startups woo coders with cloud-based development environments

rafe needleman continued his developers-in-the-cloud theme at the microsoft campus this afternoon, with an under the radar judging panel that includes first round capital's very own rob hayes. here are the presenters, roughly in my ...

Finding Mahalo In Them Thar SERPs

So, I'm not disparaging any company that gets 3M or so uniques per month, but its funny. I remember that when Mahalo was launched some year(s) ago, in its initial incarnation / hype, I remember someone saying something about building ...

quick & dirty how-to: employee stock option allocations

a great question came up recently in discussion with one of first round's ceos: how much equity should i allocate for hiring my next round of employees? for a company that has raised a first institutional round of capital, this question ...

Buffett on terrible journalism

Warren Buffett owner of one newspaper and director of another complains in his letter to shareholders (PDF) about his quote being mangled and misused by sound-bite journalism: Last year we saw, in one instance, how sound-bite ...

Operational transparency

I am in Tampa waiting to fly back home to New Jersey and, thanks to the snowicane but rather than sitting in the usual information vacuum to which airlines subject us, I am watching as Continental shows us the status of the flights that ...

News(paper)

Friend Michael Rosenblum forwarded word that the Star-Ledger in New Jersey was just nominated for seven local Emmys for its video work. Bravo for my old friends there and for Rosenblum, who trained them . ...

Italy endangers the web

Italy is endangering the web. It convicted three Google executives for privacy violations for a video that was posted on YouTube that Google took down when it received a complaint. By holding Google liable for the actions of a user, ...

Demand Media's advisors

Demand Media just announced the formation of an advisory board; Staci Kramer has the details at PaidContent. I was invited to join but decided to decline. I've been saying a lot about Demand sometimes disagreeing with the common and ...

Get your PSA checked, men

Here's audio of an appearance on The Takeaway on public radio this morning about the American Cancer Society's new prostate (PSA) screening guidelines, telling doctors to discuss the test and its implications first the moral ...

TEDxNYed: This is bullshit

Here are my notes for my talk to the TEDxNYed gathering this past weekend. I used the opportunity of a TED event to question the TED format, especially in relation to education, where as in media we must move past the one-way ...

Marketing's next

Meredith, the magazine publisher, is taking on functions of ad agencies, as the Wall Street Journal describes in detail today. It's a smart move by Meredith and it's inevitable as we shift from selling scarcity to selling service to ...

Google: Forms & Landing Pages are Key

A fascinating post by Googler Gavin Doolan: If you are considering making changes to your website design, take a moment to consider the potential revenue impact of your redesign. (This graph) shows a theoretical overview of the ROI ...

Looking for examples of microcopy

I've set up a new Flickr group with the express intent of aggregating examples of microcopy, that tiny copy (often shorter than a sentence) that helps clarify, explain, reduce commitment, or otherwise assuage someone performing (or ...

Communicating Value through Cause & Effect on Fanfeedr

A few months ago we held an event called Testcase at Betahouse in Cambridge, MA where we asked four startups to come and user test their web sites with local folks who showed up. Despite the super informal user testing method we used, ...

Top 10 Best and Worst Internet Stocks of 2009

After a dismal 2008, Internet stocks crushed the overall market in 2009, with the sector up +89.9% vs. the NASDAQ's +43.9% gain and the S&P 500's +23.5% gain. The average Internet stock gained +91.6% indicating that the gains were ...

The Great Abdication: Consumer Internet, Venture Capital, and Angels

(My day job is investing in the public markets, but I have a small personal portfolio of private investments, mostly angel investments in internet and software related startups. In the past six months I have spent some time helping a ...

Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Retiring Old Friends to Make Room for ...

About a year ago I wrote a post How Friendships Evolve and the Quest for Platonic Intimacy. Among other things, it addressed the challenge of 18-30 year olds who seek to add an intellectual dimension to long-standing emotional ...

Colleges Work to Maintain an Information Deficit About Their ...

To graduate from college students do not have to demonstrate anything whatsoever beyond passing grades. Students do not, for example, take a standardized test administered to students from multiple universities, so their performance ...

The Three Horsemen of the VC Apocalypse

The Venture Capital industry is about to enter a kind of mid-life crisis that could test its very foundations thanks to three key drivers: Returns: For a long time, returns have the biggest selling point for venture capital as an asset ...

The 10 Dollar Rule

Chris G. wrote about how he reduces stress when traveling, and among all the good tips is this: I often get stressed out spending small amounts of money. Overall, this isn't always bad -- it's led to a healthy paranoia about debt and a ...

Tesla Motors Files S1; Bankers Think It's Worth at least $1.5BN+

Electric car company Tesla Motors filed it's initial S1 registration statement today which means that if everything goes smoothly with the SEC it is looking at a late Q2 IPO. The headline of most stories about the filing is that Tesla ...

Save America's Space Program...

http://www.SaveSpace.US is a movement started by people on the Space Coast to raise the awareness of the nation, the President, and other elected officials: Space needs to be a priority for America! Our country's space program faces a ...

new twitterholic functionality...

so gavin actually wrote this a while ago now, but it's just been sitting to the side collecting enough data to be interesting. we're now ranking people based on hash tag usage/associations. it's a little less straight forward than the ...

Spirit Airlines Reaches Out...

I just got off the phone with Ben Baldanza from Spirit Airlines regarding a series of posts I wrote about 2 years ago now. Long enough ago that I honestly didn't immediately recognize the name, and once I did, completely thought it was ...

The Great Debate...

Think of the various world governments like retail. There's Neiman Marcus on one end and Walmart on the other. As much as we all love to hate on Walmart (pre-recession), many folks basically argue that we are to be the Walmart of ...

A List Apart: Articles: Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web

You've probably heard that Apple recently announced the iPad. The absence of Flash Player on the device seems to have awakened the HTML5 vs. Flash debate. Apparently, it's the final nail in the coffin for Flash. The arguments run wide, ...

The Gong Show Google Chrome

Google launched a browser: Chrome. I downloaded and it and took it for a spin this afternoon. Here are my first impressions. HolyCrapItIsFast! Seriously, it starts up fast, tabs open and close fast, browsing is snappier and more ...

Why Big Data? Here's Why I'm Interested

I just had my 2nd conversation this morning before coffee about this fabulous Economist special report on Big Data: Data Data Everywhere. The person I was corresponding with asked me why I was interested in this topic. Here's my answer. ...

Community Manager Job, Anjunabeats - Mashable Jobs

One of the UK's leading independent dance labels is recruiting for a Community Manager. You will ideally have at least 3 years relevant experience in a community manager role with a specific focus on social media. ...

Sales Consultant Job, Meltwater Buzz - Mashable Jobs

Social Media Sales Consultant - With Management Potential About the Meltwater Group Meltwater Group is a privately held software company founded in Norway in 2001. We are committed to challenging existing business models by introducing ...

social media coordinator Job, surfaces usa - Mashable Jobs

must have strong writing & communication skills.launching a social media platform for 7 stores. x citing ground level opportunity. will b managing several twiiter, facebook, blogs & website news rooms. Apply by. Email: Mashable Partners ...

15 Famous Tech Titans Hit Forbes' Billionaire List

Forbes has released its annual list of the world's billionaires and when it comes to technology, the list includes many of the same faces we see year after year.

Director/VP of Sales and Business Development Job, Comedy.com ...

Comedy.com, the guide to what's funny right now, is looking to hire a Director (or VP depending on experience level) of Sales and Business Development in its Santa Monica office. This position will be tasked primarily with bringing in ...

Database of Intentions Chart - Version 2, Updated for Commerce

There are many, many signals in the Database of Intentions, as my readers have pointed out, but the one I feel compelled to add to the chart I created Friday is the Commerce signal. This signal emerged before search, really, ...

Mauldin: The Velocity of Money

The Velocity of Money. The Federal Reserve and central banks in general are running a grand experiment on the economic body, without the benefit of anesthesia. They are testing the theories of Irving Fisher (representing the classical ...

California Bonds? Detroit Bonds? 30-Year Treasuries? Bring 'Em On.

People are sure digging on the collapse thesis with respect to bond purchasing: Lockyer Sells 25% More California Bonds Than Forecast (Bloomberg); Detroit sees lower than expected interest rates on new bond offering (DetNews) ...

Database of Intentions Chart - Version 2, Updated for Commerce ...

On Emerging (Financial) Viruses

Investigators face a daunting black box with emerging viruses: the challenge of developing a universal therapeutic agent to combat a genetically proficient virus that quite likely has many more options for emergence than we have yet ...

Matt Simmons: The Oil & Water Mix

Matt Simmons: The Oil & Water Mix. By Paul Kedrosky Saturday, March 13, 2010 . Matt Simmons: The Oil & Water Mix. On Emerging (Financial) Viruses | Home Lijit Search. Recent Comments. Archives. Select a Month... March 2010 ...

The Business Climate in China

I just spent a week and a half in southern China visiting a range of manufacturing facilities and meeting with senior executives, and the learnings were significant, some of which I want to share with you today. ...

Cogaoke Case Study: quality wins over quantity

I've spoken before about whuffie deposits and withdrawals before. I'd like to think I deposit a lot into my whuffie account. I help people out with their campaigns, vote for them when they ask and generally follow links, photos and blog ...

Discouragement and Faith | HPC

Faith. It's a tough one when discouragement is so plentiful. Some days I wonder if it's a test to see if I'm strong enough.

Would You Sacrifice Love for Greatness? | HPC

Do you have to sacrifice love for greatness? And, if so, what would be your choice?

Facebook Launches Sports Topic Page, Begins Promoting College ...

Having launched a number of popular, official topic pages already, Facebook has another one out today: Sports. It promises to provide periodic status updates about sports, as you might guess as well as highlight ways other companies ...

This Week's Headlines on Inside Social Games

ISG Logo It's a week of international imports and premieres for social startups. We have seen new levels of quality in synchronous games, automated fighting titles, and even some new lessons in tycoon zoology. ...

Power to Change the Broken System | HPC

Now is the time for us to use all of the power we have to move business in the direction of customer-centric thinking. It's good for everyone.

Las Boletas para el F8 se agotaron en 2 das

Gran expectativa ha causado la realizacin de la tercera versin del F8 el evento organizado por Facebook dirigido a toda la comunidad de desarrolladores, emprendedores y anunciantes de Facebook. Sin embargo, es posible que muchos de lo ...

What the World Needs isthese TED Talks | HPC

So though TED 2010 was, as one speaker said, worth the sum of the whole rather than any individual part, these are my top 10 moments that tied the parts together for me...

Personal RFP: attention airlines! | HPC

Imagine this campaign from an airline: We want to rectify your bad airline experiences AND entice you to see if we are true to our word by offering you equivalent miles... I have.

Why I've Fallen in Love with the Nexus One | HPC

Why I cheated on the iPhone with the Nexus One and ended up falling in love. Sorry iPhone!

Making Friendfeed Better, Part II | Deep Jive Interests

Friendfeed needs powerful friends (read: friends with tons of friends, wealthy friends, powerful friends, friends with access). They could do a lot worse than Thomas Hawk, Zooomr-evangelist, and gigantic Flickr Fan, who suggests a lot ...

and also be wary of small men with big ideas. chartreuse

People don't know what's going to happen next. My readers are not sure. Could I embarrass them? Maybe. Could I inspire them? Maybe. They don't know. That's very important, because when you become a comfortable, reliable friend, ...

The money graph BuzzMachine

A new Pew study on the economics of news does not give comfort to news sites planning pay schemes. It also does not give me comfort that we're wasting precious time futzing over walls when we should be paying attention to the big ...

true/false smart/dumb and a few maybes (Or always be wary of big ...

true/false smart/dumb and a few maybes (Or always be wary of big men with small ideas) Digg getting into the toolbar business: Smart. Rihanna going back to Chris Brown: Dumb. nangoldin. Adam Corrolla taking his show online: Smart ...

The NFL, FCC, CBA, Start Up Leagues, Sub-Prime Mortgages and You ...

Is it possible that the future economics of the NFL could be influenced by the FCC ? Absolutely. Does the NFL and all professional sports leagues have something in common with the Sub Prime mortgage mess and the collapse of home prices. ...

Ben Casnocha: The Blog: The Power of the Phrase "It Turns Out..."

"Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression 'it turns out' to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of ...

Modeling scale usage heterogeneity the Bayesian way Anne Z.

Posts in my journal club category are my summaries and thoughts on journal articles I read. I've found I absorb material much better if I try to summarize it in a way that might make sense to someone else. The article covered here ...

The Impact of the New Tech: Use, Then Judge

Alain de Botton recently blogged about "one of the challenges of our time": re-learning how to concentrate. To sit quietly and think without distraction. I agree, except I'm not sure if we've ever known how to do so. ...

Effort or expression Anne Z.

Difficulty has become repugnant because it denies entitlement, disenchants potential, limits mobility and flexibility, delays gratification, distracts from distraction and demands responsibility, commitment, attention and thought ...

Bring on spring

I'm ready for spring. I've almost finished winter quarter classes just the writeup of my HLM project left to turn in. The snow is finally melting off my front lawn. The crabapple trees are putting out buds. ...

Plans for spring fun

Aside from undergoing death and rebirth and thereby achieving atonement with the father this spring, I have a lot of fun stuff to look forward to. First, my classes, which promise to be extra fun since they are almost all statistics: ...

SXSW

I'm going to SXSW. Are you? I'm bringing a bottle of Pappy. What are you bringing? If you are going, and you are fun.let me know.

This is the future of computer graphics

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:14:11 -0400

I've been waiting a loooong time for someone to solve this problem. Absolutely cannot wait for games to start coming out that leverage this technology. Should shake up the data visualization industry a bit as well. Using search algorithms to...

Rimors Confirmed: Facebook to Add Location Service

Sony Takes a Unique Approach to Challenging the iPhone

Dozens of smartphone models have come along in recent months attempting to take a stab at Apple's dominance with features such as touchscreen capability, big library of apps, music playing, and zippy performance but electronics giant ...

Innovation, Schminnovation Welcome to the Boring Age

We flatter ourselves by imagining that we live in an age of endless invention and innovation. We don't. By almost any reasonable measure the inventions of the last few decades pale against the great inventions of the past, ...

Buyers Remorse

In 2008 the sight of a Toyota Prius sporting an Obama hopey changey bumper sticker rose to the level of being a cliche and the Prius itself became a social statement, outselling other hybrids based on existing gasoline powered models. ...

Digital Medical Records, A Modest Proposal

For years and years (and years) there has been talk about the digitalization of medical records to enable portability. There are three primary problems that obstruct this vision, the first being a somewhat murky legal and regulatory ...

PA School Webcam Lawsuit

The Pennsylvania case shows how even well-intentioned plans can go awry if officials fail to understand the technology and its potential consequences, privacy experts said. Compromising images from inside a student's bedroom could fall ...

Wind Power Does Not Equal Job Power

Most of the jobs are going overseas, said Russ Choma at the Investigative Reporting Workshop. He analyzed which foreign firms had accepted the most stimulus money. According to our estimates, about 6000 jobs have been created ...

Facebook Roundup: Events, Facebook in D.C., LivingSocial, Searches ...

Facebook's Redesign Paid Off With Searches Facebook's redesign in early February seems to have paid off, as U.S. search queries grew by 10% last month with 436 million U.S. searches last month, according to comScore. ...

google says screw accuracy as long as you're an authority

i've often chided google for trusting wikipedia so much when wikipedia says we don't care about accuracy or truth, just verifiability. it now looks like they've taken it a step further and pitched truth out the window with the dodgeball ...

analogies in blog titles are like dirty underwear

as i cruise thru my seo folder in my feedreader every day i'm filled with a sense of dismay and utter dissapointment with most of what i see. more often than not i see titles like: how my step dad taught me the ethics of burnt sienna ...

looking for a chumby calendar widget

one of the things that's really missing from my chumby is a simple calendar widget. i'm just looking for simple month view and the ability to flip back and forth through months.the widget exists in german but not in english. ...

pubcon discount coupon code

so i'm back and getting caught up from smx. if you missed it and are looking for the next seo show be sure to check out pubcon coming up this november in las vegas. if you haven't already registered you can use this discount code to ...

breast cancer, social media, and picnik.com

earlier this week barbara boser of 3 dog media made a post asking people to turn their avatars pink for breast cancer awareness month. so in an effort to help a good cause i tried to play along, however trying to turn my avatar a shade ...

google book search affects ecommerce, is your vertical next

last night i was looking up some books that were recommended to me, and saw my first google book search in the # 1 serp [travel wise: how to be safe, savvy and secure abroad] (screen shot below). so the question you need to be thinking ...

thesis tutorial - how to add adsense section targeting

using adsense on your blog usually isn't the most profitable way to monetize it, but it is fairly quick and easy, which makes it a popular choice for many website owners. last week i moved one of my commercial blogs to thesis, ...

domain diversity in google serp's for breaking news

one of my favorite things about google is how the show a wide variety of domains for search results, especially for breaking news terms like [washington mutual]. it's not like the top 20 results have 6 listings from washington mutual ...

