"Henry Luce’s Time started as a full-fledged aggregator almost 89 years ago.

A quick visit to the library confirmed his statements. Sure enough, all 29 pages of the black and white weekly — its signature red-border cover not yet developed — were packed with advertisements and aggregation. This wasn’t just rewrites of the week’s news; it was rip-and-read copy from the day’s major publications — The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Science Monitor, and the New York World, to name a few."

"Because new-market disruptions initially attract those that aren’t traditional consumers of The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, these incumbent organizations feel little pain or threat. So they stay the course on content, competing on “quality” against these new-market disruptors."

"We’ve been here before. The question is not, how aggregation is ruining journalism, but how traditional journalism will respond to the aggregation."

"Twitter is an associative writing form, not a narrative one. In Twitter, we are sent somewhere else-via a link-or reminded of something. We are not telling stories. Thus, while the twitter fiction is swell and cute, it usually it misses the generic boat. Twitter promises a new slate for poets. For fiction writers, not so much. (For what I find to be a notable exception, see my piece for Economist.com). Tweets create meaning and aesthetic experiences  by reminding us, not by telling a story…

1.a.) Twitter does not operate on the narrative arc of rising action, suspense, climax, and denouement…

Twitter lacks single-point perspective (or omniscience)…

2.) Twitter helps resist the curse of paragraphism…

2.a.) A new focus on the sentence is salutary…

Conclusion: There is no summing up on twitter. There are many arrows pointing one across (not up or down) to the ideas of others, cross-fertilization, and forced attention to the composition of sentences."

"In this way, I want to extrapolate from the specific case of Roland Barthes to develop a larger, concluding argument: that Barthes’ specific usage is illustrative of wider intellectual usage of card indexes as pre-digital creative media; in other words, not just as an archival device, but, crucially, as a key historical technology of invention. I intend this last term in the precise sense in which Derrida (1989) understands it, that is, as an oscillation between the performative and the constative, with the former working to disrupt itself (the performative) and the latter (the constative) – or what might be termed the unsettling operation of invention."

"I made this little program so you can view and link to a whole conversation from Twitter in context. Here's an example! Want one for your conversation? Just enter the URL of an individual tweet (it should contain a long number):"

"dotEPUB is software in the cloud that allows you to convert any webpage into an e-book.

For content consumers (readers), we have developed a bookmarklet (or favlet) for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari or Opera. And, if you are a Google Chrome user, you can install the dotEPUB extension in your browser.

For content producers (editors, authors), we offer a widget. See the tips for webmasters. For more customizable results, developers can use our API."