Latest Articles
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Web
Topic-focused Blogs: Examples
So I've started a topic-focused blog, eBook Culture. Yesterday I outlined my personal goals for the site. Today I'm going to review examples of successful topic-focused blogs, from two people who are leading the way in this type of blog.PVRblog: product-centered contentProbably the most well known example of a topic-focused...
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Entertainment
Mobile Media
Lucas Gonze comments on my post from yesterday:"Richard MacManus is throwing himself into eBooks. A synchronicity is that I ran across an excellent bit of non-fiction by Phillip K. Dick which is available freely on the net and couldn't figure out what to do with it. It's not desk reading...
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Web
My Goals for eBook Culture
One of my stated niches is 'web strategy' and I've written a couple of posts on this subject. However strategy is one of those things that is better practiced rather than preached. I could write a whole bunch of articles on strategy, but the only way for someone to be...
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Entertainment
Context on the Web
Summary: Microcontent in the form of sound bites, links and text extracts are the lingua franca of the Web. But the flipside is that context morphs very easily, so what are the moral and ethical implications of that?Following on from my post the other day about Systems Builders, in which...
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Social
Systems Builder
I came across an article in Computerworld that has some good advice on designing and building IT systems. The article is by Michael Hugos and he starts out by defining "Systems Builder":"This person can speak both the language of technology and the language of business. This person understands the specific...
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Entertainment
Open Media
Open-Media.org is an Open Source Media Project launched today by Marc Canter and J.D. Lasica. It's going to be like the Internet Archive, only for multimedia files. In fact Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive (home of the The Wayback Machine) is providing free storage and free bandwidth for Open...
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Entertainment
Electracy Comes From Other Planets
I recently wrote about a new kind of literacy, one in which Generation Y is more fluent than the rest of us. It is transforming the act of reading and it's also re-defining Knowledge Management, I believe. In my travels (on the Web) I came across a new term that...
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Entertainment
Multimedia Blogging
Jon Udell has kicked off a series of articles at O'Reilly Network on what he calls "hypermedia blogging":"The two-way Web unleashed by the blogging revolution is, and will remain, largely a textual medium. And yet we're clearly at an inflection point. It's increasingly feasible to create and share media content....
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Web
Introducing eBookCulture.com
I've started a new topic-focused weblog: eBookCulture.com. It's going to be exclusively on the topic of eBooks and the read/write culture that I think will develop around eBooks over the next few years. eBooks have so far not broken through into the mainstream, due to a number of factors -...
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Web
Morning Coffee Note: Heavy Themes
As a follow-up to my Reliance post yesterday, which was on the subject of my dependence on web servers, I read something by Mitch Kapor this morning that resonates (even though his post was from a different context):"I think I've unfairly maligned servers in the past. It's not the server...
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Entertainment
Audio Blogging Experiment Results
Audio and video blogging seem to be hot topics currently. I myself have done two, pretty low-tech, audio blog posts. Both were readings of textual posts, one of a Read/Write Web classic from January 2004 - The Fractal Blogosphere. And the second audio post was something I wrote just last...
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Web
Reliance
The thing about web technology - and computing in general - that continues to frustrate me, is that it forces me to rely on hardware and software that is often outside of my direct control. It's all very well embracing the server side and using browser-based products like Movable Type...
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Entertainment
A New Kind of Literacy
Note: This post is also available in audio format (.wav file, 2.9MB)."Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline" announced the headline at the National Endowment for the Arts website on 8 July 2004. On that day the NEA published a report entitled "Reading at Risk" (PDF), which outlined the findings of a...
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Web
Notes on Tim O’Reilly’s Oscon 2004 speech
One good thing about audio on the Web is that I can listen to things while I'm working. Which is precisely what I did this morning with Tim O'Reilly's keynote speech at the Open Source Convention currently being held in the US. The audio was done by IT Conversations, rapidly...
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Web
Read/Write/Think/Dream
As I was browsing the Web, looking for inspiration, I discovered a work by John Baldessari - a conceptual artist from America. He transformed the library space at UCSD (University of California, San Diego) into a beautiful work of art... the photos online are enough to make me want to...
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Entertainment
Audio Blogging enhances the Social Web
Yesterday I did my first audio blogging post. I think audio has the potential to be a key part of the so-called Social Web, or Social Media as it's being called now. And I like the term 'Social Media', over the more tradional term 'Social Software'. It emphasizes that the...
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Web
More on Subscriber Stats
I've just hit a century, 100 Bloglines subscribers. I was on 79 only 4 days ago, when I posted my article about Bloglines subscriber stats. Mind you it helps when the creator of Bloglines links to you :-)To put this into perspective, I also noticed today that Boing Boing has...
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Web
We’re all on the same page
In yesterday's post I mentioned The 3 C's: Create, Communicate and Collaborate. The 2nd one could just as easily be 'Converse', as in conversations. All of these C's are things I strive to achieve in my weblog. In an effort to strengthen the 'Communicate/Converse' prong, I've finally gotten around to...
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Web
Analysing Bloglines Subscriber Stats
I love Bloglines. It's a browser-based RSS feeds aggregator that almost singlehandedly proves the case that web applications can be better than desktop-based ones. I say this in the context of Joel Spolsky's already classic essay on why web browser apps are winning the war against so-called rich or smart...
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Web
Sylvian and The System
This is a Short Story by Richard MacManus. It takes a speculative look at what the blogosphere might be like in 20-30 years time.IMy name is sylvian and this is my story of The System. Twenty years ago it was called the Web. Back then people were making it up...