"The Slow Web would be more like a book, retaining many of the elements of the Popular Web, but unhurried, re-considered, additive. Research would no longer be restricted to rapid responders. Conclusions would be intentionally postponed until sufficiently noodled-with. Writers could budget sufficient dream-time before setting pixel to page. Fresh thinking would no longer have to happen in real time." An interesting addition to Robin Sloan's essay Fish.

"If the internet makes a sound (and it does), are you listening? Our correspondent uses software to transform the digital ephemera of web browsing—from network traffic to JavaScript, browser histories to JPGs—into music." A lovely piece by Giles Turnbull.

Megan Garber: "Almost all of the advances taking place within our established social networks have emphasized images at the expense of text. There's the rise of Pinterest, most obviously, and its almost text-free explosion of pictures and pins. And the less-meteoric-but-still-pretty-remarkable rise of Flickr and Instagram and Hipstamatic and their fellow photographic networks. But there's also Facebook, doubling down on its photo-heavy Timeline. And Google+, selling itself on its video Hangouts. There's the small matter of YouTube. And the viral profusion of Tumblr. Even Twitter -- spare, text-y little Twitter -- has, in its latest web redesign, emphasized user avatars, not to mention video and image attachments, much more boldly than it ever did before." This is a good post, with more questions than answers.

'How's that for a tagline? "Instagram: pictures of things that don't mind having their pictures taken."' Robin Sloan on what gets posted to Instagram (but I'd caution that a) you're seeing things your friends post and b) there are some photos of (young, attractive, usually female, often self-taken) people in the Popular tab. Still, worth reading.

"Our Internet dreams, it seems, have turned to shit.
"Except they haven’t. I don’t believe anything has fundamentally changed. The infrastructure is still there. We’re just overwhelmed by the sort of activity some of us were trying to escape. We thought there was something special about blogs and forums but we mistook the tool for how we were using the tool. The Internet is, in many ways, a neutral platform. You can use it for anything, and that means you can use it for mediocre sales nonsense as much as flaneurism."

In the comments on a post about the removal of state(-level) funding for library services across California, this is a deservedly well-circulated comment about libraries and their role in providing internet access.

'The most important thing to realize about the flâneur is that he was a character; not a real person, but a "type," a fantasy of male bohemianism created by Baudelaire, Balzac, and the journalist Jules Janin. Just as we carefully curate our online presences today--tagging only the most flattering photographs, listing the favorite books and bands that prove our coolness--these men created the flâneur as an idealized version of themselves: a seductive master of the modern city.'

"Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore." A thoughtful essay by Evgeny Morozov that captures some of my dislike for the modern web. (Having said that, on editing my pinboard bookmarks, I find a disturbing number recently are from the NYT. So much for me flaneuring.)

Maria Popova: "Affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they're right?" http://t.co/eD3ZOwQx

Bobbie Johnson: "From the outside, the British and Irish market looks like a vast patchwork of services and providers: perfect territory for a big, swaggering giant to come in and clean up. In fact, the truth is just the opposite: For Netflix to get anything like the success it has had in America, it will need to find out a way to get around Rupert Murdoch and the BBC, two of the world’s most powerful media forces. They have no reason to work with Netflix and every reason to actively work against it."

"Because it was very difficult to get the big picture on the phone's small screen, I thought to pick up a paper map at a gas station. To my dismay, the spinner racks were empty, with only a few maps of other parts of the state available. I immediately regretted throwing away my paper maps in a cleaning binge a few years back - I can easily imagine futures in which they will be worth their weight in gold."

A story about privacy, law, the internet, and the future. Go and read it (if you haven't already).

"using GIFs, a type of picture format similar to a JPEG which has been around since the invention of home computers" Oh, Daily Mail, discovering animated GIFs now they've got all "artistic" on Tumblr, and completely getting their history wrong, how we love* you. * may be sarcasm.

