November 2011
15 posts
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The future in one word: platforms →
infoneer-pulse:
One of the reasons why librarians don’t talk very much about ebook platform choice is because, by and large, we’ve already decided the matter. Libraries have made their choice, voted with their dollars and their energies, and have overwhelmingly selected Overdrive as our platform.
Yes, we have outsourced ourselves with an ebook platform that betrays many of the values that the...
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“But a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place. Like a bar or a club, a...”
– Google Pages Won’t Save Search Giant’s Social Network, Slate Says (via azspot).
It’s interesting that DMs and RTs and things like that all started as work-arounds to accomplish communication goals on Twitter, and now they’re fully-featured mechanisms within Twitter’s official...
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Watchhypothes.is is a website that wants to peer-review the ENTIRE internet. It’s a cool idea, but it also might be a pretty misguided one. Wikipedia is already a peer-reviewed internet. What hypothes.is means by “peer reviewed” is that everything is reviewed by experts, not actual peers. And as far as I can tell, the thing that makes the internet so great is that you don’t HAVE...
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“JD: That’s because, as important as politics are to me, the life and the spirit...”
– John Darnielle on politics in lyrics (via slocedot).
Some would refer to a songwriter who takes on social issues and engages with politics as a responsible artist. To do so is to misunderstand the responsibilities of the artist. John Darnielle is ACTUALLY a responsible artist.
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Could Reddit Make Its Own 'Rome, Sweet Rome' And... →
The short answer to that question seems to be yes, but it’s also interesting, and barely mentioned, that the collaborative elements of the story (the ones written by both the original poster and the rest of Reddit’s posters) belong to the individuals who came up with them. WB might face some unique and interesting obstacles to this production!
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“Voting 2-1 to void the fine, the court stated that the FCC has maintained a...”
– The AV Club brings to our attention something most people hadn’t thought about in a while. I took a course on FCC law once, and it was interesting to see how hugely the FCC’s policies and what they choose to pursue can change with each administration.
For instance, since Obama took...
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“A team of computational linguists at Carnegie Mellon University… has used...”
– Twitterology - A New Science? - NYTimes.com (via interestingsnippets).
It’s weird that this isn’t obvious. Everything is data now, and it’s stupid not to treat it as such. 