Where the TV fight goes

My first bit of advice to pissed-off Cablevision customers in New York who've just lost WABC right before the Oscars I do recommend that you switch to Verizon Fios. You won't get it in time. It's not perfect. ...

Senator Al Franken is Requesting User Caps on Internet Bandwidth ?

According to the LA Times, In written questions to Comcast and NBC Universal regarding their $30-billion proposed marriage, Sen. Franken who has been one of the harshest critics of the deal wants Comcast and NBC Universal to ...

How to Get Rich Part 1a

I wrote a post last year about How to Get Rich. The no shortcuts version. It is posted below. I wanted to repost it because its been so popular in the archives. Plus, with the advent of some new banking laws, I wanted to update it with ...

Don't Waste the Internet on TV Protect the Future of the ...

I had a very enjoyable debate with Avner Rosen of Boxee yesterday at SXSW. We tended to go around in circles defending our positions. His (to paraphase): the internet will do what cable and satellite do, but it will do it better. ...

If Free Works on the Internet, Can It Work for Health Insurance ?

As best I can tell, Health Insurance for the average family costs about 13k per year. For individuals, its about $6k per year. For some, employers pay a big chuck of that. For others, the deductibles and other charges are super high so ...

The Most Important Feature of a Multi-Device Web: Syncing

As the ecosystem of devices proliferates, with the iPhone and Android platforms coming into their own (along with the ever-impending iTablet), we're seeing a single feature become the most important and critical piece of new technology: ...

Talking the IPad, Kids, Making Money and Video

I cant wait to get my hands on the IPad. Its going to be a HUGE hit. You can book it right now that it will be the product that kids of this generation grow up with and look back on with affection just like we did with the first video ...

The Simplicity Test: A Simple Policy Guide for Job Growth

The simplest way to create more jobs is to allow small business and entrepreneurs is to spend less time and money on lawyers and accountants and redirect that intellectual and financial capital to the core competencies of their business ...

Seth Godin Should Read His Own Book

Mark Cuban Is Completely Wrong About Aggregators. I was particularly surprised because I am in the middle of reading his new book LynchPin which actually makes my point about why its a poor business move for newspapers and many others ...

Why Google is Bad for the Newspaper Business

One of the key core competencies of a publication is the process of selecting all the news thats fit to print. No one can read every news story. Instead of even trying to consume everything, we all have a process we go through for ...

Why Have So Many Internet People Lost Touch With Reality ?

Sometimes its hard to tell if people are trying to be funny, mean, interesting, provocative or are just plain stupid or completely out of touch with reality. I know I get accused of being all of the above all the time. ...

Update from Chile

Chileflag70405306 Folks, we will return to regular programming here soon, and I want to talk at some point about the Chile situation more broadly, but let me quickly address some issues as the day-to-day developments unfold: ...

All Entrepreneurship is Social

There is a tremendous amount of fuzzy thinking around terms like "social entrepreneurship," "social business," and "socially responsible business." When people ask me what I think about social entrepreneurship, I first say I'm not sure ...

This Week's Newsweek

There are four articles of note in the latest Newsweek magazine. 1. I wrote a brief personal piece on Chile. I mention other natural disasters that preceded Chile and conclude: The anonymity then of death tolls, my lack of proximity, ...

Social science as rhetorical exercise: An example from research on ...

Green, Ha, & Bullock (2010) critique mediation analyses in social science research: Given the strong requirements in terms of model specification and measurement, the enterprise of opening the black box or exploring causal pathways ...

sts-125 pictures...

kathryn and i were very fortunate to be guests of our congressman to the sts-125 launch. took these with my d80 from the osb2 observation deck :) more. permalink | email this | linking blogs | comments.

A List Apart: Articles: Web Standards for E-books

The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren't going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form. The electronic book is the latest example ...

Everything Is Amazing, But Nobody Is Happy

Below is the funniest video I've seen since Feldman's Oscar recap.

Readings: Venture, Debt, Apple, The Big Short, etc.

Survey finds VCs bullish on clean tech energy storage (Source); The importance of investor signaling in venture pricing (Source); US household debt falls for first time (Source); Apple Waits in Wings as Cable's TV Everywhere Stamps Out ...

Consumer Debt Change, Then and Then and Now

Consumer Debt Change, Then and Then and Now. By Paul Kedrosky Friday, March 12, 2010 . Consumer Debt Change, Then and Then and Now. Readings: Venture, Debt, Apple, The Big Short, etc. ...

Video Chat on the Plane? Illegal? OK? Legal Gray Area?

I'm writing this at around 36000 feet, on a United Airlines flight between New York and San Francisco. That's not so unusual - anymore - Wifi had been on planes for over a year now, and I've grown accustomed to the service. Why? ...

WildTangent Moves Further Into Social Gaming With Brand Offers In ...

WildTangent is continuing its foray into Facebook and social gaming, now providing brand-advertising offers on developer Playdom's Facebook app, Tiki Farm. The tropical island farming game is beginning to feature brands that sponsor ...

Minding the Gap | HPC

There is much more business can learn from the values driving the growth of online communities than where to target the next generation of buyers.

Google Apps Marketplace Discover, Deploy, and Manage Apps for Business

App Stores have been around for a while, but mostly for cell phones, and very few business applications. Google is making a big move into online enterprise applications with the Google Apps Marketplace already stocked with over 50 real ...

Cell Phones Could Change the Face of Real Estate

The benefits of mobile technology are apparent in nearly all facets of society and if Software Advice's Chris Thorman's prediction proves correct, it could very well change the way real estate transactions are done as well. ...

Rackspace: The Wrold's Leader in Hosting

When you need an exchange hosting solution, who can argue with the experience of having an entire staff of experts working for you-serving as an extension of your IT department and allowing your in-house team to focus on the other ...

10 Articles I Was Proud of Writing in January

I was just looking over the archives of my most recent ReadWriteWeb articles and noticed there were a number of them I was quite proud of in January. I decided to highlight them here, in case you'd like to see any you missed. ...

Some Nice Feedback About My Product Development Consulting

I regularly do one-hour long telephone consulting sessions on launch planning and product development. I really enjoy doing that kind of work. My most recent client in that capacity was a pre-launched e-learning platform called Nixty. ...

Monday Signal: Block Those Ads!

Monday's Signal round up is light. The news was a bit boring over the weekend, and I'm OK with that. We all watched the Oscars and enjoyed the suspense of disbelief. I tweeted that it feels like, as a culture, we're closing in on One ...

The Database of Intentions Is Far Larger Than I Thought

Database of Intentions Chart - Version 2, Updated for Commerce

Monday Signal: Block Those Ads!

Tuesday Signal: The Internet Is A Human Right (And Spending Is Up ...

Well, it's Monday night, but I'm in NYC, and I am pretty sure Tuesday is going to be a blur. So here are the links I read on the plane out here (love that Wifi). Expect news from me soon on the themes and lineup for FM's annual CM ...

Platform shifts Mainframe to Mini to PC to Mobile. Why leaders ...

Platform shifts happen every decade or so in computing. The leaders of the previous generation are rarely successful in dominating the next generation platform. IBM dominated the mainframe business. They didn't lose their dominance ...

The Torturous Inner Life of the Man Who Seems to Have it All

How many people whose lives we admire actually maintain a torturous inner life? How many ideal men and women -- and I don't mean perfect, I mean ideal, which is to say perfectly flawed -- actually are consumed by insecurity or anxiety ...

Adjusting for response styles in cross-cultural research

I'm working on a cross-country study of math achievement scores related to liking-for-math and ran into some problems with the measure I'm using for liking-for-math. Some countries show extremely skewed distributions on the ...

It Appears As Though Microsoft's New OS Will Demand New Hardware

Smartphone users getting revved up for the new Windows Mobile 7 operating system may be surprised to discover that they will not be able to upgrade to the new platform- even if they're currently running Windows Mobile. ...

farmville players raise $700k with sweet seeds for haiti

last week we mailed checks for around $550k to fatem.org and fonkoze.org. we were proud to see so many of our farmville players participate in this program which has raised over $700k to date. following is more info on the programs ...

to zwink or not?

michael arrington posted a clip today of a bar-side chat I did with Berkeley entrepreneurs in which I stressed how we were laser focused from the beginning on finding revenue opportunities that would scale. The primary reason I pointed ...

Zynga looking for rockstar product managers (again)

We would love to hire people who want to leave banking or consulting with high analytical chops who also loves consumer web products. Email your resume to ami@zynga.com.

Relaunching Offers

Starting today, we are bringing back offers around our games to provide our users who don't have access to online payment methods the ability to make in-game purchases while having a compelling game experience. The offers are from eight ...

Zynga games about to come back up

dear zynga gamers,. we are sorry that our games were down for the last 2 hrs. our netops crew is working hard to bring our games back up. mafia wars is up now on fb and rest coming in next few minutes. we're really sorry your evening ...

My take on zynga and cpa offers

Michael Arrington posted over the weekend about CPA offers within social games and questioned why facebook, myspace, zynga and others would expose these to our users. He raises good points about 'scammy' advertisers and the bad user ...

"first car i've considered crashing into a tree"

this has to be the funniest and -- sadly for honda -- worst review i have ever seen in print. it's a review of honda's new insight 1.3 ima se hybrid. and the sound is worse. the honda's petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, ...

july newsletter: sustainability business case

in addition to the email newsletter we send out every month (you can sign up on this page by entering your email address) we've recently designed an easier-to-read pdf. this issue kicks off a series on connecting sustainability with ...

role of retail in sustainability

just posted role of retail in sustainability on my business blog. i'm surprised at how few retailers are stepping up to the plate and helping consumers make educated choices on sustainable products. best buy is a laggard, home depot is ...

InnoDB page size and SSD

Mark Callaghan made some progress with 4k pages in and InnoDB. I ran some number on SSD with 8k pages but my 4k build would dump core. The numbers for 8k show some potential. The way I see this working is that one would buffer the first ...

Google vs Microsoft on the browser, cloud, and mobile platforms

Google is an amazing company, even more so from the inside. To the outside world Google is just search. But Google has made three big bets on the future of computing; Chrome (browser), Google Apps (cloud), and Android (mobile) that will ...

Gmail offline access fully supported, and more cool stuff from ...

Gmail is my new email client after 5 years on Microsoft Outlook. One of the knocks against Gmail was that you couldn't use it offline. Not anymore. Offline Gmail has been available via Gmail Labs for over a year, and now is a fully ...

What do Mark Cuban, Dan Farber, Steve Ballmer, and Mary Jo Foley ...

Doing what you love to do is a special privilege. Many people trudge through life working jobs they don't like, or in these times, struggling to find a job at all. This week I had the chance to spend time with Mark Cuban, ...

Dan Gillmor Journalism Education Should be Broader, Deeper in ...

Accepting an award from Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably the best general education ...

Five User Experience Trends

Since my blog has been broken a lot recently I missed this excellent overview of Five User Experience trends by Gene Smith. I can't help but agree with all of them: Services as Software Gene is one of the first people in the UX ...

OLS regression, student level: Math achievement on liking math and ...

I duplicated all country-level variables to student level, then ran a student level regression of math on liking for math (PATM), per capita GDP (GDP), and cultural value indexes (Rational and Self Expressive). ...

Puny results for my model of math achievement related to liking math

Here's a description of the data analysis project I'm working on. I was so excited to push the button on my hierarchical linear analysis, hoping hoping hoping to see a statistically significant effect of the kind I wanted. And I did! ...

Attitude towards math vs. confidence, liking, usefulness of math ...

Kadijevich, D. (2006). Developing trustworthy TIMSS Background Measures: A case study on mathematics attitude. The Teaching of Mathematics IX(2), 41-51. Abstract. This study, which used a sample of 197707 students from 46 countries that ...

Study Says Mobile Browsers doing a lot of Socializing

While we like to think that most smart phone users are involved in checking stock quotes, putting together Powerpoint presentations, and exchanging emails with the "higher ups", a new study concludes that mobile users are doing a whole ...

Most Annoying Ringtones Ever - Not When They're Free

The Database of Intentions Is Far Larger Than I Thought

People Putting an Extra 50k Miles Or More On Their Cars

Read this an it immediately resonated with me. According to a study by Auto MD, which is owned by the US Auto Parts Network, Inc. (ie people who have a vested interest in making parts for used cars) 77% of people are, on average, ...

On the Origins of Avatars

Updated: Thanks to several commenters, I've updated the piece to cover some more early references to avatars. As I sit looking at Tweetdeck this morning, looking over 40 avatars of people I know and don't know, I wonder how much of my ...

Quote of the Day

The craziest sentences uttered at the Vancouver Olympics came from Norwegian silver medalist Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset describing his performance in the men's 4x10 cross-country relay: "My name is Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset. ...

For immediate release: Your straw diameter sucks

Dear local restaurant,. Stop treating your thirsty customers like shit. Saving 40 cents on 1000 straws is no way to run a business. Thin straws are terrible. They make the soft-drink super fizzy. How could it be any other way, ...

On the important issue of copycat companies

Looking through my twitter stream, I came across this from Bryce: It's not just him. It's reality. And as the founder of one of the world's most successful knockoff companies, I really can't think of anything wrong with it. ...

The danger of healthcare is a RIGHT

When you say healthcare is a right.be careful and think about exactly what you're saying. You are charting new territory. You see, unlike other rights, healthcare isn't something that can merely be protected.healthcare is ...

Lou Dobbs' Fascist Fantasia

Also see: Lou Dobbs' Spokesman, Knight of Malta Robert Dilenschneider Is CNBC prepared to Invest in Dobbs and His Record of Conspiracy Theories and Inflammatory Rhetoric? Media Matters | December 01, 2009 ...

Former Army Top Brass Address Gitmo, Obama And More

'We know from experience that torture does not produce reliable intelligence, and acting on information derived through such abuse is dangerous, to our troops, and to our nation. ... Misinformation abounds, as some have taken to the ...

The Brother of James Earl Ray Links the CIA to the Murder of ...

Also see: "MLK: Sex, Lies & (FBI) Idiot Types" By Alex Constantine The following letter to Barry F. Kowalski, former special counsel at the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice, was written by ...

Citizens United used 'Hillary: The Movie' to take on McCain-Feingold

By Philip Rucker Washington Post | January 22, 2010 David Bossie, a veteran Republican campaign operative [Swiftboater] who made his mark investigating the Clintons, thought his group could offer a conservative answer to Michael Moore's ...

Canadian Ambassador Kenneth Taylor Revealed as a CIA Spy Chief in Iran

By Barry O'Regan Examiner | January 24, 2010 Canada's own spy who came in from the cold has been revealed 30 years later. Ken Taylor, once Canada's Ambassador in Iran in 1979 has been revealed to be a CIA Station chief. ...

How To Quit Your Job PROPERLY.

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:33:14 -0500

Would you like some valuable free advice? Let me share a chunk with you, something I had to learn the hard way. There's a post making the rounds today from Mark Suster on "how to quit your job", the gist...

Basic Data Format Lessons

[This is the second post in a series on best practices for government datasets by Harlan Yu and me. (previous post)]. When creating a dataset, the preferences of developers may not be obvious to those producing the dataset. ...

Labeling Dataset Contents

[This is the third post in a series on best practices for government datasets by Harlan Yu and me. (previous posts)]. When the government releases a dataset, citizens ideally will discuss the contents and supply educated feedback. ...

Thoughts on InnoDB Page Compression

I spend the last couple days playing with InnoDB page compression on the latest Percona build. I'm pretty happy so far with Percona and the latest InnoDB changes. Compression wasn't living up to my expectations though. ...

Telling stories to the remembering self

I've been thinking about Kahneman's remembering self, and how that part of the self needs memories woven into meaningful stories. Joseph Campbell's monomyth structure offers a structure for telling stories to the remembering self. ...

A List Apart: Articles: Accent Folding for Auto-Complete

Another generation of technology has passed and Unicode support is almost everywhere. The next step is to write software that is not just internationalized but truly multilingual. In this article we will skip through a bit of history ...

Bing TV ad - start ur engine

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype. Bing TV ad - start ur engine

vote flipping on the hart intercivic eslate

there have been numerous press reports about "vote flipping." i did an analysis of the eslate, my local voting machine, including mocked up screen shots, to attempt to explain the issue.

Study: 47% of CEOs Say Blogs Useful for PR

Wow. This is big news. Nearly half of CEOs (47%) surveyed by PR Week and Burson Marsteller rate blogs high as external audience communication tools. That's a big endorsement! Additional nuggets... * The majority of them remain skeptical ...

Government Datasets That Facilitate Innovation

[This is the first post in a series on best practices for government datasets by Harlan Yu and me.] There's a growing consensus that the government can increase its openness and transparency by publishing its raw data in bulk online. ...

peter schiff at authors@google...

permalink | email this | linking blogs | comments.

smx internet marketers charity party

unfortunately i'm not going to be able to be at smx on monday do to some prior family and business obligations, but if you are going be sure to attend the internet marketers charity party on monday night. ...

gavin and i in the sentinel...

article about twitterholic.com. probably a good thing they went with a more natural photo than the posed ones they took. not sure specifically what we're laughing about, but mainly the 'shoot' consisted of gavin and i repeatedly asking ...

