Archive for February, 2008
« Previous Entries Wednesday, February 27th, 2008Libraries Will Disappear by 2019
Slate.com is running an interesting slide show/article on building libraries (specifically downtown city libraries) in the age of Google. The slide show features several contemparary interpretations of libraries in cities such as: Chicago, Nashville and Seattle. One of the interesting critiques of current libraries is on the building itself. Many libraries reflect ”an outmoded structure erected [...]
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008Web Advertising, the Future?
I found this article in the New York Times “Not Ready to Pay for TV Time, A Mexican Beer Goes Online”, which notes how the Mexican beer Pacifico is trying to use the Internet, and not TV, to make an advertising push to enter into new markets in the United States. Instead of paying for [...]
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008Sexual Politics and MMORPGS
Salon.com featured an interesting article entitled “Why Can’t Gay Dwarves Get Married in Middle Earth?” The article discusses how different MMORPG and video games have taken different approaches to allowing in game marriages between both opposite and same-sex couples. Many video games and MMORPGs have some kind of marriage feature and many decide to include [...]
Monday, February 25th, 2008Analog and Digital Facebooks
In the interest of historically contexualizing our digital culture, it annoys me a little bit that so much of the literature out there on Facebook fails to discuss the old, analog facebooks common to small liberal arts colleges in the days before rampant online social networking. In the summer before one’s freshman year of college, [...]
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008The Consumerization of Politics
In Convergence Culture Henry Jenkins writes that “historically critics have seen consumption as almost the polar opposite of citizenly participation…Today, consumption assume a more public and collective dimension – no longer a matter of individual choices and preferences, consumption becomes a topic of public discussion and collective deliberation; shared interests often lead to shared knowledge, [...]
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008Zamzar
A friend of mine who teaches college German was just telling me about this web 2.0 site, Zamzar. http://www.zamzar.com/ It converts files without having to download them. He said it’s becoming a boon to secondary school foreign language instructors who want to use youtube videos in cultural instruction, but can’t because they’re districts have blocked [...]
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008Quilters’ Collective Intelligence
I know that I was planning on posting about the quilter as humachine this week, but I came across another idea this week that is equally interesting to me. I just read Henry Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture, and one of my favorite things about Jenkins is the ease with which he summarizes and adds onto [...]
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008Old Media Matters?
It was interesting to watch, after Nels posted the Facebook article, how this issue unfolded, in pieces, in the New York Times. After the NY Times printed an article on Feb. 11 about the difficult of deleting a profile, two day later they printed another way discussing what Facebook had done to make it easier. [...]
Monday, February 18th, 2008Kiki & Bubu
An interesting take on the global economic shift. http://www.monochrom.at/kiki-and-bubu/
Sunday, February 17th, 2008The Implied Analogy of Open Access
The “Shot heard round the world” is a well known phrase that has come to represent several historical incidents throughout world history. The line is originally from the opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson‘s Concord Hymn (1837), and referred to the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. The most recent shot has come from the muzzle of Harvard University Faculty of [...]
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