This is a beautifully heartfelt post from Timoni:
Every day, I feel things because of the internet, and that’s amazing. Humans have been using abstracted communication for thousands of years, but it’s never been so instantaneous, never so capable of bringing folks of completely different backgrounds together in conversation. This is a huge step. Good job us.
An excellent longish-zoom article by Alexis Madrigal with an eerily accurate summation of the current state of the web. Although I think that a lack of any fundamentally new paradigms could be seen as a sign of stabilisation as much as stagnation.
Yes! Charles Stross speaks the unspeakable: that advertising is fundamentally “wrong”.
He’s right, y’know.
Bruce Sterling writes about the New Aesthetic in an article that’s half manifesto and half critique.
Grab a cup of tea or hit your “read it later” bookmarklet of choice for this one—it’s a lengthy but worthwhile read.
A cautionary tale from Stuart. We, the makers of modern technology, are letting people down. Badly.
We’re in this to help users, remember: not just the ones who think as we do, but the ones who rely on us to build things for them because they don’t know what they’re doing. If your response is honestly “well, he should have spent more on a phone to get something better”, then I’m exceedingly disillusioned by you.
A collection of articles on the tricksy art of Futurism from—amongst others—Bruce Sterling, Annalee Newitz, and Matt Novak, creator of the Paleofuture blog.
The wonderful story of an odd place:
The Jamesburg Earth Station is a massive satellite receiver in a remote valley in California. It played a central role in satellite communications for three decades, but had been forgotten until the current owner put it up for sale, promoting it as a great place to spend the apocalypse.
This is one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve read …and it just happens to be posted on a blog. Please read it, particularly if you are a voter in the UK.
There’s a good point buried in this tirade.
Here’s a more positive spin: with this much horseshit, there’s gotta be a horse in there somewhere.
Colly’s thoughts on digital preservation are written in a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek way but at least he’s thinking about it. That alone gives me comfort.
A beautiful reminder that by publishing on the web, we are all historians.
Every color you choose and line of code you write is a reflection of you; not just as a human being in this world, but as a human being in this time and place in human history. Inside each project is a record of the styles and fashions you value, the technological advancements being made in the industry, the tone of your voice, and even the social and economic trends around you.
This post from Maciej might initially seem negative but read it through to the end: there’s a very powerful positive message.
A thoughtful piece from Matt on the changes in cultural transmission that we should be embracing instead of bemoaning.
If you live in the States, please, please, for the love of the internet, write to your representative at fightforthefuture.org/pipa
A rallying cry from Neal Stephenson for Getting Big Stuff Done.
This is quite beautiful. An interactive piece that allows you to dig through the ruins of Geocities like an archeologist.
Such wanton destruction! I’ll never forgive those twunts at Yahoo.
Fuckers.
Asking what the difference is between science fiction and design fiction. The answer may be …usefulness.
A great speech by Ben Hammersley that ties together multiple strands of life in the 21st century.
Craig has written down his dConstruct talk, the one that completely polarised opinion. Personally, I loved it.
A worrying report on the state of digital preservation and the web, specifically in the UK. Welcome to the memory hole.
A wonderful reminder by Kevin Kelly of the amazing interconnected world we live in, thanks to network effects.
A superb post by David that ties together multiple strands of personal digital preservation through homesteading instead of sharecropping.
Stewart Brand wrote this twelve years ago: it’s more relevant than ever in today’s cloud-worshipping climate.
I’d like to think that it’s ironic that I’m linking to The Wayback Machine because the original URL for this essay is dead. But it isn’t ironic, it’s horrific.
Clay Shirky takes a long hard look at the present (and future) of newspapers and—more important—of journalism. A good read.
Here’s one to add to Instapaper or Readability to savour at your leisure: Aaron Straup Cope’s talk at Museums and the Web 2010:
This paper examines the act of association, the art of framing and the participatory nature of robots in creating artifacts and story-telling in projects like Flickr Galleries, the API-based Suggestify project (which provides the ability to suggest locations for other people’s photos) and the increasing number of bespoke (and often paper-based) curatorial productions.
Take some time out to read this. Read all of this. Craig’s thoughts on the nature of publishing today:
Digital’s effect on how we produce, distribute and consume content.
The entire archive of the Reith lectures is now online for your huffduffing pleasure.
A beautiful dose of perspective from Frank.
Brewster Kahle explains how and why the Internet Archive is keeping physical copies of the books it digitises.
A nice summation of the open science movement, courtesy of Bobbie.
A profile of those whacky Brooklyn Studiomates.
A blog devoted to sifting through the gems in the Geocities torrent. This is digital archeology.
The threat to Google Videos shows businesses are not suitable cultural custodians — they can’t be held accountable to the public.
Kevin Kelly asks “What is a book?” and provides some thought-provoking answers. There’s some inspiring crystal-ball gazing in here.
Tom talks about “Things Rules Do.”
Brian Eno’s original essay on the origins of The Long Now Foundation. It is ten years old—a long time on the web and 1% of a millennium.
Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said “I have a dream…” , he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently – as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real.
A detailed look at how French archivists go about preserving websites.
Everything is worth preserving and protecting.
James’s talk from Tools Of Change. Great stuff!
A brave and probably unpopular stance; could it be that the fundamental technological bedrock of the internet needs to change to avoid the seemingly-inevitable rise of walled gardens?
I wish I had a teacher like David when I was in school.
URLs, permalinks, archives … preservation. It all matters so very much.
The fascinating story of the BBC Domesday Project and its subsequent fate.