The Gong Show Missing Hot Chip

Hot Chip is only playing two shows in the US on their latest tour. One in LA and one in NY. Tickets for the NY show at the Highline Ballroom went on sale at 1pm on Saturday. I pinged the Ticketmaster server at 1:02pm and they were all ...

andrewparker: @innonate, sorry to hear that. my blog comments have ...

andrewparker: @innonate, sorry to hear that. my blog comments have been down all day... intensedebate has had a rough launch on the gong show.

"google vp of engineering jeff huber said, "a lot that you have ...

google vp of engineering jeff huber said, "a lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. that is paleolithic thinking. the web has already won. the web is the platform."

Pravda: Google's China Hypocrisy Ignores Deep CIA Connections

By: Pravda | Jan 14, 2010 The western media is currently full of articles on Google's 'threat to quit China' over internet censorship issues, and the company's 'suspicion' that the Chinese government was behind attempts to 'break-in' to ...

The Gong Show London Meetings

I'm going to London for Seedcamp and am interested in meeting other members of the web tech community there. If you've been following this blog from the UK and are interested in chatting (or want to make an intro to someone I should ...

You have been blessed, for you know Swantastic

Yesterday I *launched* Swantastic!, the site that will one day put airport rags like Entrepreneur Magazine to rest. You're welcome. You see, son.this ain't my first rodeo. I've been playing this online digital business 3.14159265 ...

A List Apart: Articles: Training the Butterflies: Interview with ...

Everyone has seen it happen. An otherwise accomplished person walks on stage at a conference, and subsequently one or more of the following occur: The microphone breaks, the speaker punctuates every sentence with ummm, he starts ...

The Gong Show Traitor!

This is a crime against all that is cardinal-colored. Mike Montgomery, legendary ex-Stanford basketball coach, just signed on to coach Cal! Seriously? How is this not some belated April Fools joke? The Trent vs Monty games over the next ...

Questions over Deaths of 3 Guantanamo Detainees Raised by Magazine ...

Also see: The Suppressed Fact: 100 Deaths by US Torture By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS (CP) WASHINGTON Three Guantanamo Bay detainees whose deaths were ruled a suicide in 2006 apparently were transported from their cells hours before their ...

Qaeda Says Fighters Alive, Yemen Vows More Strikes

DUBAI (Reuters) - The Yemen-based wing of al Qaeda said on Monday its fighters had survived an air strike last week that Yemeni officials said killed six leaders of the militant group. "The Yemeni government has been making many false ...

On the Up and Up in Emurse Land...

We've covered a ton of ground this summer over on Emurse.com. Andy Fraley joined the team as our lead designer / front end guru, then Chris Finke came on board to lead up development efforts. Both of these guys are two of the most ...

Scott Brown, Right-Wing Nut: Smeared Obama as Born Out of Wedlock

January 17, 2010 (ChattahBox)-A recent video uncovered by the blog Blue Mass Group, reveals Massachusetts Republican senatorial candidate Scott Brown to be something of a right-wing birther nut. It's long been known that the state ...

Google OS and The Privacy Issue: For Some, Google Is Quite Evil

Nice pick up from the USA Today on privacy concerns regarding Google's upcoming Google OS. In particular. Privacy advocates want more transparency from Google about how it plans to monetize the vast amounts of behavioral data it ...

Speaking of Accidental Tweets

Speaking of careless tweets: unintentional, accidental, pre-maturely scheduled, or actually intentional? EA's UK PR team just tweeted an announcement that Command & Conquer 4 is now in development, though the linked press release ...

A great OLD idea for a business!

We already know that your idea is worth very little. But I'll go one step further: It often sucks to base your business on a completely new idea. Why? You're probably not the first to think of it or try it. ...

Competition? We HAVE NO COMPETITION.

The book Blue Ocean Strategy should be on the desk and in the mind of every entrepreneur and startup investor. The concept is not new You're better off as a small fish in a wide, blue ocean than in a pool of water bloodied by the ...

A List Apart: Articles: The Problem with Passwords

Usability researcher Jakob Nielsen's recent column advocates a fundamental change to password field design on the web. He believes that the time has come to show most passwords in clear text as users type them, abandoning the ...

A List Apart: Articles: Words that Zing

People use websites to make decisionsfrom what product to buy to what health treatment to seek. [1][2][3] When someone consults a website, there is a precious opportunity not only to provide useful information but also to influence ...

emurse.com updates...

andy fraley was hired as our lead ui designer. i'm extremely excited to be working with andy again. we both worked on the netscape.com re-launch a few years back and i've enjoyed following his career ever since. ...

Alex Constantine's Blacklist: Moving On - Introducing The AC Anti ...

vpflet said... Ken Taylor's CIA profile was reviewed in the Globe and Mail by Michael Valpy. According to our researches and experience, Valpy is himself a CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) agent himself. ...

The Gong Show Decision Making

There is an over-emphasis on the individual when it comes to responsibility and rationality in decision making. I rarely agree with David Brooks, but I found this paragraph in his op-ed today to hit the nail on the head: ...

for those in new york

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:10:33 -0500

For those in New York: I'm going to be interviewing Bob Stein on Thursday as part of The Public School New York. This is part of The Public School's series on The Page + The Screen, which looks interesting all...

Links

- UK newspapers lash out against the BBC iPhone app, saying it undermines the commercial sector. I totally agree, when will people accept that a taxpayer financed entity providing a service that competes with the private sector is ...

On More or Less Permanent Hiatus

Well, after another brief shpurt of blogging, I've decided to kind of suspend things on DJI in more or less permanent hiatus. The reason? Not that I don't have anything in particular to say (which I do, at times), so expect the odd post ...

On Using Twitter For Corporate Marketing

It appears as though some institutions are using interns to man their Twitter stations, as picked up by the Big Money Blog at Slate.com Pizza Hut, in particular has had some success with their own intern: she's grown their ...

Dreamers of Day

I recently posted this quote on the 52weeksofUX site, but I like it so much I'm going to post it here as well: All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds ...

Feature Development in Action: Broadcast Stream Messages in Socialcast

In which I describe how we discovered the broadcast stream message feature in Socialcast. One of the guiding principles of interaction design is to support existing behavior. This means to figure out what is already happening, ...

Is Twitter Successful?

The big question everyone has with Twitter is, and the very first one that John Battelle asked Twitter CEO Ev Williams when he interviewed him yesterday, is What's the revenue model? And the answer Ev gave is exactly the same one ...

The Gong Show AppEngine Limitations?

Google announced a game-changing hosted platform for application development last night. Our initial enthusiasm at Union Square Ventures about this platform is captured by Albert over on our blog. I'm trying to tease out initial ...

Shopping Cart SEO Tips

When you run an online e-commerce store with a shopping cart, it's quite easy for your architecture and URL's to enter into territory that's not friendly for search engines. Here are some basic tips I recommend for everyone working with ...

Are You Fun to Follow on Twitter?

Over at Harvard Business Review, Tammy Erickson observes most tweets are not very interesting: Frankly, most people's tweets are neither interesting nor fun to read certainly not on a daily or hourly basis. Many, not at all. ...

Ensuring zynga's user experience - removing all cpa offers

michael arrington posted yesterday on mobile offerings still being shown in our new game fishville. I want to explain why this occurred and how we are taking more aggressive steps to ensure this never happens again. ...

What Did Zuckerberg Really Say About Privacy?

I just noticed some posts around the web questioning my characterization of Mark Zuckerberg's on-stage declaration that the age of privacy is over. I left a comment on one of those blog posts that I thought I should post here as well. ...

The White House Says I'm Wrong, What do You Think?

Last night I wrote a blog post about the launch of data.gov.uk and said it had 3X as many data sets as the US's data.gov. Today I got an interesting email from the White House (cool!) saying I was wrong. ...

zynga's haiti relief efforts

the zynga team went into action as soon as we learned of the devastation in Haiti. Here is the update on our efforts and where you can participate: 1. FarmVille: New White non withering Corn for Haiti, 100% proceeds go to Haiti ...

What's your wishlist for zynga games in 2010?

Happy new year to all zynga gamers. We would love to hear what's your top wishes for zynga games in 2010. We know you want better reliability and availability of our games. We are actively working on this. ...

Earmarks

Todays usa today reports that despite obama's pledge to reduce earmarks to below $7.8b (where they were before bush), they will still hit $19b. They include F22 jets the pentagon doesn't want! $2m for a bike path in spokane. ...

20 Things Going Wrong with the U.S. Economy | Venture Chronicles

20 Things Going Wrong with the U.S. Economy. Posted on February 4, 2010. Filed Under Uncategorized |. Comments. Search for: Categories. Blogs Clean Tech Companies Enterprise 2.0 Enterprise Software Entrepreneurship ...

Air Refueling

this is a pretty cool video, air refueling an F-18 over Iraq:

Irrational Populism

I've been reading about some of the troubles that the Las Vegas hospitality industry is going through (as well as getting a lot of promo email for $40 a night suites at Mandalay Bay) and it again reminds me that populist uproar is ...

A List Apart: Articles: The Content Strategist as Digital Curator

The term curate is the interactive world's new buzzword. During content creation and governance discussions, client pitches and creative brainstorms, I've watched this word gain traction at almost warp speed. ...

A List Apart: Articles: Using SVG For Flexible, Scalable, and Fun ...

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) consist of circles, rectangles, and paths created in XML and combined into drawings on web pages. You can apply solid colors, gradients, and a sophisticated number of filters to SVGalthough not all ...

A List Apart: Articles: Using SVG for Flexible, Scalable, and Fun ...

In Part I, I talked about browser support, when you can use SVG (and when you shouldn't), and accessibility. In this article, I'm going to dig into the technology behind using SVG for your site design. We'll explore how to incorporate ...

A List Apart: Articles: The Survey, 2009

Whether you call yourself a user experience consultant, web developer, or content strategist; whether you design customer flows, buttons, or brands; no matter what title you hold as a full- or part-time web professional, ...

Insurance Industry vs. The Baucus Plan...

Lots of chatter about the insurance industry report claiming that the Baucus health care proposal will raise premiums 111% over the next ten years. Obviously, any report commissioned by special interest should be questioned. ...

The Gong Show Smacks Forehead Part I

Sometimes I read something that is so boneheaded that I literally smack my forehead. It happens frequently enough, that I'm going to start a series of posts on the subject. I'll tag them all with the tag smacksforehead if you want to ...

The Gong Show App Store is a Solution to The Penny Gap

Greg Yardley recently published the following breakdown of Apple's iPhone App Store applications listed at various pricing tiers. His insight was that free was no longer the most popular application price. Instead, $0.99 was the most ...

iSift

iSift at first blush looks like another digg clone. The Web application allows you to submit an article that will be reviewed by all and will be elevated, based on popularity, to the main page. From a look at the tag cloud, they're just ...

Fold Looks Promising

Fold is a Web 2.0 start page that looks promising. The site aims to "consolidate most of the tools and information you need every day into a single web page." Hopefully this is more than just another RSS start page. ...

Blogging's Impact on Search Position Quantified

Search Engine Watch has an article about search's impact on PR and reputation management. Blogs are featured at the end of the piece. However, one statistic really jumped out at me. According to Converseon's study of the top 20 search ...

Flickr Tops 100M Photos

Flickr this morning passed 100 million photos, according to Sweedish Super Sleuth Hans Kullin. Technorati Tags: Flickr, Photos.

RSS in Internet Explorer 7

Dwight Silverman previews RSS reading in Internet Explorer 7.

Make Dreams Come True

NOTE: This item is cross-posted on the Media Center's We Influence blog where every so often I will contribute to the conversation. "What can companies do to invite the customer in?" sez Ogilvy PR's John Bell. ...

Stuart Elliott Podcasts

Stuart Elliot at the New York Times, the dean of ad columnists, is podcasting on advertising trends. Technorati Tags: NYT, New York Times, Advertising.

Just What Were We Thinking?

Here's a little taste of what goes on behind the scenes when we decide to give a blogger the reigns not only to a client's blog but to the actual product as well ...

Scoble, Steve and Mini Microsoft at the Movies!

Steve Jobs, there's someone out there who's the next Pixar and he's making funny movies about bloggers. It's Nathan Weinberg. This flick, which I think he created, features me, my friend Robert Scoble and mini Microsoft, and it is funny ...

leading a sustainable enterprise

ibm recently released its 2009 report on sustainable enterprises, and the findings were similar to last year's: "develop new sources of operational, supply chain and customer information to gain new levels of insight for meeting ...

three types of meetings

great summary of the different types of meetings from rands in repose: alignment meetings sound like this: it's red, are we all in agreement it's red? ok, swell. wait, phil thinks it's blue. phil, here are the 18 compelling reasons ...

10 strategies for building a credible sustainable brand

I recently conducted a webinar on 10 Strategies for Building a Credible Sustainable Brand in conjunction with Sustainable Life Media. While I'll never again agree to develop an hour's worth of new content with 1 week's notice (! ...

extraordinary minds shaping modern thought

one of the coolest and most thought-provoking sites i've been on in ages... check out sputnik observatory for the study of contemporary culture. i think the name's a bit misleading, as the site includes a lot of scientific thought that ...

creating competitive advantage through sustainability

i just published a post on my business blog outlining the five steps to creating competitive advantage through sustainability. go take a peek and let me know what you think.

proving values-based business is the most fruitful

i was recently interviewed for gennefer snowfield's philanthropy in 5 series at triplepundit.com on the subject of values-based business and aligning philanthropy with strategy. you can read my responses on my business blog.

taco bell green spoof

a great spoof by the onion about taco bell's environmental efforts. "taco bell's new green menu takes no ingredients from nature." it's pretty funny.

Speaking Next Month at Where 2.0

I'll be speaking at the Where 2.0 conference next month in San Jose, about journalists are using, and can use, location-related products and services. The talk is called Where Does Journalism Go? You can get a 25 percent discount by ...

Location, Location

Combining mobility, time and location is becoming one of the most valuable techniques of media creation. Last week, some students and I did a small experiment that demonstrates how easy this is to do, and suggests all kinds of ...

What About the Readers?

Several folks I know and admire are seeking to intervene in a settlement between the Author's Guild and Google, a deal that has many unfortunate aspects including the way it treats orphaned works that is, works still protected by ...

Will Microsoft Use Office 10 To Push Internet Explorer and ...

In advance of the inevitable blogging orgy around Microsoft's Office 10, only a couple of questions I'd like answered: Will Office 10 work better in Internet Explorer, and will it require Silverlight to work? ...

John Wilke, RIP

Sad news: The Wall Street Journal's John Wilke has died at age 54. John Wilke worked at the Journal for two decades, and did some of the best reporting on how business and politics merge in unhealthy ways. ...

NY Times Pundit to Critic: Fuck You

It's hard surprising when someone fires back at a harsh critic of his or her employer's competence and/or ethics. But when that someone is superstar New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and the return fire takes the form, ...

More Cowardly Journalism

The Washington Post does an excellent story on torture during the Bush administration but, in the cowardly way that the paper has done all along, refuses to use the word torture forthrightly. It is not harsh interrogation methods, ...

Harvard Berkman Center Talk Next Tuesday

I'll be speaking next Tuesday at lunchtime at the Berkman Center. Topic (and link for RSVP): Mediactive: Why media consumers, not just creators, need to be active users.

A Decade Since Andy Grove's Warning to Newspaper Industry

In two weeks it'll be 10 years since Andy Grove's on-stage conversation at an annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in which he warned the industry of its impending financial meltdown. He wasn't the first to warn, ...

Financial Industry's Unbelievable Greed

From the Wall Street Journal, here's another reason I'm planning to cancel my current credit cards (which I pay every month in any event) and do business with institutions that choose not to screw their customers: ...

Teens Not Twittering? Absolutely. Here's the Evidence.

No, I didn't conduct the research myself, but as astutely pointed out by Ben Parr, the recent report commissioned by Morgan Stanley regarding one teen (and his friend's) internet / technology related activities may seem the sweeping ...

WolframAlpha, Where Are You?

Time will tell if it was Bing's inherent abilities or Microsoft's deep-pockets spending that caused the initial bump of 8% in unique users after the first month but its clear what is suffering from a lack of Buzz Wolfram Alpha. ...

if sigmund freud and gautama buddha ran marketing: six simple ...

buddha freud mark rovner and katya andresen shared an unusual take on online outreach at today's nonprofit technology conference: what can freud and buddha teach us about marketing communications? together, rovner and andresen came up ...

first round capital office hours comes to...our office

img00059.jpg. originally uploaded by spacejockeys. yes, it's true - for the first time, first round capital office hours will actually be held in our offices. our san francisco doors are open and entrepreneurs are welcome to drop on by ...

pocket protectors never looked so good: women who tech

i just wanted to share news of what may be the largest, longest online conference call ever: the women who tech telesummit on may 12th, 2009. conference organizers have put together an agenda that includes: launching your own startup ...

testing in the clouds at under the radar

the mission critical - but decidedly unsexy - need for application testing is the latest part of the developer ecosystem to move into the cloud. at today's under the radar conference, rafe needleman moderated vc panel pitching from a ...

lessons from the fall of nebuad

with three congressional hearings held within the past four months, us legislators have expressed increased concern about the handling of private online information. as paul ohm mentioned yesterday, the recent scrutiny has focused ...

evidence of new jersey election discrepancies

press reports on the recent new jersey voting discrepancies have been a bit vague about the exact nature of the evidence that showed up on election day. what has the county clerks, and many citizens, so concerned? ...

citp announces 2009-10 visitors

today, i'm pleased to announce citp's visitors for the upcoming academic year. deven r. desai, visiting fellow: deven is an associate professor of law at the thomas jefferson school of law, and a permanent blogger at concurring opinions ...

bandwidth needs and engineering tradeoffs

tom lee wonders about a question that ed has pondered in the past: how much bandwidth does one human being need? i'm suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to ...

