George Orwell: Blogger

≡ Category: Literature |Leave a Comment

What makes a diary like a blog? The Orwell Prize is offering up a new answer to that familiar question in August when it fires up the Orwell Diaries, a blog that will post each entry from George Orwell’s private musings exactly 70 years after it was written. I like this idea because it combines [...]

Will Google Kill Science?

≡ Category: Google, Science |2 Comments

Not an obvious conclusion, I’ll agree. However, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, presents the argument like this: as all sorts of data accumulate into a vast ocean of petabytes, our ability to synthesize it all into elegant theories and laws will disappear. The story is the cover of this month’s issue of Wired but I [...]

The Automated Publishing House

≡ Category: Books, Business, Language Lessons, Media, Technology |Leave a Comment

The New York Times has a great article on a professor of management science who has founded an almost completely automated publishing company. The 200,000 books he’s published sound, well, terrible, and terribly overpriced: “Among the books published under his name are ‘The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea’ ($24.95 and 168 pages long); ‘Stickler [...]

In Search of TV 2.0

≡ Category: Film, Media, Television, Video - Arts & Culture, Web/Tech |6 Comments

One of the things they promised us in the heyday of the 1990s Internet boom was the end of television and a brave new world of high quality video online, on demand. Well, we’re still waiting. Youtube is great for short clips, but not designed for the technical (or legal) challenge of serving up whole [...]

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

≡ Category: Comedy, YouTube |Leave a Comment

A merry, musical St. Pat’s greeting to you from your Irish-American correspondent, presented by his three favorite muppets: via BoingBoing

A New Media Scholar’s Dilemma

≡ Category: Literature, Media, MIT |2 Comments

For a graduate student in an English Ph.D. program, one of the big milestones on the road to the dissertation is the Oral Exam. In my case this involves five professors, a list of 60-80 books, and two hours in a (rhetorically) smoke-filled room. Since I’m working on contemporary literature and new media, one of [...]

Don’t Forget to Vote

≡ Category: Politics, Video - Politics/Society, YouTube |Leave a Comment

If you’re a resident of a Super Tuesday state, we hope you can find some time to pull the lever tomorrow. Also, we hope you’ll forgive (at least) one more political post before Super Tuesday. Whatever your political affiliations, the video below is a compelling example of new media at work. According to the New [...]

Open Sourcing Congress

≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Web/Tech |Leave a Comment

The truism goes that laws and sausages are the two things you don’t want to see being made. Nevertheless, if more of us paid attention to what our congressional representatives are really up to (and let them know when they screw up), we’d probably be a little happier with how the system works overall. Two [...]

One Laptop Per Child vs. Intel

≡ Category: Business, MIT, Technology, Web/Tech |5 Comments

The New York Times ran a fascinating article today about the feud between Intel and the One Latop Per Child program run by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. If you haven’t heard about it, the initiative is intended to develop a reasonably priced ($200) laptop for primary school children in the third world. The model they’re selling [...]

The Future of Print

≡ Category: Literature, Media |2 Comments

WNYC’s latest On The Media (iTunes – Feed – Site) covers the crisis of traditional book publishing in a new media age. While Amazon rolls out the Kindle and more and more content comes out in pure digital form, we’re still publishing more books than ever before. One interesting note from the program is that [...]

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