“Books are being replaced by reading,“ to borrow a phrase from Jack Shafer. Digital technology “distances us from the old magic conjured by books” by giving us better ways to get what’s inside them. Of course the tactile experience is lost, but that’s only a sentimental attachment — not without genuine value, but not without considerable influence from purely [...]
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Let’s look at the genuine potential of new technology instead of dwelling on what’s being replaced — whether in remorse or celebration… This began as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Experiments in Delinkification a few months ago. I sat on it until Scott Rosenberg brought the topic up again this week with a series of [...]
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I’m not joking: when I was a kid I went through a phase of wanting to grow up to be someone who wrote “famous quotes.” From time to time I’d think of something that sounded profound and I’d think, “that isn’t so hard!” But then I wondered, “So now… how does this clever quote become [...]
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My book is finished and available for purchase, download, or reading online. Sorry if you don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, where I already mentioned it a few days ago. This is the formal “announcement.” Description: Truth, Will & Relevance outlines an innovative way to understand human nature and conduct — conceived specifically to address [...]
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2009 was my first full year of regular and earnest blogging. I’m usually surprised by which posts do poorly and which ones are successful. Sometimes I’m not really happy with something but I hit “Publish” anyways and people love it. Sometimes I put hours of extra work trying to popularize something and it vanishes. Here [...]
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I just reached 5130 words on a blog post… a little to long to still qualify as a “blog post,” methinks. It’s an essay really, but still long enough I should explain. When I’m writing an essay, I often start adding a sentence or a paragraph in the middle or close to the start, and [...]
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Here’s Chris Brogan’s talk on serendipity at last week’s Web 2.0 Expo, here’s my earlier one relating to generativity, and here’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of serendipity & generativity in action on Twitter: No, they’re not on the same list, nor are Jeff Jarvis and The Clever Sheep ever normally in the same [...]
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At the London Free Press, Ian Gillespie warns of the hazards of the internet: Watching that 90-second video [here], it’s hard — no, make that impossible — to see or know exactly what’s going on. But that hasn’t stopped tens of thousands (by late yesterday afternoon, the video had been viewed more than 30,000 times [...]
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