Bing and Google Pay for Twitter

It looks like Google and Bing are now paying for a Twitter firehose feed. What's interesting here isn't the deal what's interesting is that Google is PAYING for content. In the past they have refused to pay for content acquisition. ...

SSD + RAID sequential read performance falloff.

This IOPS distribution is very interesting. I'm playing with a RAID array of 5x Intel X-25E drives. It turns out they need a lot of tuning. I'll blog about this later. What is more interesting is this distribution of IOPS across threads ...

Is efficient client-side paging full table scanning impossible ...

It seems to be impossible to perform client-side paging full table scans within MySQL. For example, say you want to take a 1GB file and page through it 10MB at a time. With a flat file I could just read 10MB off disk, read the next 10MB ...

Intel's 1M IOPS desktop SSD setup

What do you get when you take 7 Intel SSDs and throw them in a desktop? 1M IOPS: So as we look at optimizing some of those things, he said, like interrupts, driver speculation, improving the physical interface between SSDs, ...

Spinn3r hiring Senior Operations and Infrastructure Engineer.

Spinn3r is hiring for an experienced Senior Operations and Infrastructure Engineer with solid Linux and MySQL skills and a passion for building scalable and high performance infrastructure. This role is about 80% engineering in future ...

Spinn3r is Hiring a Senior MySQL DBA

We're looking to hire a Senior MySQL DBA over at Spinn3r. You should obviously have MySQL experience. Love SQL, hate data corruption and slow queries, and preferably live in San Francisco. Linux experience would be nice as well but not ...

Ask me anything

Formspring has a nice simple concept. You set up an account and people can ask you anything, and then if you choose to answer, it gets published on your page. Here's my page.go on, ask me anything. There are basically two sides to ...

Being a guest @ Webmasterradio.fm Live Search

Yesterday I had the pleasure to be the guest at this week's Webmasters on The Roof show on webmasterradio.fm. The show that is co-hosted by Marcus Tandler (aka. Mediadonis) and Ralf Gtz (aka. Fridaynite) two of Germany's most ...

Bing is looking for Smart(est) Minds Developers and Program Managers

Bing Europe or better the STC (Search Technology Center) Europe has opened some new head counts in their engineering department. For all of our three locations Munich, Paris and London we are looking for Program Managers, ...

Bing on the Roof

Since yesterday Stefan Weitz is back in Germany and we had the pleasure to be guest @ the mediaplex. Where the Mediadonis was co-hosting the webmasterradio.fm show webmasters on the roof. Marcus and Stefan talked a lot about Bing, ...

Google Apps announces de-support of IE6

Internet Explorer 6.0 launched in August of 2001, more than 8 years ago. Microsoft's current version is IE 8. Web developers have complained for years about needing to support multiple versions of browsers and the security risks in ...

From MSFT evangelist to Mac enthusiast - the other side of the road

For five years I was a Microsoft evangelist to the startup and venture capital community. That ended a couple months ago. I am now a Developer Advocate at Google and I love it. After years of defending Microsoft against the Apple ...

Don't Take Angel Investments From VCs

The guys over at Venturehacks have come up with an excellent idea to create a curated list of tech-focused angel investors. While I fully support the project, I did notice that the list of angels includes a number of GPs at ...

Venture Capital and Age/Experience Discrimination

At the risk of being provocative, let me state a general and rather counter intuitive rule of Venture Capital: The more experienced and older and entrepreneur is, the harder it is to raise money for anything that isn't directly related ...

New SEO Toolkit from Microsoft

Microsoft has released a new SEO Toolkit for download. It comes with a nice set of features and I definetely think its worth checking out. You can find the download here: Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. Site Analysis Features ...

What Will IBM Do?

Back in the 1990's, Lou Gerstner helped engineer one of the great turnarounds in corporate history. In just a few years, he took IBM from a cash hemorrhaging techno dinosaur on the brink of being broken into little pieces and turned it ...

and now we have an ipad

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:00:02 -0500

The iPad has arrived, to no one's surprise: as soon as you use an iPhone, you start wondering what a computer-sized version of the same would be like. (Those interested in how past predictions look now might look at this...

Quick Followup: VCTips at Web 2.0 Expo

Just a quick post to take care of two VCTips housekeeping items: 1. A big thank-you to Amish Jani from FIRSTMARK Capital, Oren Netzer from DoubleVerify, and Avner Ronen from Boxee for joining me and Bryce Roberts at this week's VCTips ...

Burnham's Beat: Top 10 Best and Worst Software Stocks of 2009

Top 10 Best and Worst Internet Stocks of 2009 | Main | The Three Horsemen of the VC Apocalypse . 01/04/2010. Top 10 Best and Worst Software Stocks of 2009. In 2009 Software Sector was up +49.0% vs. the NASDAQ's +43.9% gain and the S&P ...

Should I wait for ______?

Got this question on my formspring ask me anything page: Should I wait to have a profitable web application before getting married/have kids? My answer: No. Entrepreneurship, in my opinion, is a life-long thing if you do it right. ...

SeedCamp European startups visit NYC and Silicon Valley

SeedCamp is a European based startup incubator similar to Ycombinator or TechStars here in the USA. Google hosted the top startups from the program in New York City and Silicon Valley this week. Each startup pitched to an audience of ...

how discourse on the web works

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 11:10:56 -0500

Good weekend reading: Jonathan Dee's examination of the fall from grace of Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs. Internecine fighting on the right isn't inherently interesting; however, Dee's piece is as much about how we think now. A few samples: That...

Email and blog post subject lines are going to die and here's why: the first sentence or two works much better.

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:34:22 -0500

Email and blog post subject lines are going to die and here's why: the first sentence or two works much better. One of the great things I've realized while using Google Wave is that "Subject" lines in emails and blog...

test

test. this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype. test.

Comment on Art, Rocks and Obama (Or how to live in the age of the ...

My old friend wasn't with the brotherhood but he was gay as fuck and a country boy at heart living in San Francisco. And a great choreographer until meth took him out of the game. Anyway, it always seemed more like a country ass saying ...

Reporting Back on Wavelogging

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:48:52 -0500

Back in December I decided I was going to run a little experiment and try moving my blogging entirely into Wave (wavelogging?). It was an interesting experience but there is a deal-breaker that I just can't work around at the...

reading vs writing

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:31:04 -0500

Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, has an essay up at Mother Jones with the alarmist title "The Death of Fiction?": he points out, to the surprise of nobody, I expect, that the magazine component of the...

Wealth and redistribution thought-experiment #1

Wealth can be created and destroyed. For proof of this, imagine that you, Dave and I are stuck on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, with nothing but the clothes on our back. We are as poor as three people can be. ...

The Blog Post That Riled Eminem And Gave Steve Jobs A Court Date

On February 6, 2007 Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts On Music on the Apple website. He explained Apple's need to 'license rights to distribute music from others,' mentioning Universal and the other large record companies. ...

Comment on Art, Rocks and Obama (Or how to live in the age of the ...

I first heard kick rocks from a 20 something gay member of the Aryan Nation back in 2004. He was also a speed freak just out of jail and the houseboy of an old friend of mine. I remember looking it up online but I can't remember what ...

The Art of Stroking the SEO Ego

Social media, SEO, and the ego of a marketing / sales person. All three of those things are gigantic, and all continue to grow out of control. But even the juggernaut universe of the social web is dwarfed by the sheer size of some SEOs' ...

Ask an SEO - Wasting Pagerank on Noindex Pages

Here's a great question for the Ask an SEO series by Matt Inertia. Matt writes: Question. Hi Chris,. I have a question for you which I've been trying to figure out for a few months. If I disallow a page in robots.txt that I don't want ...

The Canadian SEO Prize Package!

Melanie Nathan (follow her on Twitter @MelanieNathan) recently had a kick ass little contest to get people to participate in her brand new blog, which worked like a charm. Just check out all those comments. She LITERALLY just launched ...

Ask an SEO! New Series from Chris Hooley's ThinkBait!

I've recently noticed a troubling phenomena. I spend more time answering SEO questions from friends, relatives, and industry peers than I do working on client work for my own Corporate SEO Company. And then it dawned on me. ...

Ask an SEO - Wasting Pagerank on Noindex Pages

Here's a great question for the Ask an SEO series by Matt Inertia. Matt writes: Hi Chris,. I have a question for you which I've been trying to figure out for a few months. If I disallow a page in robots.txt that I don't want (or need) ...

DoFollow, You Follow?

Let's just get to the point. Nofollow is lame. It takes value out of participating on other people's sites. It gives people, sites, and companies the ability to revoke value for their communities at a whim. If you are building value in ...

Pubcon is Coming!

Are you ready for this? Pubcon 2009 in Sunny Las Vegas is almost here. And for the first time ever, I'm taking the podium. Runnin' with the big dawgs. It's in a few weeks and I still have yet to complete my presentation. I'm screwed. ...

Comment on Art, Rocks and Obama (Or how to live in the age of the ...

urban dictionary has it at least as far back as 2003: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kick%20rocks. don't you guys google anything anymore?

Style Over Substance Your BS is Working

I've been noticing a disturbing phenomenon in client SEO land. Now, I'm not going to call out any Phoenix SEO companies specifically, but if you're reading this, you probably know who you are. Some of the people in the industry that I ...

Comment on Why Paris Hilton Is Famous (Or Understanding Value In A ...

Skinny blonde with big money that goes out every night. All of us want that kind of life even if its just for a fleeting moment. Paris Hilton lets into that world even if its just throgh pictures and stories. She interests us.

It's a PUPPY-OFF!

SnoopBloggyBlog is known for copying everything awesome that I do. So when I went out and got a cute puppy, it's no surprise Jon felt he had to follow suit. But Jon is under the false impression that his puppy is CUTER than mine. ...

The Consumerization of Enterprise VC

(My day job is investing in the public markets, but I have a small personal portfolio of private investments, mostly angel investments in Internet and software related startups. In the past six months I have spent some time helping a ...

2008 internet stocks: year in review plus 10 best and 10 worst stocks

internet stocks outperformed the market in 2008, albeit in the wrong direction. overall, the internet sector declined -52.2% during 2008 vs. the nasdaq's -40.5% decline and the s&p 500's -38.5% decline. out of 128 year-end stocks in the ...

Hey, is that camera on? I got something to say! (Or The Map Is ...

puffy. Everyone's talking about money these days so when a family member sent me a link to a tv show featuring my cousin and how he made his money I was shocked but decided to watch. My first cousin, now known to everyone, ...

An Open Letter To My Ex-Wife In The World Changing Business (Or ...

Dear favorite ex-wife who spends her time trying to change the world: No matter what happens in our next 50 years, you know no will love you more than me. And I respect more than anyone the things you are trying to do. ...

how has the the Internet changed the way you think?

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:57:01 -0500

question posed by John Brockman and answered by predictable (but interesting) members of the digerati. definitely worth browsing....

is Google good for history?

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:40:08 -0500

Following are Dan Cohen's prepared remarks for a talk at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, on January 7, 2010, in San Diego. The panel was entitled "Is Google Good for History?" and also featured talks by Paul Duguid of...

the zeitgeist checks in to the consumer electronics show

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:36:06 -0500

the never-ending stream of announcements of tablets and dedicated e-book devices from CES is a clear indicator that e-reading is coming of age. the open publishing lab at RIT is keeping track of all the relevant developments here....

the other side of the long tail

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:41:58 -0500

Jace Clayton quotes an article from The Economist: A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who...

smart thinking from Mitch Ratcliffe

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:59:42 -0500

Mitch Ratcliffe posted this very smart piece yesterday and gave permission to cross-post it on if:book. How to create new reading experiences profitably Concluding my summary of my recent presentation to a publishing industry group, begun here and continued here,...

Predictions for 2010 and the new decade

New Years Day is a time for thinking ahead to a new year and decade. But first, a look back. For me, the Internet started in 1994 with Netscape. I started working with AltaVista in 1996, and with Napster in 1999. ...

the final cut

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:04:17 -0500

Julio Cortázar is one of those writers who is mentioned far more often than actually read; most people know that he wrote Hopscotch, a novel often mentioned as a precursor to hypertext fiction, or that he wrote the short stories...

when we get what we want

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:09:47 -0500

It's the shortest day of the year, New York is under a thick blanket of snow which will soon turn to slush, and it's hard not to feel let down by the world: when the Democrats gut health care reform...

I'm Dumping My Blog for Google Wave

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:16:39 -0500

When I first started blogging in 2006 or so, I loved the idea of being able to have conversations with people all over the world, many of whom I didn't even know existed. It's served me really well in that...

Last Chance for First Round Office Hours in 2009!

It's been a great year of meeting entrepreneurs here at First Round Capital, in no small part due to the community outreach we've been doing via our Office Hours program. (Hat tip to Kent!) And as 2009 comes to a close, we've decided to ...

The Usefulness of Waves Over Time

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:30:26 -0500

As I continue to use and experiment with Wave, I keep coming up with interesting little questions and thoughts about where this is all headed. (By the way, this is also being published as a Wave, so if you're on...

What's the Secret Success of MINT.com? The Real Numbers Behind ...

Mint1 Aaron Patzer, CEO of MINT.com, dropped by The Funded and Vator.tv's Juice Pitcher tonight to share some secrets of the company's success. (Just in case you don't plug the TechCrunch feed directly into your brain stem: MINT is the ...

commentpress 3.1

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:01:52 -0500

My colleagues and I are very happy to announce a completely re-vamped version of CommentPress. Available for download at http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/. If you want to see the new version in action, check out Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the...

The CD-Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by Robert Winter

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:01:13 -0500

Robert Winter's CD-Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was published twenty years ago this week. As you look at this promo piece it's important to realize that the target machine for this title was a Macintosh with a screen resolution of...

two anniversaries

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:12:17 -0500

Just before Thanksgiving 1984, twenty-five years ago this week, The Criterion Collection was launched with the release of laserdisc editions Citizen Kane and King Kong. In the video below critic Leonard Maltin introduces Criterion to his TV audience. Roger Smith...

how we read: an investigation

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:23:59 -0500

An extremely interesting new book by Stanislas Dehaene entitled Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention has just been released. Dehaene, a neuroscientist, is curious about exactly what happens in the brain when we read,...

Who owns conversations? And what are the rules?

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:52:07 -0500

Before you get too far into this, I've also published this post to Google Wave at this link if you'd like to read along there instead. Using Google Wave heavily over the past several weeks has really gotten my mental...

The Ultimate SEO Marriage I'll Do the Honors

Imagine a marriage between cShel and Daver. High atop the Sears Tower, the place is packed with friends, family, and SEO Superstars. They are broadcasting live on uStream and hundreds of people are watching online. ...

sea change

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:52:21 -0500

There was a book sale outside the library at UCLA today. lots of wonderful paperbacks for 50 cents each. a year ago i would have bought a bag full. today zero. why? i do almost all my novel reading now...

the android OS

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:48:28 -0400

two interesting pieces about the importance of the Android OS to "the future of the book" http://ireaderreview.com/2009/10/27/androids-impact-on-ereading/ http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/the-coming-android-mini-tablet-flood/...

there's no such thing as an amorphous "public"

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:43:35 -0400

Cody Brown, an NYU undergrad, just announced Kommons, an ambitious effort to build a new model of news gathering and presentation. I just read his blog post announcing the new venture, "A Public Can Talk To Itself" and find myself...

The Google App Store Confirmed

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:07:50 -0400

In my last post about Google Wave, I specifically called out the fact that I thought Google was planning an app store: The conversation container will become the new AppStore. Adding capabilities to a conversation requires that you be able...

independent booksellers fight for their existence

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:27:28 -0400

October 22, 2009 The Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association today sent the following letter to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting that it investigate practices by Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target that it believes constitute illegal predatory pricing...

The internet Archive (and friends) announce Bookserver

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:00:04 -0400

Congratulations to Brewster Kahle and Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive for the very exciting, maybe sea-changing debut of the BookServer initiative. Possibly some real competition to Google, Amazon and Apple. Here is a re-post of Fran Toolan's detailed account...

transliteracy research group launched

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:08:19 -0400

Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger today announced the formation of The Transliteracy Research Group, a research-focused think-tank and creative laboratory. They define transliteracy as the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from...

visualizing changes in The Origin of the Species

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:05:46 -0400

Ben Fry has made a wonderful visualization showing how Darwin changed the text of Origin of the Species over the course of six editions. It's more of a conceptual art piece at this point but an exciting indicator of the...

