It’s clear to me (with a few years under my belt of posting to The Feature) that the simple act of passing along a link or nugget of information really isn’t particularly valuable. Someone that’s good at it can gain a reputation and a substantial following, as Popova has, but the discrete acts that contribute to that reputation aren’t that valuable on their own. Whenever I’ve seen something that literally adds value to its source material by transforming it in someway before passing it along (be it an essay, a mashup, a piece of art, or, sure, a gif) it seems to me that its creative forefathers are consistently well-credited. Is it maybe the case that just passing it on isn’t an act loaded with creative authorship at all?

epub-tools is a suite of command-line utilities for creating and manipulating epub book files. Included are: epubmeta, epubname, epubzip. This software uses the epub-metadata library, also available on Hackage.

epubmeta is a command-line utility for examining and editing epub book metadata. With it you can export, import and edit the raw OPF Package XML document for a given book. Or simply dump the metadata to stdout for viewing in a friendly format.

epubname is a command-line utility for renaming epub ebook files based on their OPF Package metadata. It tries to use author names and title info to construct a sensible name.

epubzip is a handy utility for zipping up the files that comprise an epub into an .epub zip file. Using the same technology as epubname, it can try to make a meaningful filename for the book.

Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.

It is easy to be naive about the evils of censorship when you already live in a carefully kept garden. Just like it is easy to be naive about the universal virtue of unconditional nonviolent pacifism, when your country already has armed soldiers on the borders, and your city already has police. It costs you nothing to be righteous, so long as the police stay on their jobs.

—then trying to defend the community is typically depicted as a coup attempt. Who is this one who dares appoint themselves as judge and executioner? Do they think their ownership of the server means they own the people? Own our community? Do they think that control over the source code makes them a god?

This about the Internet: Anyone can walk in. And anyone can walk out. And so an online community must stay fun to stay alive. Waiting until the last resort of absolute, blatent, undeniable egregiousness—waiting as long as a police officer would wait to open fire—indulging your conscience and the virtues you learned in walled fortresses, waiting until you can be certain you are in the right, and fear no questioning looks—is waiting far too late.

Now that you know why I care about telling compelling stories with widely-distributed maps, let's look at a few of the many tools that are out there to help the process. I confess to narrow experience here; I use MapBox and CartoDB for the majority of my projects, and there are plenty of alternatives to those. But as a starting point I think that these open-source web map design platforms are perfect - they minimize the amount of code required, they use the best graphic rendering engine in the field, and they are extremely cheap (or free) to use, even in an enterprise or high-traffic environment.

My favorite metaphor for explaining programming to non-coders is that it’s like carpentry. You can put together a chest of drawers with nails and glue, and it’ll fall apart in a year, or you can build something lasting and use dovetail joints. We’re not plumbers providing a utility, but neither are we artists. It’s nice if our work is beautiful, but it also must be durable. We’re craftsmen. We make things that people use.

Mythically, the committee is the evil association of people sarcastically portrayed in the previous paragraph, faceless drones that eat away at good graphic design like termites at yummy wood. Realistically, they are the group of people you work with, to varying degrees of involvement, from the start of a project until the end. Whether they are note-takers, brand managers, vice presidents or CEOs, they are the people that you talk to and e-mail with, they are the ones that brief you on the project and sit through the presentations of your work, they are responsible for informing your process and ensuring that the work is beneficial to their organization… they are the ones you celebrate with once the project is completed. They are real and they make or break your days, weeks, months and years.

When, by default, we assign fault to our clients, the committee, for not allowing us to do our most “creative” work, we are insinuating that they don’t know any better, and we do — that we are, indeed, better but the shortsighted fools would never notice our greatness.

It is not always easy to discern digital and analog experiences. A lot of seemingly analog devices have digital technology built in without us realizing it (tape decks, ovens, cars), and, as you might have noticed, more and more digital devices try to look and feel like analog tools.

But once you enter the digital realm, analogies with our body break down. Instead, digital tools are analogies of analogies. Text editors are an analogy of type writers, type writers are an analogy of writing with pen and paper, writing with pen and paper is, initially, a substitute for our memory. In general the computer now works as an extension for our head controlling those tools.

