Cannot wait to test this.
Know the idiom, know the culture:
Ah, Italy… (Via Wikipedia)
Journalists: if you don’t focus on their lies they’re going to keep telling them. It’s more than a bit frustrating you’re only now talking about your responsibility to call out lies. You’ve trained politicians that lies have no cost. As long as one side sticks to the agreed upon message, you’ll cover it as the other side of the story.
Google couldn’t figure out what to do with one of the largest install bases of cable boxes in the US???
Mitt Romney’s RNC party yacht is registered in the Caymans and named “Cracker Bay.”
You can’t write this stuff.
According to a Wall Street Journal poll.
In 2008, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory played a 10-second recording of someone singing “Au Clair de la Lune” in 1860. You can hear to the oldest known human recording here.
(Via New York Times)
So says Poynter.
And the number of stories which will be covered? We’ll be lucky to get 15.
So we’ll legislate design and police sports but we can’t discuss gun laws?
We’re absolutely blowing this nanny state.
Now a personal library is something that resides on a computer server somewhere, accessed through your Amazon account. You can sell your house and traipse across the country or overseas, but all that changes is the IP address from which you access your “library.” The books do not become dog-eared, they are never misfiled. A guest in your home will no longer note that Gibbon or Boswell lies next to your easy chair. If someone wants to know who you are through your books, the place to look is GoodReads and LibraryThing. The printed book is aware of the passage of time.
Reducing the size of my personal library made me aware that I had probably bought my last new print book. There may be exceptions to this, as when I purchase a gift for someone, but otherwise my new books will be e-books. Used books are a different matter, though, as the pleasure of browsing is something I will not give up until the last bookstore closes.
This piece perfectly sums up my feelings regarding CDs and vinyl in 2002.
It was the height of Napster and MP3 playing CD Walkmen, digital music was beginning to deliver benefits to those willing to experiment. Spindles of concert bootlegs and rare tracks archived on CD-Rs filled my shelves, but I still regularly bought, packed, and moved mounds of CDs and vinyl. When visiting a new city, one of my first stops was the local record store. Like Esposito, I subconsciously pruned what was on display. Our books and music were an indirect statement about ourselves. I never thought I’d give it up.
Records, or books, function as meta communication: the medium itself communicates with and connects you to a community of like minded people. A collection is an external manifestation of how you view yourself, often times clarifying your identity in a way unknown to even you.
But digital is too easy. Not just for purchasing and managing content, but also for interacting with a community of like minds.
One of the core features of the Internet is the ability to participate with passionate, specialized communities with relatively little investment. Entire afternoons don’t need to be spent getting to and from used stores to burying yourself in records. We can acquire similar knowledge and discussion from wherever we are in the spare minutes spent in line, in transit, or stolen between meetings. Contribution is easier too: when you’re able to release an album without pressing a physical object or negotiating with a label, content comes faster.
With this system we do lose things. I miss rarity. I miss the moment when you find something for which you’ve been searching. Collecting too, has lost it’s luster. We build up private caches, but with music and books it’s becoming easier to rely on on-demand external sources. There’s more noise too. With more producers comes more good music, but even more medicore music. What Espisioto misses is the explicit statement a full bookshelf makes.
But I’ll gladly trade rarity and collecting for increased volume, vibrancy, and access to communities. I hope as more readers make the shift to digital we’ll see a similar rise in independent publishing like we did in music. It’s still shocking to me how nascent the idea of an indie writer remains.
I like that they have to begrudgingly clarify that they support Gawker’s actions. If (when) Gawker wins a Pulitzer, the committee will scrape a caveat into the award.
It’s ironic that as Twitter cuts off integration with services the content continues to stay on said services and Twitter becomes a bit more like a dumb pipe. If they have no integration beyond Twitter, they’re just a messaging platform.
And that pitch isn’t so appealing: “Public text messages, but with ads.”
I don’t think this is their intent.
The arrival of the Elevation Dock (after almost 9 months) might be enough to postpone any upcoming new, incompatible iPhone purchases by a few months.
