Thursday, September 29, 2005
What makes an idea viral?
Set Godin suggests "spreading an idea is rarely a thoughtful, voluntary act. Instead, it is near the core of who we are, and we often do it without thinking much about the implications." /Seth's Blog/
GameGame
As reported and described by The Ludologist, Aki Jorvinen's card game about making games, called GameGame, is now available! He had hinted about this at last June's DiGRA, and now it's ready to play." Grand Text Auto"
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Community Wi-Fi as Political Activism
In Cory Doctorow's latest novel Someone Comes to Town, the main character helps a tribe of Toronto "info-hippies" dumpster-dive and assemble community wi-fi out of garbage. Michael Lenczner of le Sans Fil, Montreal has organized a "fantastic grassroots free wi-fi organization (and) makes elegant points in this weblog entry regarding the political nature of his organization's work, how people in Montreal are not simply setting up technical infrastructure but are fundamentally 'hacking the city,' enabling individual people and neighborhood groups to actively shape the life of the city in powerful new ways that transcend the dominance of corporations and even of traditional government." /Smart Mobs/
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Users as Designers
"(U)ser experience design (UXD) is fine but we have to ask ourselves what comes next. UXD is not going to deal with the large scale system changes that'll come in health and schools. Large scale systems that include the people who are actively engaged in the production of these services." /Smart Mobs/
Writing sensible email messages
"As we've seen before, getting your inbound email under control will give you a huge productivity boost, but what about all the emails you send? If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you're looking for, you'll need to craft messages that are concise and easy to deal with." /43 Folders | Writing sensible email messages/
Beyond Cyberpunk! The Web Version
"When we began Beyond Cyberpunk! (BCP), there was no such thing as the World Wide Web. Hypermedia programs like Apple's HyperCard were the only way to inexpensively deliver hypertext, sounds, images and animations. We saw in HyperCard the opportunity to create a compendium of all this cybercultural output. We wanted to map the territory, but to do so in a way that allowed the user to explore her own links and interests. We tried to cram in as much material as we could, covering everthing from high-brow theory to sci-fi lit and films to the wired worlds of hackers/crackers and the zine publishing scene which was starting to move into cyberspace. The result was a 5.5 megabyte "connect-the-dots" cyber-manifesto." Beyond Cyberpunk!
Monday, September 12, 2005
XBlogThis!: An Extended BlogThis! Button
XBlogThis! is similar to the BlogThis! button. Highlight some text in the page that you want to blog about and click the XBlogThis! button. This will pop up a frame where you can specify an author, technorati tags (as a comma-delimited list), and whether to quote with quotation marks or tags. /XBlogThis!/
Friday, September 09, 2005
Your Ever-Evolving Brain
"New research suggests that the human brain may still be evolving quite rapidly." /Boing Boing/
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Drunk on Sleep Deprivation
"A new study of young doctors who are notoriously overworked shows that they're often so tired that they perform some activities as if they were hammered. The University of Michigan study was the first of its kind to do this kind of sleep/alcohol comparison--previously used on truck drivers, for example--on medical residents. The young doctors who were on a 'heavy schedule' slept an average of 3 hours per night." /Boing Boing/
Monday, September 05, 2005
MIT Technology Review on Social Machines
"When computing devices are always with us, helping us to be the social beings we are, time spent 'on the computer' no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn't: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are rapidly becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software will never become invisible, but they will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on--even though they're the only things making the world clear." /MIT Technology Review/
Friday, September 02, 2005
Burning Man and Social Software
"Community members were asking for communication tools, so we created a regionals list so they could communicate with one another. And frankly, Burning Man would never have gotten here without the internet, because we operated for a long time without an office, so if you're decentralized in that way, you'd better have a tool, and (one) that allows you to integrate things without the advantage of a physical environment." /Wired News/