Blind abstraction, a lack of real-world analogies, the feeling that the workings are a black box, and the experience of multiple fast-paced, fragmented processes — this is more or less what we mean when we use the words “digital” to describe a device.

Documents, images, videos, and audio tracks on the web are not more or less real than in any other medium. But they feel unreal and less credible on a computer, because digital media snippets reach us like fragments of a dream: unprepared, out of context, and lacking orientation, causality and continuity.

If you compare the overall information architecture of a website to a book, you will notice that the difficulty in reading a digital text is not just a matter of all the synchronous processes, or the typographic design of digital text. Think about the number of frames of reference that you need to enter, the number of levels that you need to climb down — and the mindset that this climbing requires — until you reach a digital text. How much more complexity do you need once you reach the ultimate text layer? Why is it that once we reach the text, we hardly stay there for more than a couple of minutes?

In books the transitions between the different levels or frames are clearly separated with empty pages. They act like airlocks. You know when you enter a new level, and when you leave it.

It is astonishing that, with all the high pitched projects around reading in the last few years, nobody has developed an alternative navigational model for reading digital text. The main interaction models for digital reading are still flipping or scrolling. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and both kind of suck on a tablet.

Whether we call something “digital” or “analog” depends more on the way we perceive, understand and use a device than the ghost in its shell.

Our tools, like most things, have natural limits to their utility. Up to a certain point, e-mail makes us more efficient. After that, the mounds of e-mail in our inbox take time away from our real work. Up to a certain point, time spent on social networks brings us closer to our friends. After that, it takes away from time we spend with them in person.

Our bacteria can offer us some wisdom here. If we want tools that respect their natural limits, we can design limitation into the tools themselves.

It has always intrigued me that Gandhi spent so much time thinking about technology. I understand the wisdom of it, but it’s rare to see such tool-centric activism. It would be like today’s leading civil-rights leaders urging their constituents to learn how to program mobile devices.

But what Gandhi understood is that tools are most useful to the people that own them. And villagers didn’t own factories.

Most upstream tools are so ingrained in our culture that we often forget that they are tools, like our languages, educational systems, markets, and governments. But it is important to remember that these are tools, and as tools we can shape them, rather than passively allowing them to shape us.

When upstream tools are only accessible to a few, our tools are more likely to foster monoculture rather than a vibrant ecosystem, subservience rather than self-determination. This is why Gandhi advocated the spinning wheel over the textile factory. And it’s why people don’t want WalMart in their community, money in politics, or barriers for startups. In the same way that we don’t want a web that’s shaped only by those who can afford Oracle, we don’t want a world that’s shaped only by those who can afford factories, or lawyers, or senators.

It is useful, therefore, to have missions to balance our metrics. Of course, each tool should have its own mission. But if I were to suggest one mission for all tools, it might be this: Every tool should nourish the things upon which it depends.

An ecosystem of cyclical tools would therefore nourish nature and empower people. A fully cyclical software application may, for example, use peer-to-peer data centers powered by its users, consisting of biodegradable, fertilizing microprocessors. It would be open-source and provide APIs to empower the creativity of builders, and a clean design and useful purpose that cultivates the concentration of its users.

The danger in user-centered design is that it releases the designer of the responsibility for having a vision for the world. Why have one when we can just ask users what they want? But this is a very limiting mindset. The user sees the world as it is. Our job as builders is to create the world as it could be.

There is another reason to avoid relying on your users to design your tool. The most elegantly crafted tools are those where the purpose of the tool aligns with the purpose of its builder. So the key to building great technologies is to first find your purpose. And you will not find it by polling your users.

The more I do visualization work, the more I notice who’s missing, not just globally, but personally.

I want to harness the power of whitespace in real life – I imagine diving into that picture and putting empty chairs around the table for all the people who are missing from the conversation. I want to create physical empty spaces to visualize the missing values. To force us to see who is missing.

In the panel just before this, we discussed openness vs. accessibility. Heather Ford said, “Openness is easy – you just put a license on something and say it’s open.” Accessibility is hard – someone has to take responsibility, and commit sustained effort.

A simple template that helps you build ePub-formatted books.

PANDA is your newsroom data appliance. It provides a place for you to store data, search it and share it with the rest of your newsroom.

Rather than being a barrier, a watermark should give you access. That’s why we’re getting rid of our old watermark and replacing it with one that’s less invasive and more useful.