Looming Disruptions to the Software Industry

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:58:34 -0400

I view a major shift in technology, like the one that I see materializing right now with Google Wave (the protocol), as a huge object crashing into a an existing landscape. There's this massive change right in the middle, a...

first vook -- utter failure, hbo Cube -- very interesting experiment

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:18:16 -0400

The first Vooks (combination text and video) were published yesterday by Simon & Schuster imprint, Atria. I bought the iPhone app version of Jude Deveraux's Promises. Basically it's an ordinary romance novel with video clips interspersed in the pages. In...

24 hour novel

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:01:21 -0400

Another innovative project from our colleagues at the London branch of the institute; this time in collaboration with the folks at CompletelyNovel.com. cross-posted from if:book London's blog, BookFutures. Something is growing in South London ... Spread the Word challenges writers...

the kindle gets poor grades at Princeton

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:12:08 -0400

The following is an article by Hyung Lee in yesterday's Daily Princetonian When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic...

the launch of MediaCommons Press

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:21:57 -0400

Cross-posted from Kathleen Fitzpatrick's blog at MediaCommons Today I have the pleasure of unveiling MediaCommons Press, a project we've been working toward for several months now. MediaCommons Press is the second major project hosted by MediaCommons, and it is dedicated,...

from if:book London

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:40:44 -0400

This note is from Chris Meade, director of if:book London IF:BOOK'S FIRST FICTIONAL STIMULUS - a digital boost to the book Apologies for any cross posting, but it's the end of week one in if:book's FICTIONAL STIMULUS and already visible...

Branding: The Future of Publishing?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:30:12 -0400

Patrick Brown who writes a blog for Vroman's, LA's great independent bookstore, did a lovely riff off of yesterday's post, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books....

A Vision of a Post-Wave Internet

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:48:19 -0400

This is a follow up to my last post about Google Wave, er, XMPP. That post generated a ton of commentary and questions, and my goal here is to address a lot of them, as well as take a stab...

a clean well-lighted place for books

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:29:49 -0400

The following started out as a set of notes to various colleagues suggesting that successful digital publishing involves much much more than coming up with a viable form for networked books. rather unexpectedly this led to the question of how...

transmedia storytelling -- interesting exchange between Bordwell and Jenkins

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:54:49 -0400

Henry Jenkins wrote an interesting three-part response to a post by his mentor, film scholar David Bordwell on the subject of transmedia storytelling. In addition to being thought-provoking it's a lovely example of how discourse can be thoughtful and meaningful...

a social history of the mp3

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:17:08 -0400

Those interested in the possible future of reading & the publishing industry could do worse than reading Eric Harvey's long essay at Pitchfork on the social history of the MP3. Harvey's piece is a useful examination of the way that...

Announcing the hibernation of lessig.org/blog (from the blogs-deserve-a-sabbatical-too department)

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:15:04 -0400

So my blog turns seven today. On August 20, 2002, while hiding north of San Francisco working on the Eldred appeal, I penned my first (wildly and embarrassingly defensive) missive to Dave. Some 1753 entries later, I'm letting the blog rest. This will be the last post in this frame. Who knows what the future will bring, but in the near term, it won't bring more in lessig.org/blog.

The reasons are many.

First, as I peer over the abyss of child number 3 (expected in a couple weeks), I can't begin to imagine how I would be able to allocate the time to give this space the attention it needs. I've already fretted about my failure to give this community the time it deserves in REMIX. Things will only get worse.

Second, even if I could, I'm entering a stage of my work when the ratio of speaking to reading/listening/thinking is changing significantly. I've just taken up my role as director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. As announced, this means the launch of a 5 year research project on institutional corruption. While I expect that project will have a critical cyber-presence, I don't want its life to be framed by this blog. The mission, the understanding, the community is different.

Third, even if I could, and even if the work I was doing meant I should, there's an increasingly technical burden to maintaining a blog that I don't have the cycles to support. Some very good friends -- Theo Armour and M. David Peterson -- have been volunteering time to do the mechanics of site maintenance. That has gotten overwhelming. Theo estimates that 1/3 of the 30,000 comments that were posted to the blog over these 7 years were fraudsters. He's been working endlessly to remove them. At one point late last year, Google kicked me off their index because too many illegal casino sites were linking from the bowels of my server. I know some will respond with the equivalent of "you should have put bars on your windows and double bolted locks on your front door." Maybe. Or maybe had legislatures devoted 1/10th the energy devoted to the copyright wars to addressing this muck, it might be easier for free speech to be free.

This isn't an announcement of my disappearance. I'm still trying to understand twitter. My channel at blip.tv will remain. As will the podcast, updated as I speak. I will continue to guest blog at Huffington Post. And as Change-Congress.org enters a new stage, I hope to be doing more there. But this community, this space, this board will now rest.

Thank you to the endless list of people who have helped make this place as it is, or was. Theo and M. David especially. Marc Perkel for his free hosting at ctyme.com for so many years. And thank you especially to the inhabitants of this space, especially the fantastic commentators and loyal backbenchers (Three Blind Mice, you have to reveal yourself now and let me buy you a beer). I have enjoyed this wildly more than I have not (again, I whine in REMIX about the not). And I have been very proud to be responsible for certain bits of content -- especially the guest blogging by the interesting and famous (Howard Dean was a favorite, and I will always be proud that I got Judge Posner to experiment with blogging, leading to his wonderful blog with Gary Becker).

Comments on this post will remain open for a week. And then comments on all posts will be locked.

Thank you to everyone, again.

Remix supporting a Medieval world (as critics have insisted)

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:09:33 -0400

Five-year old Felix's mom, Kierstin, sent me this image a bit ago. "I thought you would get a laugh out of these photos where your Remix became a crucial supporting wall for a Medieval Castle, manned by Playmobile guards and a plastic dinosaur." Indeed.

REMIX unmixed

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:06:01 -0400

Dave Wiley has an interesting idea he calls unmixing (in contrast to remixing), which he demonstrates with the first bit of REMIX. Basically, using Yahoo's BOSS, he reassociates every three words to another text on the web. Give it a look. (I think I'd call it re-remixing).

The struggle to improve PACER

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:57:33 -0400

So you're likely not to recognize the term -- in all caps, PACER -- but if you do, the amazing sorts at the Stanford Law Library are trying hard to organize attention to getting this essential service radically improved. You can help here.

Speak Out on (Canadian) Copyright

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:50:36 -0400

The wonderful Michael Geist has a site to facilitate organizing and thought around "the first Canadian public consultation on copyright policy since 2001."

Code v2 in Chinese

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 07:01:42 -0400

Code v2 in Chinese.

Project Tuva

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:09:45 -0400

Using Richard Feynman's famous series of lectures as a testbed, Microsoft Research has created a very impressive video presentation tool. yes, we've seen video annotation and linked transcript features before, but never executed so elegantly....

apple tablet

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:37:46 -0400

smart piece by Mike Cane enthusing on the increasingly talked about apple tablet....

book of the future - the video

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 09:26:19 -0400

thanks to Mike Lee, here's a YouTube version of the video described in the previous post....

the book of the future

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:53:00 -0400

this film loads very very slowly but i think it's the most exciting vision of the book of the future since Apple's Knowledge Navigator in 1987. interestingly, the film also includes an elegant solution to the question of how (at...

The Almighty Word

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:01:13 -0400

A few years ago, I found myself on a blind date with an English professor. At some point after the second drink, one of us mentioned a feature in the Times that day about a recent slew of steamy, pulpy...

saving scholarly publishing and saving civilization

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:31:52 -0400

Michael Jensen, the always-ahead-of-the-curve Director of the National Academies Press gave a stunningly original speech at the recent AAUP (American Association of University Presses) which, in his words, "allowed me to talk about the two issues that matter most to...

what to read now and why (according to Newsweek)

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:33:34 -0400

Newseek has published an idiosyncratic list of fifty books under the title "What to Read Now. And Why" which is different than last week's list of the "top 100 books." both relate to our inaugural post in 2004 in which...

run, don't walk

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:13:55 -0400

jonathan harris, one of the most brilliant designer/thinkers around has just launched an awesome new project -- Sputnik Observatory....

please discuss

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:14:58 -0400

In an as yet unpublished manuscript, historian Marshall Poe writes: "A book is a machine for focusing attention; the Internet is machine for diffusing it." I can see how he gets there, particularly if it's a P-book rather than an...

RIP: a remix manifesto

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:36:30 -0400

Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor has created an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. The entire film can be downloaded from here....

fabulously cool: iFixit's teardown platform

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:57:48 -0400

This is fabulously cool: iFixit has built a teardown platform. I've used the site many times to take apart Mac's I've needed to fix. But those instructions were iFixit prepared. They've now enabled anyone to build a teardown ("the act or process of disassembling") spec for any product. The site offers the structure and advice for building great teardowns. It then hosts and supports feedback. It is a fantastic example of a "hybrid," as REMIX defines the term -- and all submissions are CC-BY-NC-SA.

if:book london announces Fictional Stimulus

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:54:14 -0400

this is cross-posted from Bookfutures, the blog of Chris Meade, the director of IF:Book London IF:BOOK ANNOUNCES ITS FIRST FICTIONAL STIMULUS At last an end to those bored bookgroup blues! You love books but are interested if sceptical about what...

Trying to think a bit outside the box or at least change my conception of the box

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:02:52 -0400

There's endless talk these days about ebook readers, Kindle and all its e-ink cousins, and future tablets from Apple and other phone makers. There's nothing wrong with the fact that these devices are all designed to emulate the experience of...

On "socialism": round II

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:50:37 -0400

There's an interesting resistance (see the comments) to my resistance to Kevin Kelly's description of (what others call) Web 2.0 as "socialism." That resistance (to my resistance) convinces me my point hasn't been made.

Confidence about my "ignorance" about political philosophy notwithstanding (and don't tell my political philosophy tutor from Cambridge where I spent three years studying the stuff), my point is not that it is impossible to understand "socialism" as Kelly describes it. (Obviously, if a missile can be a "peacekeeper," anything can be anything). It is not even that never in the history of "socialism" have people so understood it (there have of course been plenty of voluntary communities that have called themselves "socialist"). Instead, my argument against Kelly was about responsibility in language: How would the words, or label, he used be understood. Not after, as I said, reading "a 3,500 word essay that redefines the term." Rather, how would it be understood by a culture that increasingly has the attention span of 140 characters?

In my view, the answer to that question is absolutely clear: "Socialist" would be associated with the dominant, modern vision of "socialism" which has, at its core, coercion. And as the Internet that Kelly and I celebrate doesn't have "coercion" at its core, I maintain, it is not "socialist."

In reading the reactions to my argument, however, I realize that in using the term "coercion" I was committing the same error that I was accusing Kelly of making. People associate the word "coercion" with Abu Ghraib or Stalin. And certainly, the "coercion" of socialism isn't necessarily (or even often) that.

That's fair. By "coercion" I meant simply law -- that "socialism" is a system enforced by law, and enforced contrary to the way individuals would freely choose autonomously to associate. Again, I'm for that kind of coercion in lots of contexts. I'm for income redistribution (to some degree); I want better public schools, I want to force you to vaccinate your childeren, etc. So I didn't mean anything necessarily negative by the term "coercion." I meant something analytical: That Wikipedia, if it coerces, coerces differently from how 95% (of Americans) at least understand the term "socialism."

Again, if you doubt that, think about American critics of "socialism": None of them are complaining about people voluntarily choosing to associate however they choose to associate (except of course if they are gay). They are complaining about people being forced to associate in ways they don't choose to associate. There's nothing inconsistent with someone being a Right Wing (and anti-socialist) Republican yet working at a church soup kitchen every other Saturday. Those spheres are separate in the American mind. Because they are separate, one can choose to be a Wikipedian and see no inconsistency in voting for Ronald Reagan.

(But aren't the "freely chosen obligations" often enforced (i.e., in my terms, "coerced") by the state? Of course they are -- as the Legal Realists and most recently Critical Legal Studies Movement worked very hard to remind us. But they had to work so hard because they were working against a very solid assumption about the sense of the term "coercion." They wanted to change it. But they at least acknowledged there was something there to change.)

So my argument against Kelly is that it is wrong to use a term (in the context of a Wired essay at least; a philosophy seminar would invoke a completely different set of ethics) that would be so completely misunderstood. We choose our words. We don't choose our meaning.

But if you're still not convinced, then here's a hypothetical that makes the same point. (And note, I'm being REALLY careful here -- this is ONLY a hypothetical):

Imagine someone said Barack Obama's economic policies were "fascist." But by that the person didn't mean the Fascism of the later German Nazi Party. He didn't mean, that is, the racism that came to define the term. Instead, he meant the Fascism of the early National Socialist Party, or of their equivalent in Italy, or England, or the earliest of FDR's administration.

My point is that however accurate it would be to describe the current "Czar" filled administrations with the centralizing and corporatist politics of the early 1930s, it would be unethical to call it "fascist." The term has been marked, just as the name "Adolf" has been marked, and in mixed, attention deprived contexts, it is wrong to ignore that marking.

Secondly, and finally: Even if it weren't, Kelly's description would be wrong. Even if there were a useable concept (as opposed to a possible concept) of "voluntary socialism," it would be wrong to describe what most think of as Web 2.0 as "socialist." That again because of the part Kelly ignores. Sure, there's a "sharing economy" as I describe in REMIX. That economy fits well with the Kibbutz or Wikipedia. And if you want to call that "socialist," fine. But the "hybrid" economy is not that economy. The Facebooks and Twitters and Flickrs and Yelps! are not entities engaged in a global urge to hug. They are companies that promise investors a huge return from their very risky investment. To do that, of course, they need to behave differently from the dominant mode of, say, Hollywood lawyers. But if they behave like Gandhi, they're not going to succeed at their mission -- which is (however much "change the world" or "don't be evil" is in the plan) to make money. Those people are not "socialists" (except in the corrupted sense that defines the term in many places today). Those people are members of a hybrid economy. What Tim calls "Web 2.0." And while I can well understand that someone would feel "torture," as Kelly puts it, using that term (I don't feel it, but who am I dictate to Kelly), the fear of that torture doesn't justify this violation of the ethics of language. The freedom of Wikipedia et al., is threatened enough. We don't need to throw the baggage of "socialism" into the bargain.

Et tu, KK? (aka, No, Kevin, this is not "socialism")

Thu, 28 May 2009 21:57:50 -0400

As I wrote last week, I threw away a week I didn't have penning an "insanely long" review (as I described it), of Mark Helprin's insanely sloppy "Digital Barbarism."

The part of that book that really got me going was the incessant Red-baiting -- the suggestion that the movement of which I am a part is a kind of warmed over Marxism from the 1960s.

That part always gets me going because it betrays a kind of mushiness in thinking that I should have thought a decade of writing by scores of advocates would have driven away. As I wrote about Helprin:

It is in this extreme of Red-baiting that one can see the mushiness of Helprin's brain: Let's say he were attacking a bunch of scholars who believed copyright should be as robust as the Framers of our Constitution had it. That was a regime that secured copyrights only to those who registered their work. And not just any work, but only "maps, charts, book or books" (music, for example, was excluded). Imagine the term of the protection was again just as the Framers made it -- 14 years, renewable by the author, if living, for another 14 years (but again, only if he registered the renewal). And imagine finally that the rights granted were forfeit if the author failed to deposit the copyrighted work with the government, or if he failed to mark the work with the appropriate sign. Such a reform would certainly be radical. It is wildly more radical than anything any of the scholars Helprin attacks would recommend.
But here's the question: would one who so recommended be a "collectivist"? Were our Framers "collectivists"? Obviously not. Because the consequence of a limited copyright is not that the collective gets to control who does what. The consequence of a limited copyright is that the work is in the public domain, and anyone has the liberty to do anything he or she wants with the work. The state or the "collective" is not privileged over the individual. The individual is privileged over the state or "collective." And so strong is that privilege in America that a Court of Appeals in Colorado recently held that the government can't remove work from the public domain unless it satisfies a strict First Amendment test first.

The kind words of some in response to the review made me think perhaps the week wasn't completely wasted. But then as I got settled into a 13 hour flight to Australia, I read this piece by Kevin Kelly, "The New Socialism."

Words have meaning. We don't get to choose their meaning. If you call something "X" people will hear the equation. They won't read the fine-print which says ("By X, I mean really not-X).

Kelly says:

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism.

That statement is flatly wrong. It is completely unreasonable to call that "socialism" -- at least when the behavior described is purely voluntary. It's like saying "Because Stalin set up a competition between different collective farms, it's not unreasonable to call that free market capitalism." Both statements are wrong because they point to a feature that is common, and ignore the feature that is distinctive. At the core of socialism is coercion (justified or not is a separate question). At the core of the behavior Kelly celebrates is freedom.

Kelly's argument is like so many today that has implicitly embraced the view that free market, libertarian sorts believe that the only thing in the world is competition, or people working to non-common goals. It is the idea that we are free only if we are antagonistic, and that free market theorists have been working to create a world where individuals struggle against, not with. A world that aspires to dog-eat-dog as its central value.

