Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
July 15, 2009
Voyager (which I mentioned in a previous post) was one of the coolest companies around in the Nineties; I was a devoted customer. I bought Voyager Expanded Books: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World (though it may not have had that title then). Books on floppy disk! Annotatable!...
July 14, 2009
Via Daring Fireball I just learned about Pinboard, which describes itself as “antisocial bookmarking.” I am tempted to use it rather than Delicious for just that reason. I think all that line really means is that it’s easy to make the default setting for your bookmarks “Private.” In other respects Pinboard...
July 13, 2009
I often think that all stories about the relations between online gaming and real life are just footnotes to Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life (free PDF here) — one of the great masterpieces of contemporary journalism. I was looking it over again recently and noting how, though the technologies have developed significantly in the...
July 13, 2009
Via Adam Keiper, my editor here at The New Atlantis, I see this fascinating story about . . . well, several things, but primarily about the efforts of Bob Stein — founder of the Voyager Company and then, more recently, the Institute for the Future of the Book — to create more deeper and more meaningful communities of...
July 10, 2009
The Newshour with Jim Lehrer last night did a story on cloud computing that was rather comical at times — “You mean other people can see that spreadsheet?” — but laid out the basic issues well enough. However, the show was extremely Google-centric: its primary example of “living in the cloud” was a...
July 9, 2009
July 9, 2009
As I was writing that last little tiny post, about Latin tags on the London Underground, it occurred to me that that's the kind of thing done much more efficiently via Twitter. Thus: the brand spanking new Text Patterns Twitter Feed.
July 9, 2009
July 8, 2009
. . . writing a post about Google's plans to build their own OS, when I could have just waited for Fake Steve: Point four: You also may not have noticed, but nobody uses Chrome. I mean think about it. Do you know anyone who uses Chrome? Really? And you know why nobody uses Chrome? Because Chrome is shit. Just utter, utter shit. I...
July 8, 2009
Over at The American Scene, I have some thoughts on a recent proposal: that Bill Gates should start his own university.