“Yes, many of the books on the shelves are available under those options. We can have the publisher drop ship a brand new copy anywhere you like, or you can purchase this used copy. You can also rent the book, but you might want to consider a membership because then the rental is free. Members don’t pay for rentals, though like non-members, if they don’t return the book eventually, the cost of the book is charged to their credit card and we order another.”

“Well, if you invest in a membership and thus in this store, then we can sell you a DRM-free ebook edition for many of the titles in the store. Many of the publishers we work with have been convinced that if you have a stake in the store, you will have a stake in its continuance and your access to the books we offer.  And that, they hope, would be enough for you to use the file only in legal ways. They also get a cut of the membership fee, which they don’t have to pay royalties on, or any other costs for that matter.”

Many of them are flawed, some of them quite terribly so, but few, if any, are cruel or mean or malicious, though all of them certainly share the capacity to be such. They are rarely, if ever, portrayed as victims, and if they are ever impediments to the story, it is because they impede themselves through their own character flaws. They are not sex objects, though many are sexual, and several certainly desirable, and often-times they are desired by others to varying degrees. A few even have healthy libidos.

Writers don't write Men or Women or Dogs or Salmon. Writers write characters, and at our best, if we do it well and with care and with thought, we invest in those characters a spark of life, a realism and nuance that makes them believable and relatable. We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy, characters our audience will care for, and as a result, will care about what happens to them, and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

This isn't a matter of authenticity alone, though certainly anything that helps invest a story with verisimilitude – and I would argue that such investment comes via character far more than it does via plot – is worthy of pursuit. Rather, this is a matter of respect, for both the story itself and for the audience receiving it. The reader is smarter than you. The reader is always smarter than you. And the reader knows when you've taken a shortcut, or phoned it in, or are trying to pull a fast one. And the reader don't like it one bit.

Gender isn't simply a biological trait; it's a societal one. The female experience is different from that of the male, and if, as a male writer, you cannot accept that basic premise, then you will never, ever, be able to write women well. A man walking alone through Midtown Manhattan at three in the morning may have concerns for his safety, but I promise you, it's a very different experience for a woman taking the same walk, and it's different again for a man wearing a dress. Think about it. That's a societal factor, and it's a gendered one, and this is not and can not be subject to debate. If you're looking to argue that sexism is a thing of the past, that the world is gender-blind, you're not only wrong, you're lying to yourself.

When in doubt, research. Research a lot. Read. Read a lot, and there is no shortage now – and there was no shortage then – of material to plumb. The women who work in the mystery and thriller genre are many, skilled, and I read them voraciously, just to see what they did with their characters, those points of view. But the best thing I did, the thing that helped the most, the thing that became the guiding principle, and has been ever since, was also the simplest.

Writing is one of those professions where you can never be good enough. Where what you write tomorrow must, at the least, be an attempt to become better at your craft than you were yesterday. What I learned writing Bridgett unquestionably made me a better writer of women, yes, but more importantly, it made me a better writer, period. It changed how I approached my characters, made me re-examine my process and my assumptions.

James Gleick is a native New Yorker and a graduate of Harvard and the author of a half-dozen books on science, technology, and culture. His latest bestseller, translated into 20 languages, is The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, which the NY Times called "ambitious, illuminating, and sexily theoretical." Whatever they meant by that. They also said "Don't make the mistake of reading it quickly."

How do we balance the empowering possibilities of the networked public sphere with the dark, unsettling, and even dangerous energies of cyberspace? Matthew Battles blends a deep-historical perspective on the internet with storytelling that reaches into its weird, uncanny depths. It’s a hybrid approach, reflecting the web’s way of landing us in a feral state—the predicament of a domestic creature forced to live by its imperfectly-rekindled instincts in a world where it is never entirely at home. The feral is a metaphor—and maybe more than just a metaphor—for thriving in cyberspace, a habitat that changes too rapidly for anyone truly to be native. This talk will weave critical and reflective discussion of online experience with a short story from Battles’ new collection, The Sovereignties of Invention.