"Malte Spitz from the German Green party decided to publish his own data collected from August 2009 to February 2010. However, to even access the information, he had to file a suit against telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom." "Each of the [35 thousand] rows of the spreadsheet represents an instance when Spitz’s mobile phone transferred information over a half-year period."  "Taken together, they provide what investigators call a profile – a clear picture of a person’s habits and preferences, and indeed, of his or her life." Naturally, it's a German politician - and a Green - who's pushing the envelope on this. (Would any American dare? Or care?)

"A growing number of artists—largely from a dark electronic genre known as witch house—have found that by using symbols in their name they can make it to the top of playlists even if they’re not ranked at the top of Google results." File under 'creative (ab)uses of Unicode'?

"We spend hours on the web, but you wouldn't know that from reading contemporary fiction." A good look at how most novels aren't acknowledging the internet, with a few recommendations for ones that are.

"Published last night, more Future of Local stuff on FB Places, Foursquare & Grindr". Looks like it might be worth collecting all of these.

"I don’t love trains because they teach me about America. I don’t love them because they connect me with a country I have never known. I love them because they disconnect me from everything else. When the train pulls out of the station, it’s like a plug being yanked from a socket."

"Horrifying as this vision is, it simply distracts from the main lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a 'dissent tax' on content they find objectionable." A long piece by Zeynep Tufekci that sags a little in the middle, but which is definitely a worthwhile read and eminently quotable in parts.

"I’d gained some perspective on how narrow the real-time channels were. Their steely focus on The Now neglected all sorts of other facets of human existence, communication, happiness." Matthew Ogle's call-to-arms for better access to your own, older data on web sites.

"David Cameron will today set out a vision of London's East End becoming a hi-tech rival to Silicon Valley on the US west coast, disclosing Google, Facebook and a host of cutting-edge firms have committed to invest in the Olympic Park." "Cameron will also disclose that he will look at a potentially far-reaching change to intellectual property rights after Google told him UK laws are far more restrictive than the US." Well.

"I couldn’t email, blog, tweet or quote from the [New Yorker iPad] app, to say nothing of linking away to other sources — for magazine apps like these, the world outside is just a rumor to be denied." It's good to see influential people continue to say stuff like this. (See also http://notes.husk.org/tagged/ipad for previous witterings on this topic.)

The actual Ofcom report referenced in the Guardian story, for further digging into figures. For example, the Guardian didn't think this was worthy of note: "Children are likely to have a TV in their bedroom, with this being the case for half of 5-7s (49%), two-thirds of 8-11s (67%) and three-quarters of 12-15s (77%)."

"A quarter of UK internet users aged eight to 12 had profiles on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace last year, research has found, although the lowest minimum age set on any of the sites is 13." "44% of children between 12 and 15 thought downloading shared copies of films and music for free should not be illegal." Quite a few interesting nuggets here.

"I haven’t found a news source I like enough to devote any time or money to absorbing. I’m too impatient to watch TV news and there’s almost no part of my day when talk radio isn’t a distraction." I'm looking forward to what emerges from Phil's work.

Interesting thoughts on news on the web. "What if there was a paywall scheme for news that was compatible with the customs and values of the current network-news consumer?" Lee asks, before going on to outline a scheme.

"the Swiss Post (that's the postal service, not a newspaper) and the German tech startup Syntops are making it happen with their Personal News project. This is a small experiment, but a fascinating one that offers a mashup of section fronts from select newspapers in Europe and the U.S."

"A handful of well-funded and powerful platforms, locked in heated competition, could be better for consumers and generate more innovation than Mr O’Reilly’s vision of an internet made of many 'small pieces loosely joined'." Really?

"it's up to the entrepreneurs who are building applications in the valleys between those hills to make the tough choice: do you live off the largesse of the feudal lord on top of the hill, and enjoy the short term benefits [... or] do you go your own way, and attempt to amass enough strength to take the hill yourself?"

A somewhat interesting leader in the Economist contrasting old-style cliques (Eton, masons) with business-oriented social networks. I'm not quite sure everything they say holds together but it's an interesting area to think about.