But that conception of capitalism/free-market/libertarianism has no basis in fact. And so as I ranted in my head about Kelly's confusion, I was enormously happy to have the chance to hear an economist at the conference I was attending at Canberra present a paper that (unintentionally) completely destroys Kelly's thesis.

Nicholas Gruen is an economist with the consulting group, Lateral Economics. His paper (PDF) (blog entry) was titled "Adam Smith 2.0: Emergent Public Goods, Intellectual Property and the Rhetoric of Remix." And he introduced the paper by remarking a fact that I had missed -- this year is the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's first (and last) published book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments (alas, the second edition). (Last because he finished his 6th edition of the book responding to the terrors of the French revolution just before he died in 1790).

What the modern misunderstanding of markets forgets about Smith is that his aim was as much to understand the provision of public goods as it was to understand the role of the market. Indeed, you could only understand the role of the market against a background of public goods (including civil society), and one critically important question is how a society produces those public goods.

Unlike statists of later years, Smith was fascinated by emergent public goods -- goods that were public goods (since nonrival and nonexcludable, as economists later would formalize the concept), but that were created not by any central actor like the state, but by the mutual and voluntary actions of individuals. Language is the simplest example -- language is a quintessentially public good, but no central coordinator is necessary to produce language. But Smith was eager to describe a wide range of emergent public goods that set the preconditions to a well functioning market.

Obviously, in this focus on civil society, Smith is not alone -- even among the heros to libertarian/capitalist/free marketeers. In this respect, Hayek continues the tradition Smith began. He too was deeply sensitive to the health of civil society, and recognized how civil society was produced by "masses of people who own the means of production [and] work toward a common goal and share their products in common, [people who] contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge." But Hayek too was not "socialist."

The thing that Smith was pointing to (and Hayek too), is not "socialism." It is not reasonably called socialism. Because "socialism" is the thing Smith was attacking in the 6th edition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Socialism is using the power of the state to force a result that otherwise would not have been chosen voluntarily by the people. As Gruen quotes Smith:

The man of system. . . is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. . . . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Coercive government action is -- IMHO -- a necessary condition of something being "socialism." It isn't sufficient -- there is plenty of coercive governmental action that doesn't qualify as socialism, like raising taxes to fund national defense, or to pay the police. But if you're calling something "socialist," then a requirement for using that term correctly -- meaning in the way it is understood at least by people who don't take the time to read a 3,500 word essay that redefines the term -- is to be able to point to the coercive state action that produces the thing you're talking about.

I'm not an opponent to all things plausibly called "socialist" (though as I'll argue in a moment, our political culture could do well to avoid the most prominent examples of socialism that Washington has produced over the past 8 years). A graduated income tax could properly be called "socialist," because it is coerced, though I'm in favor of it. Forcing polluters to internalize the cost of their pollution (carbon as well as others) is not, in my view, properly called "socialist," even though it is the product of coercive state action. There are many examples in the middle of course -- schools, parks, public highways. But all of the examples of proper "socialism" begin with pointing to coercion by the state. A conservative Baptist church is not "socialist" when it voluntarily collects money to give to the poor, even though the result is similar to the result of a "socialist" plan to redistribute money from the rich to the poor.

On this account, none of the things that Kelly (and I) celebrate about the Internet are "socialist." No one forces Wikipedia editors to build a free encyclopedia. No one sends to the Gulag (Helprin's book notwithstanding) photographers who don't use CC licenses to share their photographs in Flickr. Scientists who share their research freely within the Public Library of Science are not necessarily friends of Che. They may be. But their freely sharing their knowledge is not a certain signal of leftist leanings.

All this would have been obvious to Kelly if he had included in his list of purportedly "socialist" organizations the Christian Right. Say what you want about the politics of the Christian Right (and don't get me started), one can't say they are "socialists." But likewise, whatever you think about organized religion (and again, don't get me started), one can't deny that it represents "masses of people who own the means of production work[ing] toward a common goal and share[ing] their products in common, [] contribut[ing] labor without wages and enjoy[ing] the fruits free of charge." Yet it would be patently "unreasonable" to call the Baptist Church "socialism."

Likewise might this have been obvious if Kelly had focused on other writing about the stuff he and I celebrates, that emphasizes more than Benkler, for example, the commercial or business dimension to this phenomenon. Half of REMIX is about what Kelly calls the "hybrid," but my point is about the hybrid as a business strategy. So too with the fantastic book, Wikinomics. Again, the focus of that book is on how a sharing economy gets leveraged by a commercial economy to benefit both. In no instance is that leveraging coercion. In no way, therefore, is it "socialism."

Now of course Kelly works hard in his essay to disassociate the term "socialism" from lots of "cultural baggage" (as he puts it; victims of the Gulag may have a different way of describing that): As he writes:

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.
Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

And of course, these distinctions are right and true. But what is not true is that something is "socialism" because "technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions." Tim O'Reilly gave us a good enough word for such technologies -- Web 2.0. And if that term is too geeky, then how about "civil society"? Or the extraordinary words of Smith from 250 years ago.

I launch this rant against a friend not to betray a Stallman-like-tic. I think think some fuzzy language is productive. I don't insist on precision at every linguistic turn.

But sloppiness here has serious political consequences. When a founder of the movement which we all now celebrate calls this movement "socialist," that plays right in the hand of those would attack everything this movement has built. Again, see Helprin. Or Andrew Keen.

It is a fact that in America the term "socialism" is a smear. I'm not defending that fact. I wouldn't give up defending programs merely because they could be so smeared.

But I do think that now is not the time to engage in a playful redefinition of a term that has such a distinctive and clear sense. Whatever "socialism" could have become, had it not been hijacked by revolutions in the east, what it is in the minds of 95% of America is not what Wikipedia is.

And indeed, when I look around at the real socialism of the past decade, I am almost Declan-esque in my revulsion towards it: America has plenty of "socialism." The most recent versions we should all be very skeptical of. This is the general practice of socializing risk, and privatizing benefits. I'd be happy to join the "anti-socialist" movement if we could agree to end that perversion first.

But that deal notwithstanding, I will never agree to call what millions have voluntarily created on the Net "socialism." That term insults the creators, and confuses the rest.

GSC: Senator Ben Nelson is angry (second in a series)

Thu, 28 May 2009 19:38:40 -0400

Change Congress launched its second "good souls corruption" attack today, this time against Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. (Two Dems in a row; we'll be more balanced next time.) The attack has excited an hysterical response from the Senator's office. Read about the charge (here) and the response (below), and then please sign our petition to Senator Nelson.

At the beginning of May, Senator Nelson was reported to have said that including a "public option" (giving Americans a choice to opt into a public system) in a national health care proposal was a "deal breaker," and that he would "form a coalition of like-minded centrists opposed to the creation of a public plan, as a counterweight to Democrats pushing for it."

On May 7, our friends at Public Campaign produced a report that showed that Senator Nelson has received more than "$2 million from insurance and health care interests in his three campaigns for federal office."

These two facts together expose Senator Nelson to the charge of "Good Souls corruption" -- legal, even ethical acts that reasonably lead the public to wonder whether it is the merits or the money that is driving this Senator's decision.

Senator Nelson responded immediately to the attack by issuing the following press release. [Bracketed annotations are courtesy of me, not the Senator's staff.]

NELSON: NEBRASKANS BEWARE OF MISLEADING FUNDRAISING GIMMICK
May 28, 2009 - The office of Nebraska's Senator Ben Nelson today warned Nebraskans not to fall for a misleading fundraising gimmick by a special interest group called Change Congress. The group has issued a press release concerning Senator Nelson and said it was sending mailers to Nebraskans.
Senator Nelson's spokesman Jake Thompson issued this statement:
"There's no doubt Senator Nelson understands the insurance industry's important role providing health care for millions of Americans. After all, he's been an insurance executive [The ever effective, "I'm a former insurance exec!" defense], an insurance industry regulator, a governor who created a children's health insurance program, and today he represents Nebraska, arguably the insurance capital of the world. [And no doubt the insurance industry fundraising capital of the world.]
But let's look at this group closely. They claim, 'Ben Nelson said he may not support Obama's plan.' Can they send us a copy of the plan? [Maybe not, but we can certainly send you again to the report indicating he opposed a key element of the President's plan] No, because President Obama hasn't offered a specific plan yet. Next, they ask if people are ready to change Congress and 'take on special interests' and 'only donate to politicians who prove they are willing to do that.' Then, they promote an election law proposal they're lobbying for.
So, let's get this straight: These people are endorsing something they haven't seen [No idea what this means: We're endorsing a bill introduced by Senators Durbin and Specter. We've seen this bill.], criticizing Senator Nelson for something he hasn't done [Interesting. Where is the press release denying the reports from the beginning of May?] and using health care as a fundraising gimmick [A "fundraising gimmick"? If he means we're fundraising around this issue, that's false. If he means our strike is a "gimmick," then what's he so upset about?] --to lobby for unrelated special interest legislation. ["UNRELATED"!?!! Are you kidding me? One can define corruption as unrelated to the objects corrupted, but that doesn't make it so.] These people have a political agenda that has nothing remotely [We have an agenda. It is to create a Congress where legislation is on the merits -- not, as it is today, guided by the implicit threat of large campaign contributors.] to do with helping Nebraskans get and keep affordable, high quality health care. Their effort is silly, sad and sophomoric. [Unlike this sort of name calling.]
Nebraskans are far too smart to fall for just another special interest group grabbing a hot issue and misrepresenting both the president [Um, where did we misrepresent the President?] and Senator Nelson [And where was Senator Nelson's letter to Ryan Grimm complaining he had misrepresented him -- before we raised this issue?] to raise money to lobby Congress [And where is our effort to raise money to lobby Congress -- we've asked people to STOP giving money to Congress.]"
Here are some facts about Senator Nelson and health care:
During his presidential campaign and recently President Obama has said Americans who like their private insurance will get to keep it, or have the option to join another plan.
Ben Nelson agrees and he's eager to see more details from the president, and he wants to make sure that the 85 percent of Nebraskans who have insurance today will continue to have the option of staying with their existing plans.
Senator Nelson believes that all Americans should receive health insurance and agrees with President Obama that those who currently have health insurance should be assured that it won't be taken away from them.
Senator Nelson is spending much of the congressional break in Nebraska this week meeting with Nebraskans, listening to them discuss health care and reform ideas. He's listening to patients, providers, employers and others. He looks forward to hearing from many more Nebraskans on ways to strengthen, broaden and provide stability in America's health care system."
[But please notice, Senator Nelson has not indicated that he supports a central idea in Obama's plan -- that Nebraskans will also have the freedom to choose a public option if (and imagine this) the private options are too costly.]

As I said, this is only the second in a series. (The first was Representative Conyers.) We will continue to call out members of both parties -- and again, I promise, a Republican is coming soon -- who make it too easy for Americans to believe (as 88% in my district believe) that money buys results in Congress.

Congress could change this problem tomorrow -- by enacting the Trustworthy Government Now Act (aka, the "Fair Elections Now Act"). And of course Members can avoid the charge of "good souls corruption" by co-sponsoring that bill now.

But meanwhile, we'll be working hard to make more enemies, by making the status quo very uncomfortable. Nice was for the 90s. CHANGE was the promise for today.

Tell Ben Nelson to (be)come clean.

Join our Donor Strike -- promising not to support any candidate who doesn't co-sponsor the Trustworthy Government Now Act.

And finally, celebrate this good news just in: Senator Nelson now indicates that he has changed his view, and is now "open" to the public option.

Bravo, Senator. Now about the system of funding that makes people wonder?

RIP! in Minneapolis -- May 28.

Wed, 27 May 2009 15:07:42 -0400

From the latest RIP!: A Remix Manifesto screening:

Sound Unseen in Minneapolis screens RIP!
DateMay 28, 2009
Time8:00 PM
VenueThe TRYLON screening room
Location2820 E 33rd St, Minneapolis, MN, 55406

Event TypeOpen to the Public
Ticket Price$5
Venue Capacity60 (Small venue, buying tix in advance recommended!)
Event Websitehttp://soundunseen.com
In RiP: A Remix Manifesto, web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
The film's central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy?
"About as edgy and fascinating a glimpse you'll get of one of the more pressing issues of our Internet Age." .....Montreal Gazette.

The Solipsist and the Internet (a review of Helprin's Digital Barbarism)

Wed, 20 May 2009 12:04:21 -0400

Exactly two years ago today, the New York Times published an op-ed about copyright by a novelist. The piece caused something of a digital riot. As we learn now from his book, Digital Barbarism (HarperCollins 2009) (note: if you buy from that link, Creative Commons gets the referral fee), Mark Helprin was at the time completely ignorant about the hornet's nest he was about to kick. For him, the op-ed was a professional rapprochement with the New York Times, a chance to make things right once again (though why they were then wrong is a story left mysteriously (and thankfully) out of the book).

(Read the rest of this insanely long review in the extended entry. You can download a better formatted PDF here.)

The Kindle experience: this must be a nightmare

Tue, 19 May 2009 04:21:05 -0400

So I buy a Kindle book for my Kindle 2. It downloads to my machine. I open up the book -- it has no relation (except the relation of "not") to the book I ordered. Three emails, 4 days later, Amazon has still not responded to the problem. I wonder how they begin to discover/fix such a problem.

Remix Culture: (They say) Fair Use is Your Friend

Tue, 19 May 2009 04:17:47 -0400

The great folks at American University have a great video about "fair use" and remix.

GreenWorldApps: Easier ways to Clear Up Your Carbon

Tue, 19 May 2009 04:14:06 -0400

I still think lots about how to make obvious the obvious responsibility we all have to clean up your carbon. GreenWorldApps is developing a suite of web apps to make that easier.

Noah Wardrup-Fruin sums up his experience with open peer review

Wed, 13 May 2009 02:27:30 -0400

Noah Wardrup-Fruin has a book coming out from MIT Press this summer -- Expressive Processing. Together with Doug Sery, his editor at MIT and Ben Vershbow a former colleague at the Institute, Noah used CommentPress to conduct an open peer...

The Presence of Print

Thu, 07 May 2009 15:47:23 -0400

About two years ago, Dan Visel ended a thoughtful post on the New York Public Library's newly-installed Espresso Book Machine by proposing: "There's a discussion here that needs to happen." In light of the second version of the Espresso Book...

Gamers Anonymous

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 22:50:49 -0400

I am not a gamer. I do not consider myself a gaming enthusiast, I do not belong to any kind of "gaming community" and I have not kept my finger on the proverbial pulse of interactive entertainment since my monthly...

notes from around the web

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:54:39 -0400

On April 26 in Los Angeles, haudenschildGarage presents a performance entitled The Last Book, an "attempt to resurrect the medieval illuminated manuscript through the invocation of our current alchemy, the new technologies, to conjure a future as the past in...

oulipo in new york

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:16:25 -0400

The most prominent members of the Oulipo are making a rare descent upon New York this week; there are readings at the New School tonight and in Pierogi in Williamsburg on April 3rd. (A complete schedule of events can be...

design and dasein: heidegger against the birkerts argument

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:18:07 -0400

Here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, much ink has been spilled -- or rather, many pixels generated -- regarding Sven Birkerts's "Resisting the Kindle," which contends that the e-reader's rise augurs ill for our ability to contextualize information. The argument...

extraordinary book sculpture

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 07:11:28 -0400

Brian Dettmer creates these extraordinary sculptures by amalgamating, modifying and mutating books. Looking at these images of the physical matter of books, remixed into sculptures, I'm reminded of the process that texts are increasingly going through once digitized: amalgamated, remixed,...

will the real iPod for reading stand up now please?

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:00:43 -0400

OK, so first of all: this isn't an article about whether or not ebooks are a good thing. But I was thinking this morning about the now hackneyed idea that we're moments away from an 'iPod moment for ebooks', and...

sven birkerts on the kindle

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:30:46 -0500

The Atlantic just posted a short piece by Sven Birkerts, Resisting the Kindle, voicing his concerns over what is being lost when reading moves from page to screen. The challenge is to take the kernel of truth in what Birkerts...

wednesday miscellany

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:27:57 -0500

Arc90 has released Readability, a bookmark that strips away most of the cruft that generally surrounds text on the Web to focus on the main text column. It doesn't work on every website, of course, but it does point out...

why is text on screens so ugly?

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:09:49 -0500

There have been a raft of reviews of the new Kindle and the various iPhone reading applications lately. In general, reviewers are more positive about the experience of reading from a screen than they have been in the past. However,...

briefly noted: iphones & o'reilly

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:31:30 -0500

Ars Technica has a review of an interesting-sounding iPhone application called Papers, designed to make it easy to carry around a library of scientific papers on your iPhone. It works with a desktop app also called Papers; it also interfaces...

briefly noted

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:22:04 -0500

In Mute, Tony D. Sampson reviews FLOSS+ART and Software Studies: A Lexicon, two books on software studies and digital art. At the Poetry Foundation, Stephanie Strickland a manifesto for e-poetry, which nicely defines how e-poetry might differ from traditional poetry....

announcement: itin film on sunday

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:41:17 -0500

Alex Itin, the Institute's artist-in-residence, currently has a show up in Frost Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. If you're around this Sunday afternoon, he's screening his films and giving an artist's talk. I'm not sure exactly what he'll be up to –...

wikipedia before wikipedia

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:50:32 -0500

I've been reading Tom McArthur's Worlds of Reference: lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer, a history of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference materials published in 1986. The last section, titled "Tomorrow's World" is interesting in hindsight:...

