NYT article on Paul Otlet, with an excellent graphic explaining the Mundaneum system, and a video excerpt from the documentary on him.

Increasing use of AI means smarter-than-average searchers constantly need to learn tricks in order to counteract the AI that assumes a user base of average consumers.

The primary goal of this class is to teach students about the culture of "print media" in an era when that culture is being joined (and in some cases, overtaken) by a culture that we might variously call digital culture, online culture, or the culture of the web.

Yesterday afternoon, I started wondering why my steady stream of emails seemed to have come to a halt. It didn’t take long to get the answer: emails to me were being bounced back to their senders as undeliverable, on the grounds that my Gmail account was over quota.

Naturally, I immediately paid Google the $5 they wanted to upgrade to 20 GB of storage from the free 7.5 GB. But the email is still bouncing, and Google says it could take up to 24 hours before they start letting it through again. When I log in to my Gmail account, 14 hours after I upgraded, I still get the warning message saying I’m out of space and can’t receive any emails. (Incidentally, the link to Google’s “tips on reducing your email storage” provides no such thing, it just pulls up a page telling me how much storage I have.)

There are two extremely annoying things, here, for an old-fashioned person like me who still relies to a large extent on email. I’ve been using email for 17 years now, and I’ve encountered my fair share of email problems along the way. But in every case, the email ended up sitting there on my mail server until the problem was resolved. When Google decides I have an email problem (that I haven’t paid them enough money), however, they don’t keep the mail on the server until the ransom is paid. Instead, they just declare “a permanent error” and bounce it back to the sender. That’s incredibly aggressive and rude, and means I will now never receive a large number of emails which might well have been very important.

More annoying still is the fact that Google never told me this was about to happen. I’ve never used their web interface: while I like the reliability and spam-filtering abilities of the Gmail service, I don’t like checking my email in a browser. So I don’t: instead I use Apple’s Mail applications on my computer, iPad, and iPhone. Had I logged in to the Gmail website, I would have seen a warning telling me that I was running out of quota. But not once did Google send me an automated email saying that I was about to run out of storage space.

When Chris Anderson says that the web is dead, he’s talking about new applications which are supplanting things we used to use the web for. What he doesn’t mention is that millions of people never made the switch to the web in the first place, at least when it comes to email. Google behaves as though everybody using Gmail uses the web interface, when a moment’s thought would show that to be false. And then it imposes a punishment on people who run out of quota or who delay too long in paying which seems out of all proportion to the crime.

In any case, if you’ve tried to reach me via email and the message has bounced, try resending your message — with any luck it’ll get through now. I just worked out that although the paying-for-more storage solution takes time to work, the deleting-spam-emails solution seems to work immediately. It would be nice if Google mentioned that somewhere.

Alternatively, send it to felix.salmon at reuters. I came close to running out of quota there, too, recently, but they became very insistent that I had to delete old emails long before they bounced anything. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it was nothing compared to Google’s nasty and passive-aggressive behavior.

Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies.