Why Tom Taylor doesn't care about URL shortening, and other thoughts.

"C implementation based on F/OSS code; Proof of Concept multi-OS client with curses (text-based) UI; Proof of Concept gateway to the Spotify service (text-based protocol, for supporting REST)" It compiles cleanly on Mac OS X and the gateway looks handy for exposing playlists (and lists of what's available) to people who haven't signed up.

"The situation is undeniably bad. What’s going to happen next?" Adrian Hon talks about the future of books.

"When asked directly whether age ratings could be introduced, Mr Burnham replies: “Yes, that would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus.” ISPs, such as BT, Tiscali, AOL or Sky could also be forced to offer internet services where the only websites accessible are those deemed suitable for children."

"I think about the web as experienced on a PC, and then about mobile as an add on. The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on."

"Here’s something I don’t often do: put a free story up on this blog. But. Hey. Economic meltdown. Elections. Topicality. Too late to shop it. So, here you go . . ."

Danny O'Brien's notes from OpenTech. I suspect this is a boiling down of some of his posts from earlier this year, but I really should read it to make sure. (Warning: PDF)

An interesting comment piece on a neglected new work of fiction, book publishing, and its response to changes in the market around it.

More post-Shirky commentary, this from Tom Armitage, arguing that TV-by-choice is different from TV-that's-on, taking in participation and radio as he goes.

Chris Heathcote argues that Clay Shirky's much-linked talk on "social surplus" is weirdly anti-consumption and values the Internet more highly than TV for no good reason. Can't say I entirely disagree (cf growth of web video).

"The huge opportunity ahead is a filter to bubble up the things you need to know without missing anything you want to know."

Maybe it's a weekend away from London, but the idea that a bunch of web 2.0 poseurs can not only resist the juggernaut of world recession but, instead, revolutionise the economy (and of course get rich) strikes me as archetypal bubble thinking.

"when Orkut was blocked at the ISP level in Iran, pretty much nobody in the English-speaking blog-tech-pundit scene seemed to even notice ... [people seem to care] more about freeing Robert Scoble’s addressbook from Facebook"

More refutation, perhaps: Pew report that 21% of young adults use libraries to find out how to do certain things, which is higher than the 12% for the general population. Hm.

Interesting talk proposals, their rejections, and elaborations. Lots to unpack in here.

A discussion on Lessing's Nobel speech. "One could respond to this in many ways, but perhaps the most fruitful would be to simply accept Lessing's premise. TV and computers and the Internet have changed the ways that people spend their time"

Doris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech: "How will ... our way of thinking be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities"

Good scepticism here. "The ability to grab free books online points to the device’s real competition: not paper books but Internet-friendly laptops, tablet computers and smart phones."

"The vast majority of weblogs act like sluice gates, simply helping the flow of culture along without adding to the volume of water in any way" More context/synthesis, please.

Looks like a series on how to host your own photos (like I used to) but without sacrificing the community stuff that Flickr brought to the table. Not sure it's possible, but I reckon it might be worth returning to.

"Within a few minutes, I realised that I needed something like URI.pm, in order to resolve URIs into an absolute form." Could be useful for Zimki stuff (and indeed Mark's already looking at it).

"For SomaFM, this means our royalties for 2006 will be increased retroactively from about $20,000 to about $600,000. That's more than 3 times what we made in 2006."

Sounds like a nice device, this, but I'd rather not buy one through BT. Also makes me wonder if it's another nail in DAB's coffin.

I'm now nostalgic for the days when every site didn't clutter itself with loads of stupid social news site icons. Sphere's front page is rubbish too- doesn't work if your browser's too narrow. Can we get on with bursting the bubble now please?

Matt Webb on the possibilites of a socially-networked printer.

'when you examine each [Internet music phenomenon] in detail, you find the music business letting the media believe what it wants to about the "bottom-up" internet - and hiding the top-down PR'