"But to my eye, GIF is the most popular animation and short film format that's ever existed. It works on smartphones in millions of people's pockets, on giant displays in museums, in web browsers on a newspaper website. It finds liberation in constraints, in the same way that fewer characters in our tweets and texts freed us to communicate more liberally with one another. And it invites participation, in a medium that's both fun and accessible, as the pop music of moving images, giving us animations that are totally disposable and completely timeless."

"Twenty-one years later, an anonymous software engineer pulled together various digital artifacts to create a multiplayer game for his son.

Tonight, while playing that game, I ran into my 15-year-old self."

What magic smells like.

"The value of the web is in its history. The value of the web is that it grows over time and that it spiders out making connections, just as often doubling back on itself to find previously unseen patterns and connections. It is not a linear progression through time and space always discarding the near past. Or if it is then I'm sorry for wasting everyone's time because that sounds about as exciting, and about as valuable, as any given season of canned television programming."

"That is the point that I am trying to make. The web is not, despite the desires of so many, a publishing medium. The web is a customer service medium. “Intense moderation” in a customer service medium is what “editing” was for publishing." Paul Ford is great.

"...the internet’s endless pathways turn our simple discoveries into expeditions that reveal the worlds in which those things have lived, taking the role of archivists and archaeologists of pasts that overlay and intertwine." This is lovely.

"..for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future."

"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"

"10 years ago, on this Friday in March of 2000, the Dot.Com bubble burst in the UK." [This is very good, Simon Wistow!]

"Somewhere in the future, a picture of David Minor—in jeans and a tie, face beatific under a studio light, sleeves rolled up to expose the Eugene Debs quote tattooed on his arm—is berthed in a database table in off-system storage, waiting to be remade." Lovely, sharp, writing from Joel Johnson.

"My 12 year old daugh­ter uses a com­pletely unfil­tered Inter­net con­nec­tion. She also has root access to the net­work at home and to the com­puter she uses. Yet she’s never encoun­tered any of the prob­lems Sen­a­tor Con­roy and the likes of Sen­a­tor Field­ing seem to believe are ram­pant — no nas­ties, viruses, stalk­ers or any other unde­sir­able in sev­eral years of using the Inter­net unfil­tered and mostly unsu­per­vised. And you know why? _Good rules and decent par­ent­ing_ (well, cer­tainly the first and hope­fully the second)." Man, Australia's conservatism is getting rather scary.

"4chan is, I contend, the most interesting angle we have on the evolution of human consciousness. It is a shamanic experience, a bardo of becoming, where the soul is detached from the body, set free to wander in the wilderness of banality until it encounters the epic lulz of meeting itself... and finding that it, itself, is the most disturbing thing on 4chan." o_O. Just worth linking to for the eyeball-expanding prose; there may be something in there, but I'm not sure.

"But what if you make personalisation easier? Consider a game that brings your real world into your game world, all on its own. It could to grab data from the internet about the real world and the gamers that live in it, and weave it into the game experience, for an effect that is both surprising and personally meaningful. You would see yourself in a game without having to put yourself there. It’s not user-generated content: it’s user-generated, machine-mediated content – UGMMC, or as I like to say it, “Ugh-Meck.”" I am super-happy at how well Chris's writing for Edge Online is turning out.

"Designed by Oliver Rokison a teacher at St Paul's School. This project connects to the Tower Bridge twitter account and mimics the movements of the real tower bridge." Fun.

"...the ongoing charm and usefulness of the animated .gif lies in this very economy. Like a good one-liner, the animated .gif can tell a joke with the impact of a one-inch punch, trimming away the fat of unnecessary frames to deliver its message with streamlined effectiveness." All too true. And Simon gives me my own discovery of the day

Matt Haughey on ten years of MetaFilter.

"They preserve them as best they can, perhaps without even knowing that’s what they’re doing, but in the understanding that no archives may be kept, no histories written, and that what sustains their digital lives is the lived-out, written-down, spoken word." Reminds me of the "what five pages would you print out" conundrum, and the end of Fahrenheit 451; walking the woods, chanting entries from Encyclopedia Dramatica

"Cracking the bus network is really the key to most cities, and we’re nearly at the point of directed bus serendipity. In London, at least."

"82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km."

This is not good. And the worst part: "Hundreds of public bodies and quangos, including local councils, will also be able to access the data to investigate flytipping and other less serious crimes." It's not the police having this that's the big worry; it's the incompetent lower echelons of civil service. who shouldn't need this.

"in other words: Please ensure that there is absolutely no way for your customer to know whether we are showing the form or you are. In fact, please train your customer to give their “Verified by Visa” password to anyone who asks for it." Eesh. I knew I never licked VBV, but this just proves, accutely, *why* I don't like it.

"For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need." Late to link to this, but as everyone else who has done already would point out: it's great.

Oh gosh, the Rock Band 2 community site is lovely. Lovely URLs, lovely public-facing site with no wall, lovely. (Thanks, Brandon).

"Paine does have a descendent, a place where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another." Fantastic article

"You forgot one thing, Dr. Roberts. You forgot that people are dicks." Aheheh.

"Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data."

"I am stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs... My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language."

"The comments on this site stand in stark contrast to the childishness and idiocy that flourishes elsewhere on the net. I know it, and I know I’m fortunate in this regard." A nice thank-you note from a really rather good writer and gamesblog.

"We believe that the interests of Internet users come first -- and should come first -- as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored."

Aaron had two talks turned down; both, from their abstracts alone, sound fascinating; from his fuller explanations, they sound like they had the potential to be fantastic. Still reeling from some ideas. Disappointed there's not space for this in the world

Funny. Obvious at times, but funny.

"All three—the internet telephone firm, the video site and the social network—make almost no money. EBay's disappointment with Skype is a timely reminder of where this fad might lead." The Economist on EBay's Skype "issue"...

"I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft."

The internet is changing, very disruptive technology and there are new inventions coming along every month. One has to stay awake and race to stay up with it, or if you get enough brilliant people around maybe you can get ahead of it.

"Grammar Fascist is a game for everyone who has ever despaired at the pitiful standard of writing displayed on Internet forums. It's a game for everyone who's ever wanted to get in touch with their inner intellectual snob. It's a game for anyone who's eve

Very good, alltold: Tim O'Reilly on what "Web 2.0" is - and is not.