What does a public right to hear mean in networked environments and why does it matter? In this talk I’ll describe how a public right to hear has historically and implicitly underpinned the U.S. press’s claims to freedom and, more fundamentally, what we want democracy to be. I’ll trace how this right appears in contemporary news production, show how three networked press organizations have used Application Programming Interfaces to both depend upon and distance themselves from readers, and describe how my research program joins questions of free speech with media infrastructure design. I will argue that a contemporary public right to hear partly depends upon how the press’s technologies and practices mediate among networked actors who construct and contest what Bowker and Star (1999) call “boundary infrastructures.” It is by studying these technosocial, journalistic systems—powerful yet often invisible systems that I call “newsware”—that we might understand how a public right to hear emerges from networked, institutionally situated communication cultures like the online press.

Narula proposed the use of microformats and the little-known rev attribute to attach semantic meaning to links, allowing browsers to handle different kinds of links differently. (rev is supposed to represent a reverse link. All major browsers, when faced with a rev attribute now, just ignore it. It’s like a cousin to rel.)

Eugene Wu, a graduate student of computer science at MIT, demonstrated a suite of tools called DBTruck that makes data comparison a snap. Enter the URL of a CSV file, JSON data, or an HTML table and DBTruck will clean up the data and import it to a local database. Normally you might go to a web page like this, select and copy the table, paste it into an Excel spreadsheet, then spend 15 minutes trying to fix the misplaced cells and formatting issues. DBTruck is automated and fast.

Too often we just get a giant number — the U.S. debt is $15 trillion, Chinese greenhouse gases are the highest in the world at 7 billion tonnes a year, Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics, etc. Is there some way of helping to put these statistics — huge to the point of meaningless — into an understandable, human framework?

So the titanic showdown between Facebook and Google might not be the News Feed vs. Google+ after all. It might be Facebook Camera vs. Project Glass.

It might, in fact, be pictures vs. vision.

Google is getting good, really good, at building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing.

Unfortunately, instead of the Security Council logo, viewers were shown the badge of the United Nations Space Command, the military agency depicted in popular interstellar war game Halo.

The Globe created what it calls the Globe Lab, a space where employees are encouraged come up with ways to breathe life back into the newspaper industry.

“A piece of ivory, made perfectly round, has several conical holes worked into it, so that their several apices meet at the centre of the globular mass. The workman then commences to detach the innermost sphere of all. This is done by inserting a tool into each hole, with a point bent and very sharp. That instrument is so arranged as to cut away or scrape the ivory through each hole, at equi-distances from the surface. The implement works away at the bottom of each conical hole successively, until the incisions meet. In this way, the innermost ball is separated; and to smooth, carve and ornament it, its various faces are, one after the other, brought opposite one of the largest holes. The other balls, larger as they near the outer surface, are each cut, wrought and polished precisely in the same manner. The outermost ball of course is done last of all.”

The user doesn’t come out of nowhere. We don’t land on your page and then head happily to those social networks to promote you, just because you have a button on your site. We find content through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc., not the other way around.

If you provide excellent content, social media users will take the time to read and talk about it in their networks. That’s what you really want. You don’t want a cheap thumbs up, you want your readers to talk about your content with their own voice.

Social media buttons are not a social media strategy, even though they’re often sold that way. Excellent content, serious networking and constant human engagement is the way to build your profile. Adding those sleazy buttons won’t achieve anything. Social media is not easy — there is no simple trick.

To cut a long story short – what I want to say is, that there are many more important setscrews that have to be concerted and that determine good typography and optimal readability than just the stroke weight of a typeface. The text column has to look harmonious, with legible letterforms and good spacing, achieved by a rhythmical pattern of black strokes and the white space inbetween, with evenly rendered stems, well attuned word spaces and line spacing.

Possible minor differences in font weight from one device to another don’t matter much to me, as long as the thing in a whole can be read comfortably. But maybe us print designers, who had to deal with different papers, printing methods and dot gains all our lives, have just idly learned to come to terms with it. Colour and the contrast of the screen are much more crucial. All the finetuned optimization are at risk to get screwed up by a user who has his crisp retina display set to full brightness. And that cannot be responded to.

With this widget, you can make beautiful interactive timelines like the one below. Try dragging it horizontally or using your mouse-wheel. Click on each event for more details.

Ouwi is first, and foremost classifiable as a 'non-linear two dimensional writing system.' If I convince you that it's a good idea, but you don't like how Ouwi works, I have tried to break down the issues here so you can design your own. Either way, you should become more conscious here of the problems and possibilities of a language and writing system like Ouwi.

