Letters Remain

Category: technology

  • Elderly Becoming Redundant

    If the elderly are mostly recognised and valued for their accumulated knowledge and skills (a contentious assumption in itself, granted), then technological advances are gradually making the older generations redundant, suggests Philip Greenspun. Let’s start by considering factual knowledge. An old person will know more than a young person, but can any person, young or…

  • Overcoming Network Effects

    A network effect is “the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people”. When there is a positive network effect we say that the good or service in question increases in usefulness the more users there are, like the telephone or online social networks. Of course, being in…

  • Social Writing

    No, I don’t mean blogs. “Protagonize was originally devised as a lark, testing out a new technology platform with what was supposed to be a simple, fun idea. When the site launched in late 2007, it was dedicated completely to the (nearly) lost art of the addventure (yes, that’s spelled right), a very specific type of…

  • Newspaper

    In the spirit of self-publishing, Russell Davies et aliud created Newspaper Club, a mostly UK launched collective dedicated to building a service to help people make their own newspapers. One of my favorite ideas is Things Our Friends Have Shot On Flickr which is a beautiful example of the digital world colliding with print media.…

  • “We have broken your business, now we want your machines.”

    Russell Davies on what’s been percolating in digital culture regarding print media: It’s not news that the internet has stimulated all sorts of creativity in the real world. From communities and marketplaces of crafters like folksy to new forms of personal manufacture like shapeways; technology is giving regular people access to tools and markets that once they…

  • Books, Printing, and Self-Publishing

    In an age of increasing digitization, objects become more valuable. And that value is the reason print media will not die, even if it does shrink. My prediction for print media, therefore, is two-fold: you will see small run, local editions of hardbound books and quick, cheap paperbacks. Couple this with our new attitudes on the democratization of…

  • There is something outside of the text

    To make a very long story short, I was a book lugging Luddite until about three years ago when I discovered that the internet was more than cats fiending after cheeseburgers. And, since then, I have become increasingly fascinated with digital culture’s scrolls and more than a little concerned about my friend, the codex. Over the next few days,…

  • Blogs as Public Billboards

    First seen over at Raul Gutierrez’ Heading East, this Tim Berners-Lee quote on the role of the home page from 1996 or so seems to come from an interview with Rohit Khare and DC Denison: With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it’s a public billboard that people work on…

  • Ebook Readers and Auto-Correcting Books

    With the growing prevalence of ebook readers that can be updated remotely–such as Amazon’s Kindle–could the time of the book riddled with errors be coming to an end? Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been…

  • DNA R/W+ 12 Speed

    The speed at which Synthetic Biology is evolving (pun intended) is mind-blowing, especially to someone who has just stumbled upon the science (inspired by Tuur Van Balen’s presentation at Interesting 2009). In his words, it “will make most of us wonder why we ever got so excited about the Internet”. You can tell a technology…