The purpose of the CAMiLEON project was to demonstrate the value of emulation in preserving not only the data stored in obsolete systems but the behaviour of the systems themselves - in this case one of the very first interactive multi-media systems. The aim was to reproduce the original user experience as accurately as possible, and the CAMiLEON team argued that the slight faults in images as displayed from the analogue discs were a part of that experience, and should not be cleaned up as Andy proposed to do. Our aim was different - we wanted to preserve the data with the highest quality available consistent with longevity.
Part two of Kirby Ferguson’s series focuses on films. Creation requires influence.
The BBC’s decision to actively delete old content (rather than simply allowing it to take up some space on a server) really gets my blood boiling.
The BBC asked the public to contribute their memories of World War Two to a website between June 2003 and January 2006…” and five years later some suit decided to bin them.
Cute.
Let’s make the Bletchley Park data machine-readable so we can start mining the stories they contain (like Old Weather).
Bletchley Park need help to catalogue and create a proper archive of these decrypts.
I want in!
Preserving the papernet.
Jeffrey points out another point of failure in our online storage: the willingness of site owners to sell their product (and your data) to a big company for a quick payout.
Mandy writes about digital preservation:
The technological means to produce an archive are not beyond our skills; sadly, right now at least, the will to do so is insufficient.
An accurately-downbeat look at digital preservation.
French schoolchildren are given technological tools that are less than thirty years old and asked to describe what they do.
An excellent piece of writing on the fundamental question of the web: Why Wasn’t I Consulted?
Pitching Orwell against Huxley in an argument that is ironically shallow: it only holds up if you accept the premise that activities involving the web, television and video games are inherently “bad” and anti-social: a pathetically, narrow-minded and condescending worldview.
Matt is, as usual, eloquent and inspiring.
Wired Magazine break with tradition by publishing a halfway interesting article (though you’ll still need Readability or Instapaper to make the experience of reading it bearable).
A viciously accurate assessment of Yahoo’s scorched earth policy towards our online collective culture:
All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.
An oldie but a goodie. This is why we have standards.
Matt encapsulates a lot of what I've been thinking about recently: the real-time web is all well and good, but let's not forsake the enormous potential for fulfilment in archives.
A great piece by Umberto Eco on the real effect of Wikileaks: not in exposing dangerous secrets, but in exposing what we already knew anyway.
There's going to be a Culture Hack Day in January, the weekend before History Hack Day. They're like buses; you wait for ages for one to come along and then two show up at once.
How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?
An inspiring State Of The Web address by Tim Berners-Lee. He can't resist pitching linked data at the end, but it's mostly a stirring call to arms.
A great piece on the golden age of radio ...which is right now.
One web page for every book. I love this project.
It's well worth paying attention to this site, the accompaniment to the four-part series of videos entitled "Everything is a Remix."
A nifty exploration of architecture and urban planning that describes itself as "a set of interlinked concepts, models, speculations, probings, essays and artefacts based on urban systems."
A site that aims to ask and explore the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality, with a focus on science, religion, markets and morals.
An excellent long-zoom rebuttal by Alexis Madrigal of the whole "The web is dead" guff on Wired right now.
The game Yakuza 3 as reviewed by 3 Yakuza.
Lucy Inglis, curator of Georgian London, on the role she and other bloggers play.
Yes! Yes! Yes! An excellent fisking of that ridiculous New York Times article that confused problems in the present with data longevity.
This article needs a great big "citation needed" slapped on it. Yes, people need to think about what they post on the web, but no, that stuff will not stay around "forever." If anything, the web suffers from the opposite problem: memory loss.
An entertaining missive from the future.
Mike Stenhouse has graphed civilisation longevity: a nice bit of long zoom perspective.
Of plush toys and tentacle porn.
A nine-point document that constitutes a "Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence."
A beautiful site for long-form content, also available in dead tree format.
Here is the star to sail your ship by.
James Sturm outlines his plan to give up the internet, which sounds like a good decision for him. Comments are open via snail mail.
This is wonderful: sad, beautiful, and wonderful ...it's what I've been trying so hard to clumsily articulate. Read it. And smile. And weep.
A thoroughly well-researched and data-heavy blog post ...complete with interactive charts!
Before we point the finger and laugh at the Facebook users leaving confused comments on Read Write Web, we should look to our own experiences with Google Buzz.
The wonderful world of audio pressed onto postcards: a Polish tradition.
A wonderful trip down memory lane to the amateur web of the 90s.
A treasure trove of music from Archive.org.
I believe it was the philosopher Conflicticus who said, "Only stupid bastards help EMI."
The challenges of the long tail.
Short stories in Tokyo.
Here lies what we could salvage from the ashes of GeoCities.
A beautifully designed location-based web magazine.
This is wonderful, just wonderful; an in-depth piece on corridors in science fiction movies. Swoon!
The colour scheme is a little odd (though I expect this will change from month to month) but the typography is tasteful and the content is king.
The latest project from Jonathan Harris is a not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture: "We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world."
Yet another journalist writing about Twitter. But Bobbie knows whereof he speaks. This is a good one.
Kevin Kelly on mankind's love/hate relationship with technology.
Classic photographs recreated in Lego.
A look into the future that never was. This stuff is right up my alley.
Lawrence Lessig's newest book, Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, is now available as a free PDF download.
Phil Gyford on why he will miss Geocities. "It’s only thanks to the efforts of people like the Internet Archive and Archive Team that we’ll have a record of what people, rather than companies, published in the past. As companies like Yahoo! switch off swathes of our online universe little fragments of our collective history disappear. They might be ugly and neglected fragments of our history but they’re still what got us where we are today."
The perfect person for the job—George will be working on the Internet Archive's Open Library project: a webpage for every book ever published.
This is the plain vanilla look.
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