Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 11th, 2010
Easy access to billions of pages of information has changed the way writers research topics, how they attribute that research and, indeed, how writers perform the writing process itself. For example, access to email has radically transformed the way journalists do business. It has always been standard practice for a reporter to conduct face-to-face interviews, […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 11th, 2010
There are two ends of the spectrum as far as how people feel about the accessibility of online books. In 2006, “Wired” magazine’s Kevin Kelly was excited about the notion of an “infinite book.” He imagined a mega-Wikipedia where users tag favorite book quotes. Kelly was prophetic in imagining four years ago an “iTunes-esque” situation […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 11th, 2010
As soon as the first university researchers started sharing documents on Arpanet, society realized the importance of rushing to get content online. In his book “A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers and the Digital Revolution,” Dennis Baron describes the Google Books project which began in 2002. (p. 47) Google outsourced to China and India the massive […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 11th, 2010
The development of civilization has seen a shift from the more informal traditions of an oral society where people told stories and verbally relayed information from tribe to tribe to the more formal tradition of the written word. Thanks to Gutenberg and his printed bible in 1455, when something is credible and important, we refer […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on Apr 4th, 2010
This morning, I set out a cute Easter display complete with bunnies both stuffed and chocolate. In the middle of it all, I placed a photo of my kids when they were little. Took a quick pic, posted it to Facebook as a Happy Easter message to my college kids and waited for my 15-year-old […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on Mar 28th, 2010
The Los Angeles Times sold its soul to the Mad Hatter early this month for a reported pittance of $300,000. Subscribers awoke to find Johnny Depp had been burned into the front page: The Times continues to meander down the path of confusion in dealing with new media. Journalists throughout the Southland belted out a […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on Mar 28th, 2010
I just finished a 4550 location book on my Kindle. While “kindling” Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody,” I “highlighted” more than 250 locations. I can now quickly search that file for any notation I’d like to recall. I was pleased to know that every single word I read was backed up by a definition. As I […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on Mar 7th, 2010
Chris Anderson, in his NY Times bestseller “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” asks Stewart Brand about his oft-quoted maxim, “. . . information wants to be free . . .” and its in Brand’s answer that we find the reason for the capital “F” in Anderson’s Free. Brand (founder of Whole Earth Catalogue) […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on Mar 5th, 2010
Father of the hyperlink and file transfer protocol Tim Berners-Lee gave a cool TED talk last year about the “Semantic Web:” all the data on the web not just sitting there in silos, but forming links on its own and extrapolating new information from that synergy with little human interaction. Check out this year’s similar TED talk by Gary Flake about a […]