Most of the feedback comes from everyone in the company. I hope that doesn’t change. I feel like even when we were five people, we all knew when something was right or wrong because we use it so much. We still get feedback from the Support team. If Support’s getting thousands of emails about a design or functional piece, we can react to that.

The advantage of this system is we’re making all the decisions ourselves — we’re recognizing the problems and solving them ourselves — so when something doesn’t work, we know exactly why. When you’re A/B testing or solving problems for other people, and you ask for someone’s opinion, you’re not going to get an honest answer. You’ll get an answer because you asked a question. Also, you’re not going to recognize why you’re fixing something if you didn’t yourself recognize that it was wrong. You’re solving someone else’s problem.

For example, there is no longer a follower count displayed on the Dashboard. We moved that to the user’s blog page for two reasons. First, we wanted that column on the Dashboard to only relate to things you subscribe to — who you follow, who you like, tags you’ve subscribed to. Second, we wanted to take the focus off follower counts. It can be an intimidating number, and something to obsess over, and ultimately a huge distraction from why you’re on Tumblr. A high follower count is not a good reason to share something, and posting something purely as follower-bait is not ideal. You should post something that you like, to attract the audience that’s kindest and most similar to you.

But when we moved the follower count to another page, it bothered a lot of people. Data would show that the number of visits to the page dropped off dramatically. Both of those facts would indicate that we should move the page back up front, but we made a conscious decision: We just don’t want to show the number so prominently.

I’m a big fan of old car dashboards, like Volkswagen’s Mark I Golf. I love seeing dashboards in old concept cars. Car dashboards are fascinating because they’re supposed to be usable instantly. And a lot of it needs to be usable without even looking at it. Turning on a blinker, using the radio. Checking speed, fuel, hitting the horn, even steering — all usable at a glance or less. You have hundred-year-old technology that makes sense to anyone as soon as they sit in a car. These dashboards deal with colors, they deal with touch, they deal with language, they deal with ergonomics. The result when it’s done really well — when someone can use it without being told how to use it — is really beautiful. And yet it doesn’t need to be beautiful because no one’s really looking at it.

A lot of aca­d­e­mic work is highly spe­cial­ized, and highly spe­cific. This kind of work is vital to the pro­fes­sion. Right now if you write such a book, a book aimed at a very spe­cial­ized audi­ence, you shop it to presses, and a uni­ver­sity press takes it and pub­lishes it for, say, $75 for the hard­cover and $35 for the ebook. Or $55 for the print ed. and $25 for the kindle/ebook. The press hopes to make most of its sales to libraries, which are A: fac­ing bud­get cuts, and B: likely to be going dig­i­tal more and more. The high price dis­cour­ages both libraries and all but the most seri­ous readers.

Aside from the fact that it’s indeed nice to have a phys­i­cal book, what is the advan­tage of our tra­di­tional meth­ods, to any­one? Do you want an object, or do you want your book read? Ide­ally, you’d like both, but if the book costs $60 dol­lars, get­ting either becomes unlikely. If the AHA pub­lished them as eBooks, and left dis­tri­b­u­tion to Ama­zon and Apple and B&N, or sold them directly its own web­site, your work would be embla­zoned with the author­ity of the AHA, “in print” for­ever, and instantly avail­able at low cost to all read­ers. If you want a phy­isi­cal object, print on demand is read­ily avail­able. In fact, uni­ver­sity presses use it them­selves.

Yes, the AHA would have to do some edi­to­r­ial work, and it’s not triv­ial, but the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem is status–publishing with a major uni­ver­sity press con­fers sta­tus; hav­ing a nice look­ing book on your shelf con­fers sta­tus. But really hand­some car­riages used to con­vey sta­tus too, and so did hav­ing a “princess” phone. The AHA should take this on. They could make money, they could re-assert their cen­tral­ity to the enter­prise of his­tory, they could elim­i­nate weirdly, grossly over­priced books.

California took a step toward becoming the second state in the nation to allow self-driven cars on its roads on Monday, as the state Senate unanimously agreed to allow autonomously driven vehicles such as those pioneered by Google (GOOG).