Using the back and forth of a wikipedia article to get closer to the truth

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 07:43:43 -0500

When Jaron Lanier disparaged the Wikipedia in his 2006 essay on "the hazards of the new online collectivism" I wrote an impassioned defense including our oft-mentioned point that the most interesting thing about wikipedia articles, especially controversial ones is not...

judging a book by its contents

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:34:51 -0500

There's a post at the Harper Studio blog about Stephen King's recent denigration of Stephenie Meyer's talents as a writer. Meyer is, of course, the author of the Twilight books, a chaste vampire saga. The post asks: Can a book...

on john updike

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:42:04 -0500

If:book certainly isn't an obvious venue for a John Updike remembrance. In 2006, his "The End of Authorship" vehemently misconstrued the ideals of digital publishing. At remix culture, he bristled; at collaborative reading, he balked; at the notion of books...

a defense of the webcomics business model

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:06:11 -0500

Syndicated comics artists who are seeing their livelihood disappear as the newspapers their work appears in shrink from sight, are starting to look with more interest at the world of online webcomics. Unfortunately, they seem to misunderstand what they see...

correspondences

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:37:34 -0500

One of the most attractive books I picked up last year was a copy of Ben Greenman's Correspondences, a collection of short stories published by Hotel St. George Press. Strictly speaking, you could argue that Correspondences isn't a book: a...

Can Books and the Web Play Well Together?

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:04:13 -0500

The Internet, coupled with the bad economic times, has the media industry in a flurry; Institutional newspaper papers are failing regularly, magazines are reconsidering everything, and reports showing that people are just not reading - or at least not the...

a step forward for creative commons

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:24:06 -0500

Peter Brantley points out what's now at http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/: Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise. Except...

media commons returns!

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:09:32 -0500

After an autumn spent retooling, MediaCommons has returned in new and better form. Check out the blog for details. Over at the much improved In Media Res it's sports week. Congratulations to editors Kathleen FitzPatrick and Avi Santo for a...

bookcamp

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:21:35 -0500

Embarrassingly belated report on bookcamp (I've taken this long just to follow up on conversations). It was a delightfully un-stuffy unconference exploring bookish and net-ish tech-ish things, last Saturday, at the new Hub space in Kings Cross. I listened to...

social networking in reverse

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:24:35 -0500

A quick note to point out LittleSis, an "involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans," a project of the Public Accountability Initiative funded by the Sunlight Foundation. It's something like a networked telephone book of the rich and powerful: LittleSis aggregates publicly...

the economics of video games

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:10:35 -0500

We don't talk about games here as much as we have in the past, but this John Lanchester essay is worth a look on your way to the New Year. One paragraph stands out to me, a brief consideration of...

a book is a place . . .

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:03:49 -0500

The institute got a fantastic xmas gift last week -- the seven women reading The Golden Notebook together said they are now having such a good time discussing the book in the margin they've decided to keep the conversation going...

an interview with helen dewitt

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:07:19 -0500

Helen DeWitt is a novelist who lives in Berlin. Her first novel, The Last Samurai, was published in 2002 to not inconsiderable acclaim, though it suffered, in this country at least, from having the same title as a Tom Cruise...

volumes

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:52:51 -0500

The end of the year is heaving into view with its ineluctable retrospective urge. Trying to put together some semblance of a list of things that I liked this year, I came back to two books from the past year...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Movies

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:24:43 -0500

Wyatt Mason, the keenly observant Harper's literary critic, blogged last week about the difficulties inherent to film criticism. "[B]ecause film is a waterfall of particulars," he believes, a movie review "is the hardest place to get any serious critical footing."...

Golden Notebook Update: Even More Marginalia

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:51:56 -0500

A screen is an extremely limited amount of space. We knew when we started The Golden Notebook Project that we could only fit about seven readers comfortably within the margins of the book. However, we are not interested solely...

Variations on a theme

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:04:19 -0500

I spent a day last week at MASS MoCA, touring Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective. (It was finally profiled in the New York Times this morning, and NPR reported it yesterday.) The exhibit takes up an entire building, wall...

of music & metadata

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:00:16 -0500

How valuable is metadata? Metadata was the buzzword of choice in the blogosphere back when if:book was started, somewhere between when everyone was talking about everything in terms of XML and when the hype moved on to social networking. You...

Presenting the Unpublishable

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:05:10 -0500

Kenneth Goldsmith has launched a bold, full-throttle investigation into the nature of unpublishability over at Ubu. Introducing Publishing the Unpublishable, Goldsmith asks, "What constitutes an unpublishable work?" Authors sent in works that otherwise would have remained untouched, festering at...

nycip indie & small press book fair

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:05:30 -0500

Almost forgot about this: if you're around New York this Sunday (December 7th), I'll be on a panel at the New York Center for Independent Publishing's Indie & Small Press Book Fair. The panel, at 2 p.m., is called "The...

While we were out: a publishing news recap

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:35:00 -0500

Uh-oh. While if:book slept, the publishing industry was cast into a tumult from which it's unlikely to soon recover. Having weathered an increasingly turbulent economic downturn, the industry's already rickety business models look all the more enervated. The headlines are...

American Social History Project brainstorming

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:29:59 -0500

(Thanks for your patience - the blog is back!) On Friday November 21st, we met with the American Social History Project and several historians to discuss the possibilities for collaborative learning in history. Attendees included Josh Brown, Steve Brier, Pennee...

if:book on the way back

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:05:39 -0500

Something was going wrong somewhere in the Institute's archipelago of websites and NYU summarily turned off our server. We're slowly coming back to life - bear with us, we should have a lot of interesting things up here soon. Meanwhile,...

The Golden Notebook Project is LIVE

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:56:42 -0500

The Golden Notebook Project is LIVE. If you want to read along with a print version, here are links to both the US and UK versions from Amazon....

On the Virtues of Preexisting Material: A Manifesto, By Rick Prelinger

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:29:33 -0500

We asked Rick Prelinger for permission to cross-post this provocative piece which originally appeared in Absent Magazine 1. Why add to the population of orphaned works? 2. Don't presume that new work improves on old 3. Honor our ancestors by...

Instant fix

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:17:13 -0500

Image inspired by Shepard Fairey. In case you prefer to get your news online, here are a variety of ways to follow the election coverage. Predictably, Twitter is following every second of the election. If you're into Twitter, maybe...

an invitation

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:36:11 -0500

We've got a small NEH grant to hold a couple of brainstorming sessions. the overarching goal of the sessions is to come up with a conceptual framework for learning spaces which combine the rich media attributes of the cd-rom era...

the indeterminate dvd

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 18:31:00 -0500

On a clear day, Guy Maddin might be my favorite living film maker. He's not to everyone's taste (The Heart of the World, complete on YouTube, is a good litmus test), and I won't attempt to convert the unbelievers. But...

art and technology, 1971

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:08:58 -0400

A quite note to point out that LACMA has announced that they've posted the long out-of-print catalogue for their 1971 Art and Technology show online in its entirety in both web and PDF format. It's worth looking at: Maurice Tuchman...

Lauren Klein and The Turk

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:13:32 -0400

An engraving of The Turk from Karl Gottlieb von Windisch's Inanimate Reason, published in 1784. Image courtesy of Wikipedia. We had Lauren Klein, a graduate student from CUNY, over to lunch this afternoon. One of the pleasures of such...

Sophie demo movies now available

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:34:03 -0400

In addition to the demo books themselves, we've posted several movies demonstrating the capabilities of Sophie 1.0. At about a minute each, these clips provide a cursory glance at a variety of our books, complete with hopefully unobtrusive narration by...

a leap into the post-industrial

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:09:15 -0400

I've just returned from a quick trip to India: with my brain yet furry from jetlag, I've yet to come to any understanding of what I experienced there, should such be possible. But while in Delhi, I picked up an...

Greenblatt on human agency and New Historicism

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:06:56 -0400

Image via Queen's University. Here is a little bit about the MIT communications forum on October 14, with respondent David Thorburn, moderator Diana Henderson, and lecturer Stephen Greenblatt. Greenblatt is the Cogen University Professor of Humanities at Harvard. He...

nine curiosities from the beeman cookbook collection

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:50:27 -0400

This Sophie book showcases several interesting, rare, or otherwise odd cookbooks from the collection of Kimberly Beeman. You can download it here (.zip, 60Mb). Make sure that you have Sophie or Sophie Reader installed. The title page, including a video...

the five drafts of the gettysburg address: a sophie book

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:15:44 -0400

Contrary to popular lore, Lincoln did not write the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope. Though given short notice that he was to speak at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, he had enough time to write...

meanwhile . . . .

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:31:44 -0400

My colleagues at the Institute and i are busy making some interesting things with Sophie 1.0. We're going to start posting them on a new institute website devoted to Sophie 1.0. [They will also be available on the OpenSophie site]...

and the first document is . . . .

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:40:40 -0400

An Experiment in Visualization: Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speeches from Truman through Obama and McCain. In addition to the wordle.net visualizations in which the size of the word is proportionate to the number of times it is used, we've also included...

Mellon announces a $1.25 million grant for Sophie 2.0

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:25:31 -0400

Last week the Mellon Foundation announced a $1.25 million grant to the University of Southern California for a java-based version of Sophie, which will be known as Sophie 2.0. In addition to improving on Sophie 1.0 in various ways, Sophie...

How do you want to read?

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:25:02 -0400

(Photo of Tom Stoppard's book case, made by T. Anthony, via The New York Times.) For the sake of travel and convenience, sure, even a Kindle is better than toting a book shelf with you on an airplane. But...

The Golden Notebook Project - Readers Announced

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:52:16 -0400

Beginning November 10th, seven women will begin a public conversation in the margins of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. The text of the novel and the readers' conversation will be in a nifty new format designed by Apt Studios in...

Putting the "book" back in Facebook

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:37:59 -0400

With October just around the corner, American universities and high schools are gearing up for homecoming celebrations, those unabashed nostalgia fests. There's just one problem: the yearbook, one of nostalgia's favorite vessels, is obsolete. This summer, the Economist reported on...

looking for lit in all the wrong places

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:41:49 -0400

Just came upon a Guardian piece looking at the underwhelming quality of 'e-lit'. In my comment on the discussion I found myself reviewing a number of themes that have recurred in my if:book research over the last couple of years:...

this is a world of imagination & digitisation

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:31:44 -0400

On Thursday October 9th, National Poetry Day in the UK, 2008 if:book london is launching an exciting experiment in reading and writing, supported by Arts Council England. Over the next six months I will be working with artist and web...

Sarah Palin, Crowdsourced

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:14:53 -0400

Views of Wikipedia are decidedly mixed in academia, though perhaps trending slowly from mostly negative to grudgingly positive. But regardless of your view of Wikipedia - ?or your political persuasion - ?you cant help but be impressed with the activity...

Synthesizing art, literature, and Halloween costumes

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:41:00 -0400

Natura Morta, Giorgio Morandi, 1956 (via The Met) There is little or nothing new in the world. What matters is the new and different position in which an artist finds himself seeing and considering the things of so-called nature...

wordia - new definitions of literacy?

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:05:42 -0400

This morning, I went to Samuel Johnson's house (now a museum dedicated to 18th-century London) in the old City of London. Today is (or would have been) Samuel Johnson's birthday; the occasion was the launch of Wordia, a new startup...

History is written by the readers

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:18:56 -0400

Pardon me for plagiarizing Churchill, but the victors aren't the only ones writing history these days. At the Institute, we're re-imagining the American History Project's "Who Built America?", hoping to re-imagine the sort of information in this CD-ROM from 1991,...

Unearthing a Multimedia Time Capsule

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:39:24 -0400

Microsoft Multimedia Schubert was published fifteen years ago, in 1993. Developed by the Voyager Company, the program was one of many in an early "Microsoft Multimedia Catalog." It allows users to engage in a close reading of Schubert's Trout Quintet,...

children's books and control

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:26:49 -0400

There's a surprisingly intriguing exchange in a recent Bookworm program, where Michael Silverblatt interviews Françoise Mouly about her new line of children's books, a spinoff of the Little Lit books she's been putting out with Art Spiegelman. Not surprisingly, Mouly...

a reading room

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:46:55 -0400

Alex Itin, the Institute's artist-in-not-quite-residence, is having an opening soon. He says: I will be filling four walls with a floor to ceiling installation of images extruded over the last several years for the Art Blog: IT IN Place: http://www.futureofthebook.org/itinplace/...

recognitions

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:44:22 -0400

I came home from my first year at college, reeling from culture shock unrecognized until much later, to a job at the local natural history museum. I was in charge of their live reptile exhibit, a perennial summer attraction in...

a unified field theory of publishing in the networked era

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:29:15 -0400

The following is a set of notes, written over several months, in an attempt to weave together a number of ideas that have emerged in the course of the institute's work. I'm hoping for a lot of feedback. If there's...

McLuhan analyzes the presidential debates of 1976

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:19:15 -0400

One of our terrific summer interns, Rick Williamson, just sent a link to this 1976 TV interview of Marshall McLuhan in which he skewers the presidential debates for being completely the wrong form for the medium of television. It's interesting...

Remediating Orwell's Diaries

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:45:17 -0400

The Orwell Prize has recently unfurled their project to post George Orwell's personal diaries online, in blog form, and in real time, seventy years after each entry was originally written. Why they've elected the blog format and the seventy-year anniversary...

"I heard words and words full of holes."

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:01:05 -0400

I thought that Terry Teachout made an unfortunate omission in his recent column, "Hearing is Believing: The Vanished Glories of Spoken-Word Recordings." After glimpsing into BBC's giant vault of sound recordings, Teachout bemoans the inaccessibility of most spoken-word albums: Why...

twittering from the past

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:18:21 -0400

A couple of weeks ago, Sebastian Mary posted about experiments with sending out literature via Twitter. She found herself disappointed that DailyLit was neither "abridging the text savagely for hyper-truncated delivery, or else delivering the unabridged text 140 characters at...

Emily Dickinson in Sophie

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:23:19 -0400

Emily Dickinson's poems weren't published during her lifetime- it was only after her death that her sister found Emily's manuscripts, tucked at the bottom of a trunk, and decided to publish them. In the translation from manuscript to printed page,...

do you remember the first time?

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:20:50 -0400

Siva Vaidhyanathan, the Institute's fellow, is busy writing a book about Google, to be titled The Googlization of Everything. He's working in public, and right now, he's interested in hearing stories about how people – that means you! – began to use...

kerfluffle at britannica.com

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:07:44 -0400

I got a note from someone at Britannica online telling me about a discussion prompted by Clay Shirky's riposte to Nicolas Carr's Atlantic article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The conversation on the Britannica site, and the related posts on...

now you can judge a virtual book by its cover too

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:36:05 -0400

Zoomii, a new virtual bookstore that uses Amazon's prices and fulfilment, provides a nifty 'browse' interface that lets the viewer zoom in and out of 21,000 'books' - read cover thumbnails - arranged on 'shelves' according to category. It's the...

dailylit experiments with public reading via twitter

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:15:53 -0400

I made a passing mention of email-me-chunks-of-book-to-read service DailyLitin my recent-ish post on writing less. Though I've not tried it, it's been picking up some press lately as a way to get your reading done via the network. The latest...

lulu for magazines?

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:05:38 -0400

A new project by HP Labs aims to make print-on-demand magazine publishing available to everyone. MagCloud uses a similar model toLulu for books, or Moo for stickers and cards: upload your digital content here and we'll deal with fulfillment....

if:book review 3 - privacy and net neutrality

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:50:21 -0400

My last review post covered the debates around digitization of public domain archives, especially with reference to Google. Key to these debates are questions of access: who gets how much, what to, how is this controlled, and who by? And...

new ways with words

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:43:24 -0400

I'm delighted to announce that we've received a grant of £93,000 from the Esmee Fairbairn Trust to help us "explore how new media can be used to generate active reading, creative writing and fresh enthusiasm for literature amongst young people"....

the long tale: another book metadata app

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:39 -0400

More fun with book metadata. Hot on the heels of Bkkeepr comes Booklert, an app that lets you keep track of the Amazon rank of your (or anyone else's) book. Writer, thinker and social media maven Russell Davies speculated that...