Outsiders who follow Chinese events have known for years about Roland Soong's EastSouthWestNorth site*, which draws from Chinese-language and English-language sources for reports and analysis.I've just seen this post, from a few days ago, which strikes me as something that people who don't normally follow Chinese events should know about. It's the text of a speech Soong prepared for last weekend's annual Chinese Bloggers conference (but did not deliver, for family-emergency reasons). In it, he discusses the differences the Internet has, and has not, made in the Chinese government's ability to control information and maintain power within China. This is a subject easily misunderstood in the United States, where people tend to assume either that the cleansing power of the Internet will ultimately make government efforts at info-control pointless, or, on the contrary, that the bottling-up effectiveness of the Great Firewall will protect the government from the power of an informed citizenry.  (My own Atlantic article on the subject here.)Soong elegantly illustrates why such categorical assumptions miss the complexity of what's going on. The whole speech is worth reading, but the passage below is especially important for Americans. First he describes the way info would flow when bloggers and net connections first became significant in China, around 2003:1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).2. The local government suppresses all information.3. All media reports are censored.  (But if it wasn't reported in traditional media, there are other alternatives now on the Internet.)4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice.  The road is long and hard, and nothing ever comes out of it.5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case.  But within approximately 48 hours, all traces of information are erased by order of the authorities.  (Thus, one of the excitements of my blogging activity was to find and translate that information within this time window.)6. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through.  This creates an international scandal.7. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.Then he describes what has changed in the past five years, in this 2008 update:1.
A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality,
government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).2. The local government suppresses all information.3. All media reports are censored.4.
The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to
seek justice.  The road is long and hard and nothing ever results.5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case. 6a.
Within 48 hours, all traces of negative (i.e. against the authorities)
information are erased by order of the authorities, or else by
self-censorship at the portals/forums/blog service providers.6b.
Positive (i.e. on behalf of the authorities) information appear from
Internet commentators who are paid by the authorities for their efforts5. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through with an international incident.7.  But there are just too many portals/forums/blogs that important information will eventually seep through.8. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.He lists various reasons for the change, and then comes down to the one he considers most important:You
will note the role of western media has been eliminated from the
process model...  If once upon a time western media
coverage, which affects the opinion of western politicians and
citizens, mattered to the Chinese people, this is no longer the case.In
the political realm, the Chinese people no longer have to believe in
the rhetoric of freedom, liberty, democracy, sovereignty and human
rights.  The war in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison, the Guantanamo camp,
hurricane Katrina and other misconduct took care of all that.  Why
would the Chinese people be interested in what American president
George W. Bush have to preach to them about freedom, liberty,
democracy, sovereignty and human rights?  When the western media invoke
those terms, the reaction from the Chinese people is: "Look within
yourselves and fix your own problems first!"In the economic
realm, the financial tsunami of 2008 took care of any credibility in
the Washington consensus.  In its place was an as-yet-undefined Beijing
consensus which has less specifics than the general idea of
self-determination.  Why would the Chinese people be interested in what
Alan Greenspan and Henry Paulson have to tell them about how to run
their economy when they have failure on their hands?There is more in the same vein. Sobering but significant reading.______* The name of Soong's site refers to the way directions are given in Chinese. By this system, Seattle would be in the "Westnorth" corner of the United States, and Atlanta in the "Eastsouth."

...my sense is that now, of all times in recent history, developing new technologies is a backwards move. The real developments are going to be in the way that society changes—in terms of finance, sexuality, politics, urbanism and so on...

When the supplied links substitute for, or weaken, our own activity -- as they will when we believe the links themselves can do the work of supplying context -- then we lose context instead of gaining it.

Thanks to lifehacker I discovered that Read an Ebook Week is in early March. The Epublishers Weekly blog has a post which covers “30 Benefits of Ebooks,” which while containing some bits of truth, if you will, is mostly IMHO made of up bad logic and spurious reasoning.

I will not waste my time deconstructing all 30 reasons but will comment on a few of them.

1. Ebooks promote reading. People are spending more time in front of screens and less time in front of printed books.

Uh, how does this follow? We (even I) may be spending more time in front of our screens but we might just be looking at photos on Flickr, watching YouTube videos, surfing for porn or any of 1000s of possible activities which have absolutely nothing to do with reading an ebook. And while much of our online activity does involve reading it may not include reading books.

2. Ebooks are good for the environment. Ebooks save trees. Ebooks eliminate the need for filling up landfills with old books. Ebooks save transportation costs and the pollution associated with shipping books across the country and the world.

And the manufacture of all these electronic devices and the electricity to power them, including all of the many highly toxic components and manufacturing processes do no damage to the environment at all?

3. Ebooks preserve books. … Ebooks are ageless: they do not burn, mildew, crumble, rot, or fall apart. Ebooks ensure that literature will endure.

Ha ha ha ha ha. This is one of the funniest, utterly stupid comments I have ever heard. Digital preservation issues anymore? Format migration?

7. Ebooks are portable. You can carry an entire library on one DVD.

So those books I carry with me pretty much everywhere are not portable? Certainly ebooks are more portable in quantity is the point but make it more clearly then!

14. Ebooks are free. The magnificent work of Project Gutenberg, and other online public libraries, allow readers to read the classics at no cost.

“Right!” said with a proper Bill Cosby accent cause my public library charges me $5 just to walk in the door. Not!

21. Ebooks, with their capacity for storage, encourage the publishing of books with many pages, books that might be too expensive to produce (and purchase) in paperback.

Perhaps true, but it goes against any and all conventional wisdom that I’ve heard or read about the length of electronic materials read by people. I guess one could make a 2500-page PDF but who the hell is going to read it?

27. Ebooks defeat attempts at censorship. All these works were banned: Analects by Confucius. Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Ars Amorata by Ovid. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio by John Milton. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne. Wonder Stories by H.C. Andersen. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Ulysses by James Joyce. … Many of these books were confiscated, burned, or denied availability in libraries, bookstores and schools. Ebooks guarantee that readers maintain their right to read.