Google's self-driving cars have already crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and driven along the picturesque Pacific Coast Highway, according to the company, which has taken California lawmakers on test drives.

"I had the pleasure of going out for a drive on the autonomous vehicle," California state Senator Alan Lowenthal said before the unopposed vote. "I have to say that there are some still issues with it, but it's a better driver than I am."

By wandering back and forth between these poles of personal and professional he avoids having to take the argument that learning to program may be tremendously important personally even if you cannot be directly employed to do it.

Jeff equivocates because he has missed the point about why we learn. We learn new things because our perception of the world is shaped by our mental catalogues of what is possible and what it useful. We constantly filtering out perceptual noise on the criterion that it doesn't help us achieve some goal or end. Just think of when you learn a new word. You suddenly hear it everywhere. Not because everyone else just learned it too, but because you had been filtering it out. It didn't help you get around because you didn't know how to use it.

In summary, learning to program is not the same thing as training for a programming career. Learning new skills opens up new perceptual avenues and cognitive spaces. I'm learning to sew right now, not because the world needs another tailor but because I want to be able to recognize quality in clothing and create pieces that I can't find. Novice coders feel the same way about their digital goods and should be encouraged to continue. Learn to program.

Today countless teams are using WordPress to drive collaboration and facilitate inter-team communication. This presentation — given at the May WordPress DC Meetup — showcases some of the creative ways companies and organizations are using WordPress as the central hub of their day-to-day workflow: To organize and collaboratively edit documents and other non-web content, track and communicate their team’s progress with one another, and extend WordPress to work with their existing tools and practices

Four years ago, its traditional-to-digital-audience metrics were at a one-to-one basis, meaning for every traditional reader there was a digital one, according to Justin Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company. Now, he says, on average, its digital audience is 25 times higher than the print audience. According to ComScore, The Atlantic got 3.6 million uniques in April 2012. On the advertising side, more than 50 percent of its revenue will come from digital.

Quartz is its boldest move yet. Helmed by ex-Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Delaney and slated to officially launch later this year, Quartz is looking to succeed where Portfolio most recently failed. It plans to take a global perspective — sprinkling correspondents around the globe — and offer a mix of magazine-like analytical content and the short bursts and infographic fare that’s more au courrant on the Web but aimed at global business leaders.

Quartz is also taking an interesting distribution by focusing more on mobile and tablets. Its content won’t be created for Web reading, then ported over to tablet and mobile, Delaney said. Instead, features will be native to those environments. One trend Quartz is not joining: paywalls. All its content will be free on desktop, mobile and tablet.

A read–eval–print loop (REPL), also known as an interactive toplevel, is a simple, interactive computer programming environment. The term is most usually used to refer to a Lisp interactive environment, but can be applied to command line shells and similar environments for F#, Smalltalk, Standard ML, Perl, Prolog, Scala, Python, Ruby, Haskell, APL, BASIC, J, Tcl, and other languages as well.

Most MSs ship with markup, which is then stripped out as part of flowing the manuscript into typeset pages. The typeset pages are then sent for proofreading against the requested markup. Is a verse extract set as such? A proofreader makes sure.

Moreover, she checks to ensure that common typesetting and pagination errors (widows, hyphen stacks, loose lines, too few lines below a head, a figure preceding its callout) have been avoided. Occasionally, the copy is changed to fix said problems. If the book is coming in overly long, and the length is not the fault of the book designer, then the copy will be hacked away at until it fits (there are printing budgets to stick to, after all). And even under the best of circumstances faulty copy will sneak all the way up to this rung of the bookmaking ladder—it needs to be marked, sent to typesetting, sent back to proof, and then OK’d. It is an impressively thorough, expensively fusty process.

Clearly: to fit your proposed standards, all editorial changes should be integrated into the initial MS, and any pagination should be set aside until all parties are completely satisfied with the digital book. Version control then becomes the problem. Will edits for length and typographical sturdiness be allowed? Then the hardcopy book becomes a pan-and-scan to epub’s letterbox. Will the physical typesetting be allowed to suffer in the name of fidelity to the copy? That hurts the book’s reputation as the more-beauteous (and therefore more premiumly-priceable) iteration of a text.

We’ll invent new beauties, most certainly, that aren’t dependent on trim sizes and the like. Or: we’ll accept that paper is costly and pixels are not, so let the page count swell and damn the cost of printing a perfect thing. A certain class of consumer will learn to pay for that perfection.