The Golden Notebook -? readers wanted

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:50:39 -0400

if:book readers may remember my excited post from last October when Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize. I had coincidentally re-read The Golden Notebook over the summer and when I realized that none of my younger colleagues had read it,...

google, digitization and archives: despatches from if:book

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:35:05 -0400

In discussing with other Institute folks how to go about reviewing four year's worth of blog posts, I've felt torn at times. Should I cherry-pick 'thinky' posts that discuss a particular topic in depth, or draw out narratives from strings...

we're on our way back

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:17:08 -0400

The period of extreme introspection is winding down. As you've seen over the last few days Sebastian Mary has embarked on a review of if:book's first four years. This will unfold over the next few weeks and will prepare the...

fantasy author's site hosts fan-created wiki encyclopedia

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:55:41 -0400

In marked contrast to J K Rowling, whose battles against the publication of a fan-created Potter encyclopedia we've covered here, fantasy author Naomi Novik's website hosts a wiki in which fans of her writing help to co-create an encyclopedic guide...

virtual pop-up book in papervision

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:56:01 -0400

Ecodazoo is a beautifully-animated if slightly inscrutable site created in Papervision, a real-time 3D engine for Flash. Scrolling around the page takes you to a series of animated 'pop-up books' that tell vaguely eco-educational stories. It's pretty, even if...

fifth avenue apartment encoded with puzzles by architect

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:26:26 -0400

I was beginning to research an article about ARG genres when I came across this interesting tidbit. Without telling the client, an architect renovating an Upper East Side apartment included secret panels, puzzles, poems and artworks that - when they...

printable mini-books revisit eighteenth-century pamphleteers

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:17:44 -0400

London-based creative studio and social think-tank Proboscis has put impressive effort into thinking through the incarnations and reincarnations of written material between printed and digitized forms. Diffusion, one of Proboscis' recent-ish ventures, is a technology that lays out short texts...

if:book review 1: game culture

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:35:28 -0400

I've chosen 'game culture' as the theme for this first review post, for all that many of these posts could just as easily be tagged another handful of ways. But games have always hovered at the fringes of debates about...

if:book review update

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:14:07 -0400

Whew. I expected my review of the if:book archive to take me a few days, and selecting/commenting on posts to be a quick job requiring at most a handful of posts. Wrong. It took me a week of digging to...

bkkeepr

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:20:25 -0400

Popping out of review and archiving mode for a quick mention of bkkeepr, a new project recently out of stealth mode. Based around Twitter and ISBN data, it creates a timeline of who's reading what. The feed provides intriguing browsing,...

the doctor the salon

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:30:21 -0400

Well, I don't want to give away much about what was a blindingly brilliant episode of Doctor Who, but suffice to say the library survived, though the whole collection had been backed up on the biggest mainframe in the universe....

if:book london... tomorrow the stars

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:10:04 -0400

We've now launched a website for if:book london, the British iteration of the Institute, at http://www.futureofthebook.org.uk, and that links both to this blog and one which will focus on UK activities and in particular our work with the literature sector...

if:janus

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:23:53 -0400

It's been pretty quiet on the blog for the last few weeks. This is partly because there's a lot of work going on backstage. But it's also symptomatic of the fact that the research, writing and blogging element of the...

Place Holder #2

Fri, 30 May 2008 14:51:35 -0400

sorry for the extended absence from these pages. we've been wonderfully busy at the first Sophie workshop (at USC) this week. news of that and much else next week....

placeholder

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:08:57 -0400

We're taking ben's leaving as an opportunity to think about the institute's mission and the role of if:book within that context. and most importantly we're trying to figure out the best way to involve the readers of if:book in this...

looking at libraries

Tue, 06 May 2008 17:18:00 -0400

A few weeks back though the auspices of TED, I paid a visit to a private library. The owner doesn't want publicity, and I won't reveal details, but it was a staggeringly beautiful (if idiosyncratic) collection, and I can't imagine...

a Sophie workshop -- spread the word

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 06:42:35 -0400

Two weeks ago the Instittue for Multimedia Literacy (IML) at USC held a ceremony for the first graduating class of students with honors in multimedia scholarship. two of the students wrote their theses in Sophie. Based on their experience, Holly...

fail again fail better have fun

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 06:20:56 -0400

A new research paper by Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas on A Million Penguins, the controversial wiki novel created last year by Penguin Books makes fascinating reading. It includes amongst other delights an analysis of the activities of the contributor...

Sophie vs. Powerpoint and Keynote

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:12:38 -0400

Longtime visitors to if:book have heard about Sophie, the reading/writing environment we've been working on since the inception of the institute in 2004. Version 1.0 of Sophie was quietly released last month. We'll make a number of Sophie-related posts over...

stories and places

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:55:01 -0400

I found this new site, 217babel.com set up by Brighton based journalist and writer William Shaw, to be a nice example of an online fiction that actually gets you reading rather than admiring it awhile and then glazing over or...

floing again

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 05:43:32 -0400

"While businesses based on the sale of paper may or may not be in crisis, those of us with a wider responsibility for ensuring our literary culture thrives have wonderful new tools with which to encourage participation and communication. The...

tomorrow and tomorrow

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:34:10 -0400

The future has only been a topic of interest for a relatively short while. For most of time the future was likely to be pretty much like the past except we'd be dead then and replaced by replica offspring -...

interface culture

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:43:01 -0400

Omnisio, a new Y Combinator startup, lets people grab clips from the Web and mash them up. Users can integrate video with slide presentations, and enable time-sensitive commenting in little popup bubbles layered on the video. MediaCommons was founded partly...

a new blog format avoids the tyranny of chronology

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:10:36 -0400

Sebastian Mary and i were talking last week about the need to re-conceive the format of if:book so that interesting posts which initiate lively discussions don't get pushed to the bottom. a few days later i met with Rene Daalder...

a return to orality

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:14:12 -0400

I've been making my way through Robert Bringhurst's The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, which came out a couple years ago in Canada, but which is now getting an American release from Counterpoint. Bringhurst is probably best known...

changes

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:37:16 -0400

You've probably noticed that things have been relatively quiet around here lately. I haven't been on vacation or anything like that. Rather I've been figuring out the future, not of the book, but of me. After much personal consideration, and...

illumination

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:04:56 -0400

Kyle Bean, student at the University of Brighton sent me this nice example of his work. More hybrid books on his site http://kylebean.co.uk...

a la recherche

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:43:01 -0400

I was on the underground making my way to the London Book Fair yesterday, hoping to stand out from the crowds of frantic publishers jostling there by carrying over my shoulder the fabulously pretentious "Proust Society of America" book bag...

old school

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:51:22 -0400

J.K. Rowling went to court today to try to stop someone from publishing a lexicon of Harry Potter characters. She says she wants to do it herself, but even if that gave her the right to stop others from doing...

daydreaming about a better textbook

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:39:35 -0400

Wouldn't it be great if textbooks were published online with dynamic comment fields so that students like Matthew LaClair could raise these sorts of issues directly in the margin of the book. imagine what a terrific conversation might unfold and...

thinking about tex

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:36:11 -0400

Chances are that unless you're a mathematician or a physicist you don't know anything about TeX. TeX is a computerized typesetting system begun in the late 1970s; since the 1980s, it's been the standard way in which papers in the...

where minds meet: new architectures for the study of history and music

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:49:26 -0400

This is the narrative text for an NEH Digital Humanities Start-UP grant we just applied for. Narrative With the advent of the cd-rom in the late 80s, a few pioneering humanities scholars began to develop a new vocabulary for multi-layered,...

writing grants

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:26:03 -0400

Hence the quiet around here....

e-reads i-Wash

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:33:17 -0400

The announcement this morning of the launch in the UK of a new waterproof laptop looks like another nail in the coffin of the traditional paper book, as the new device at last makes it possible to read a downloaded...

on writing less

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:52:32 -0400

"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." Pascal, Lettres provinciales, 16, Dec.14,1656. I used to co-edit Pick Me Up, a cult London digital newsletter. After some years perfecting...

against reading

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 23:50:47 -0400

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that...

the big book of TED

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:46:42 -0400

At TED 2008, visual cartographers David Sibbet and Kevin Richards produced over 700 spontaneous sketches of the keynote presenters' ideas, using Autodesk visualization tools. These sketches have now been turned into The BIGVIZ, a downloadable 200-page interactive ebook. Parts...

this is a game. no really, it is

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:26:28 -0400

This morning, I received an envelope through the post. It contained two chapters of a pulp murder mystery, along with an invitation to a private gathering with the same title as the booklets: Looking For Headless. The gathering will...

from work to text

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:06:03 -0400

I spent the weekend before last at the Center for Book Arts as part of their Fine Press Publishing Seminar for Emerging Writers. There I was taught to set type; not, perhaps, exactly what you'd expect from someone writing for...

major news: IFB and NYU libraries to collaborate

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:46:47 -0400

A couple of weeks ago, I alluded to a new institutional partnership that's been in the works for some time. Well I'm thrilled to officially announce that the we are joining forces with the NYU Division of Libraries! From Carol...

a serious shot at screen reading

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:11:41 -0400

Another new online magazine: Triple Canopy (noted by Ed Park). Unlike Issue and Rosa B. this isn't a design magazine – although the content is very interesting – but like them, it's a serious attempt to construct a new kind of magazine...

first of penguin's interactive fictions up

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:04:04 -0400

Ben posted a few weeks back about an intriguing new interactive project in the pipeline from Penguin. WeTellStories, produced for Penguin by ARG studio SixToStart is now out in the open. Comprising six stories based on Penguin Classics, released one...

expressive processing: post-game analysis begins

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:27:25 -0400

So Noah's just wrapped up the blog peer review of his manuscript in progress, and is currently debating whether to post the final, unfinished chapter. He's also just received the blind peer reviews from MIT Press and is in the...

so when are you going to retire?: a book in process about age, work and identity

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:18:40 -0400

I want to give a shout out to a wonderful new project by a dear friend of ours. So When Are You Going to Retire? is -? or will be, or is in the process of becoming -? a...

issue magazine

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:27:23 -0400

Hot on the heels of Rosa B. (mentioned last week) comes Issue Magazine, another new web-based publication looking at the changing world of publishing and design. Issue #0, edited by Alexandre Leray and Stéphanie Vilayphiou, is undergoing a slow rollout...

hmmm. . . . please discuss

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 06:57:37 -0400

The following quote was in AP story i read in MIT's Technology Review this morning about Microsoft licensing Adobe's mobile Flash and PDF software. "Flash content is the most prolific content on the web today; it is the way people...

step inside the books: new york event this friday (3/21)

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:31:15 -0400

If you're in the New York area, don't miss this. Friday, March 21, 2008, 7-9pm - ?New York, NY - ?125 Maiden Lane, 2nd Floor. FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY: Step inside three books, drink free beer and wine, and experience...

googlization of everything now has print publisher

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:36:10 -0400

In case you missed the news last week, Siva has locked up a deal with the University of California Press to publish the North American print edition of The Googlization of Everything. It's due out late summer, 2009. Profile will...

in search of jenny everywhere

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:12:18 -0400

It's mainly the literary world that assumes fictional work to be best when the creation of only one person. Most TV shows, movies, games and comics are created by teams. But though creativity here is not bound by the Romantic...

friday projections

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:40:50 -0400

It's all go on the digital publishing scene in the UK with Penguin launching their first ARG next week - go to www.wetellstories.co.uk for more details, and various big companies plotting experiments. Meanwhile this week Gail Rebuck, chief executive of...

trade-offs

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:13:09 -0400

Alex Itin just cross-posted a wonderful new piece on his blog, and Vimeo. I watched it on Vimeo and was struck by the terrific back and forth discussion between Alex and the people who are looking at his work. It's...

google books API

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:03:44 -0400

Good news. Google has finally released an API (?) for Google Book Search: Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link...

rosa b.

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:48:11 -0400

A quick note to point out Rosa B, a new online publication in French and English from the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art Bordeaux and the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts. Their first issue, online now, is about contemporary publishing...

more compelling than choice

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:09:04 -0400

The first two major ARGs to play out, The Beast and ilovebees, surprised their creators: the collective intelligence of thousands of players was taking down in hours puzzles that the puppetmasters had expected the community to wrestle with for days....

migrating eastward

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:23:59 -0400

Buckle your seatbelts, we may be experiencing a bit of turbulence. We're in the process of migrating our server from Los Angeles, where for the past three and a half years it has resided, at the University of Southern California,...

friday musings on the literary

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:07:00 -0500

Faber chief executive Stephen Page's article in yesterday's Guardian outlines some straightforward ways of taking advantage of social media, on-demand business models and so on in the interests of sustaining Faber into the 21st century. Push out content that brings...

nicholson baker on the charms of wikipedia

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:43:34 -0500

I finally got around to reading Nicholson Baker's essay in the New York Review of Books, "The Charms of Wikipedia," and it's... charming. Baker has a flair for idiosyncratic detail, which makes him a particularly perceptive and entertaining guide through...

critical perspectives on web 2.0

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:13:43 -0500

First Monday has a new special issue out devoted to unpacking the politics, economics and ethics of Web 2.0. Looks like lots of interesting stuff. From the preface by Michael Zimmer: Web 2.0 represents a blurring of the boundaries between...

flight paths 2.0

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:10:13 -0500

Back in December we announced the launch of Flight Paths, a "networked novel" that is currently being written by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph with feedback and contributions from readers. At that point, the Web presence for the project was...

hypertextopia

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:57:41 -0500

We were recently alerted, via Grand Text Auto, to a new hypertext fiction environment on the Web called Hypertextopia: Hypertextopia is a space where you can read and write stories for the internet. On the surface, it looks like a...

fight path

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:47:22 -0500

"Writers of the world arise! It's time to throw off the shackles of traditional publishing contracts and face a brand new digital future with a brand new set of priorities." So starts an article on the Guardian 'Comment Is Free'...

student designer envisions a more credible kindle

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:02:17 -0500

Engagdet points to an award winning Australian student design for an e-book reader that combines the gesture-based "multi-touch" interface of the iPhone with the e-ink display of the Kindle. LIVRE design concept -? Nedzad Mujcinovic, Monash University "Interaction happens via...

channel 4 goes cross-platform

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:29:03 -0500

On the subject of major traditional media entities and cross-platform experimentation. Over in London last night Chris and I went to the launch event for Bow Street Runner, an online game launched by UK TV broadcaster Channel 4 to coincide...

penguin of forking paths

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:55:00 -0500

Following on last year's wiki novel, Penguin will soon launch another digital fiction experiment, this time focused on nonlinear storytelling. From Jeremy Ettinghausen on the Penguin blog: ...in a few weeks Penguin will be embarking on an experiment in storytelling...

art of compression: barry yourgrau's keitai fictions

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:33:39 -0500

The Millions has an interesting interview with the South African-born, New York-resident writer Barry Yourgrau, who recently published a collection of "keitai" (cell phone) fiction in Japan. Known for bite-sized surrealist fables (as here), the hyper-compression of the cell phone...

he do the police in different voices

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:08:16 -0500

In a sense, Graham Rawle's novel Woman's World, just out in the United States from Counterpoint, is made for the internet. It's the sort of thing that you expect to see on Digg or Reddit: artist spends several years cutting...

borders self-publishing and the idea of vanity

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:16:08 -0500

Borders, in partnership with Lulu.com, has launched a comprehensive personal publishing platform, enabling anyone to design and publish their own (print) book and have it distributed throughout the Borders physical and online retail chain. Beyond the basic self-publishing tools, authors...

"naked in the 'nonopticon'"

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:52:41 -0500

If you haven't already, check out Siva Vaidhyanathan's excellent Chronicle of Higher Ed piece on privacy and surveillance: a review of several new books treating various aspects of the topic, but a great all-around thought piece. A taste: Certainly the...

conversation, revision, trust...

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:07:54 -0500

A thought-provoking "meta-post" from Noah Wardrip-Fruin on Grand Text Auto reflecting on the blog-based review of his new book manuscript four chapters (and weeks) into the process. Really interesting stuff, so I'm quoting at length: This week, when I was...

e-read all about it

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 05:14:33 -0500

An article in Publishing News this week suggests that UK publishers are bracing themselves for the arrival on these shores of the Kindle or a rival to it soon. Much discussion of e-royalties is going on; HarperCollins and Random House...

danah boyd's closed journal boycott

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:46:35 -0500

I meant to blog this earlier but it's still quite relevant, especially in light of other recent activity on the open access front. Last week, Danah Boyd announced that henceforth she would only publish in open access journals and urged...

harvard faculty votes overwhelmingly for open access

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:28:49 -0500

The Harvard Crimson: The motion, which passed easily at yesterday's Faculty meeting, grants Harvard a non-exclusive copyright over all articles produced by any current Faculty member, allowing for the creation of an online repository that would be "available to other...

harvard faculty cast vote on open access

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:45:26 -0500

The U.S. presidential primaries in Virginia, Maryland and D.C. are not the only votes to watch today. The New York Times reports that arts and sciences faculty at Harvard are weighing in today on a proposed measure that would make...

a brief history of book

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:57:38 -0500

In the Institute's London office we've been talking about how to get across the message that the book has been through permanent change throughout its history, to knock on the head the simplistic argument of good old page v bad...

at o'reilly

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:36:26 -0500

Over the next couple of days I'll be filling up my brain at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference -? taking place, conveniently, here in New York. I'm giving a talk today called Books as Conversations, and participating...

harpercollins offers free ebooks

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:20:23 -0500

The New York Times: In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food...

digital livings

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:09:41 -0500

Alongside our research for Arts Council England, I'm also looking at how how new media writers earn their livings and make their way in the world. The Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University is...