All I can say to this one is “Seriously WTF are you on about?” I bet I can find everyone of those at both my public and academic library. And censorship certainly exists on the Internet.

Now clearly there is some value in this list. Some of the author’s points seem perfectly valid, although there are more I could pick on. But the ones I did highlight seem egregiously spurious to me.

I would like to see the proliferation of more widely available ebooks that are cross-platform, free of DRM, and in formats that are easily migratable to new formats when required. I would also like to see some of the possibilities that the author says may come to pass do so.

Nonetheless, this silly list will do nothing to change my reading habits. I read both online and in print and I print a lot of stuff that came to me electronically. Both have various affordances even now, but many of the affordances that the author claims for ebooks are nonexistent for most ebook formats at the moment.

I despise most marketing and spurious marketing really gets my goat!

So read ebooks if they work for you. If they don’t then don’t worry so much about some of these reasons.

And what I learned from today's New York Times is that tomorrow the Atlantic will remove the firewall that for years has applied to most articles in the print magazine and our very extensive archives.

Hmmm! The Atlantic, believe it or not, has been a serial innovator and pioneer in the web area. Back in the dimly-remembered mid-1990s it was one of the first non-tech magazines even to have a web site and to put much of its content online free. A few years ago it changed to the firewall / subscribers only model. Now, with the centrality of the web to the kinds of discussions we hope to provoke, this latest change, which should certainly continue the expansion of the site's influence and audience.

It will also do something that I think will be of even greater long-term importance:

The Atlantic Monthly, as we have pointed out oh, once or twice in the last while, is now 150 years old. In fact, working toward 151.

There is a phenomenal amount of fascinating and historically important material in our archives from those 150+ years. Not all of it is available online. (If you have seen the bookcases full of back volumes, you know what a gigantic challenge the mere scanning and OCR-ing will be.) Some of the highlights have been collected by Robert Vare and Daniel Smith in their superb recent 150th Anniversary anthology.

But a lot of unexplored material is available, and searchable, in the archives, and this will be an important journalistic, academic, and historic resource. Once again, a new era begins.

(I no longer have to say, "Subscribers Only" about some articles. Still -- subscribe! The timeless story of media-and-technology is that as new "delivery vehicles" arrive, they create additional forms of receiving information; eliminate a few old forms, like the cuneiform tablet; but mainly expand the range of choices people have by leaving most old forms in place. Despite television, we still have radio; despite radio and television and the internet, we still have books; despite email we still have phone calls; and for quite a while despite the internet we will still have something physically like a book or magazine, just because there are so many times and places where it's the best way to see what you want to look at. Eg: On my latest 13-hour plane flight, some of passengers mainly used laptops or iPods. Virtually all had some kind of book or magazine. Magazine content, words and pictures alike, looks far far better in real magazines -- though the web version is indispensable.)

In any case, another new beginning as of tomorrow.

The Archive collects and preserves business plans and related planning documents from the Birth of the Dot Com Era so that future generations will be able to learn from this remarkable episode in the history of technology and entrepreneurship.

Inventables researches materials, process, technologies and innovations.

Distributed content serving and community features, including user profiles, content ratings, commenting, and popularity lists.

Keefe emails his daily cartoon file (in high-resolution format) to an automated-image processing script and the cartoon appears minutes later on both sites, complete with title, keyword and date tags — all stored as meta data in the cartoon file.

Wi publishes the latest in Canadian mobilities research, encompassing disciplines such as design, engineering, computer science, communications and media studies.

We discuss models (both classical and contemporary) of creative practice and experience and their potential application to new media arts and technology. Models that connect the roles of creator and viewer/participant are of particular interest.

Focus is on bridging creative theory and creative practice with practical applications for creative arts and technology, from installations to the tools that support them. Along the way, we hope to develop new models for understanding creative processes.

This International conference is aimed to bring together a community of academics, researchers and practitioners that are involved in every aspect of Design Science.

Prominent Virtual World designers, cyberpunk authors and the editor of a cyberculture magazine will engage in discussions with the audience and social scientists.

Fischer, Claude S. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Web 2.0 enthusiasts believe that the contents of user-content databases represent the preferences and interests of everyone instead of the somewhat self-reinforcing interest clusters of a technologically savvy elite.

DarwiinRemote is a tiny software which reads data from and sends data to Nintendo Wii Remote.

GROUPTALK is an informal, student-run, participatory forum for addressing challenges in Berkeley research projects at the intersection of people and technology.

A dot plot visualization that conveys the number of results obtained from Google search queries for words of the form a{n}h{m}.