While generalized editors and IDEs have proven very useful and have helped us get to where we are today, they are necessarily ok at everything and not amazing at any one thing. When I first introduced Light Table, I showed what a general programming environment based on a set of principles might look like. That, however, is not the real power of what we're building - the real potential is in making it trivial to build domain specific tools. Let me show you what I mean.

It occured to me the other day that what we're talking about is something like a macro system for tools. To the lispers out there, that statement probably hits home - macros are incredibly powerful. Imagine being able to create these sorts of experiences on a whim instead of needing hundreds of hours to even get something simple working.

Advertising student. Advertising's not in a bubble; some very rich and formerly successful advertisers are just doing an awful job at adjusting to the change in society that's now been twenty years in the making. Dumbasses.

Here's how advertising works from its creator's point of view. There are a few principles abstract enough that you can apply to any piece of advertising. Good advertising positions itself within a market, develops a brand image, establishes its product as a good product (not even necessarily better-than: as long as you look trustworthy and people know your name, you'll sell). The bulk of ad research, meanwhile, goes into studying individual forms. TV ads. Product placement in films. Radio spots. Magazine spots. There's a series of long-tested techniques which advertisers rely on. Even these techniques usually fail, because plenty of advertisers are fucking idiots who don't get that ads are a creative medium, and if you're formulaic rather than creative, you'll sell jack shit.

The challenge of the Internet is that every web site has its own unique form. Most of these forms weren't even designed for ads (Facebook at least knew how they wanted to sell ads; Twitter still has no clue). To sell on Twitter is different from selling on Facebook is different from selling on Reddit or Tumblr or Pinterest or Instagram. There's no formula. And some of these sites are so limited that advertisers simply have no clue how to push their shitty little message out to suckers, ahem, consumers.

The fix, of course, is that instead of selling a brand you start interesting conversations, create dialogues that engage people with the thing you're selling, even start communities of people who revolve around your product. But advertisers aren't bright enough or genuine enough or ambitious enough to do this the right way. Community-building especially: nobody wants to join a forum for a product that isn't a car. Yet some people persist in thinking that if they build it, fans will come.

One future of advertising looks like the Deck Network, where people so trust the advertisers that they'll click on the ads willingly. One's the model Facebook is still struggling with: connect super-small businesses with precisely the people who want to buy their product. These anti-Facebook ads stories recently only show that you have to be smarter advertising on Facebook than you'd have to be in a newspaper. The really good Facebook ads get friends talking about them, because they really are something that those people enjoy. But that runs counter to how advertisers think about their sheep, goddammit I mean targets, no wait that doesn't sound nice either.

The real bubble is: stop treating people like products, start treating them like people. That means fewer start-ups designed to sucker people into wanting some bullshit connection they never really needed (YC has some exactly like this), fewer advertisers looking down at the masses like they're ripe for the picking, fewer businesses geared toward herding people up and selling them wholesale. The more freedom you give people w/r/t how they consume media and how they express themselves, the harder it is to trap them in your crap. Ultimately it becomes more profitable to just treat them like human beings, and act like a human yourself. But plenty of products will die when this happens because plenty of products were never intended for human consumption in the first place.

BOOKS may appear to inhabit a flat, monochromatic space. But Sarah Werner, a director at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, stresses that they carry a wealth of information which pours out only on close inspection, by looking, touching or even smelling a physical copy. They also change over time. This richness cannot—at least not yet—be captured in book-scanning projects.

She turns to a page with a handprint on it. The stain had to be that of a printer's devil, as a young shop assistant was known in those days. The handprint extends into the binding (see picture), so it must have been made before the book was still in large sheets (called signatures) and before it was folded and bound, she explains. In "Incipit textus Sententiarum", a book printed in Basel in 1482, she shows your correspondent a similar handprint on an outer margin. That was probably smeared at a later stage, possibly by a reader.

The assembly is important. Previous centuries treated books and manuscripts interchangeably, Dr Werner says, and some books were delivered as loose pages that were folded, sewn and bound. Books had their covers and bindings removed at times, and were rebound into new forms that suited the owner.

Presentation for the 3rd Language Creation Conference, March 21, 2009.