Senior principal scientist in MITRE’s Center for Information Technology, looking at how to use narrative to present information effectively.

We offer the freedom to create, play, and learn from technology without always being "tethered" to a PC or videogame console.

Research focuses on the ways in which communication and information technologies structure and extend human interaction, with particular emphases on processes of organizing and information evaluation and sharing.

Research interests are information technology and organizational behavior, social networks, and organizational theory.

Current research examines workforce development and upward mobility in information technology in New York, Washington DC, Chicago, and San Francisco.

This seminar aims to introduce and explore core literature and issues within Science and Technology Studies (STS), drawing primarily upon contributions from sociology, anthropology, political science, history and cultural studies.

WizzScribe is a server based implementation that converts audio from a variety of sources into text for a wide range of application uses.

Wouldn't it be economically more efficient for the advertiser to work directly with the program's producer to distribute television programming directly to the audience, using hyperdistribution?

Papers should address the issues involved in building sustainable models for openness in science, software and content. They can examine technical, sociological, economic/business and legal issues, and can be conceptual or practical in nature.

where are you GOING today? what did you LEAVE behind? what things did you BRING? how do you WEAR these things while youíre in motion? where do you PARK them when you stop? do you think you may have FORGOTTEN the most important thing?

China Web2.0 Review is a blog dedicated to track web2.0 development, review and profile web2.0 applications, business and services in China.

THEN is a peer-reviewed journal that takes a humanities-based approach to research on technology in education.

Media, Technology and Society: a multi-disciplinary research project on the media landscape conducted for professionals engaged in strategies, research, thinking, education, policy and philanthropy related to the future of journalism and media.

I decided to embrace the budgetary limitations of the project and create a flick using "trailing-edge technology" and all the detritus from our quickly accelerating technological culture.

The McLuhan Program's mandate is to encourage understanding of the impacts of technology on culture and society from theoretical and practical perspectives, and thus to continue the ground-breaking work initiated by Marshall McLuhan.

Comic Surfing, developed by Tokyo-based venture firm Celsys, takes viewers through manga stories at a carefully calculated speed and sequence. Pop-up frames and vibration during action scenes add to the drama.

A workshop under the theme of mobile photography - how camera phones have changed people's photography habits and created new social uses for the device as well as business, and now that this is happening what will the future look like.

Conducts research in the social, ethical, and political dimensions of information and communications technology.

Main research interests are the social and policy implications of information technologies.

Collecting, storing and displaying one's entire life, for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse.

HIIT conducts internationally high-level strategic research in information technology and related multi-disciplinary topics.

The mission of INCITE is to provide a creative interdisciplinary space for research projects which explore the socio-cultural dimensions of technology use and design.

A cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US.

A "cinema," that is, in which human subjectivity and the variable choices made by custom software combine to create films that can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts and narratives.

From acquiring footage, mixing, editing, and adding effects to final distribution, Digital Video Hacks provides unique tips, tools, and techniques for every stage of video production.

In both «The Electronic Revolution» and «The Job» (1970), Burroughs mapped strategies for the use of tape recorders as instruments of psychic terrorism.

The emerging aesthetic he describes is one in which the proliferating technologies of sampling and studio manipulation have eroded the distinction between music's producers and consumers.

The interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts.

Once a leader in Internet innovation, the United States has fallen far behind Japan and other Asian states in deploying broadband and the latest mobile-phone technology. This lag will cost it dearly.

The cool thing about "Smart Mobs" is that it's really happening...

This huge tome is a must have for anyone who wants to deeply understand hypertext and its precursors...

I usually finish everything I read, but I had to make an exception for this book...

Other Amazon readers have commented that this is McLuhan's most accessible early work, and one called it a ' pre-quel' to 'Understanding Media' the work he is best known for...

very well written, packed with information, essential for any filmmaker wannabe...

This book is a historical interpretation of the effect of technology on society...

i loved this book: it questions the idea of repeatability, which means that it questions the religion of science (as practiced by amateurs)and it shows you how language has served the impulse towards duplicity...

This is the second volume of 'Information Age'...

My well worn copy of Strunk and White has been a constant companion to me the past 30 years...

By far, the best wireless book I have read...

Firstly I would like to disagree with the reviewer who said granular synthesis was not musical...

Like many other reviewers of John Markoff's terrific "What the Dormouse Said," I live in the area-- neighborhood, really-- that is Markoff's subject; I've met a few of the characters he writes about; and I've read a lot of the literature on the history...

I had high expectations for this book, however I was severely disappointed...