http://www.roughtype.com/ Copyright 2010 Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:23:34 -0500 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.15 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You'd walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it's just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak. Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It's even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/02/blogging_a_grea.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/02/blogging_a_grea.php Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:23:34 -0500 I admit to having a bit of a personal interest in this, but I've been fascinated to see how the thinking of Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, has evolved over the past few years on the question of the Net's effect on reading and cognition. Here are three quotes from Schmidt, the most recent of which came yesterday: July 30, 2008: "I just got this in my in-box. Anybody read it? The Atlantic: ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ I mean, we’ve got a problem if this is true, right? In the article, the author ... points out that deep reading is... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/eric_schmidts_s_1.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/eric_schmidts_s_1.php Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:58:52 -0500 How cool would it have been if Twitter had been invented a couple hundred years ago so our forebears could have used it? transcendo: RT @emerson new idea: "the making a fact the subject of thought raises it" http://bit.ly/cAhzDL (expand)... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/tweet_fantasy_1.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/tweet_fantasy_1.php Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:07:15 -0500 I just heard the sad news that J. D. Salinger has died. He was 91. I went to school at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is just a few miles north of Cornish, New Hampshire, where Salinger lived. During the summer between my junior and senior year, I had a job at the circulation desk at the Dartmouth library. I was working one morning when my boss tapped me on the shoulder and motioned with his head over to the side of the desk. I just caught a glimpse of a tall, slender, slightly stooped man going through... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/j_d_salinger_an.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/j_d_salinger_an.php Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:51:53 -0500 The Britannica Blog is running, in conjunction with The Futurist magazine, a forum on Learning & Literacy in the Digital Age, which includes a piece by me on the resilience of the written word. (The brief piece actually originally appeared in a recent issue of The Futurist). First paragraph: The written word seems so horribly low tech. It hasn’t changed much for a few millennia, at least since the ancient Greeks invented symbols for vowels. In our twitterific age of hyperspeed progress, there’s something almost offensive in such durability, such pigheaded resilience. You want to grab the alphabet by the... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/from_writing_to.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/from_writing_to.php Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:56:15 -0500 The New Republic has published my commentary on Apple's iPad announcement. I reprint it here (with the important second sentence, which was cut from the New Republic version): The PC era ended this morning at ten o’clock Pacific time, when Steve Jobs mounted a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad, Apple’s version of a tablet computer. What made the moment epochal was not so much the gadget itself - an oversized iPod Touch tricked out with an e-reader application and a few other new features - but the clouds of hype that attended its arrival. Tablet computers have been... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/the_ipads_lofty.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/the_ipads_lofty.php Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:37:58 -0500 My next book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues that the tools we use to think with - our "intellectual technologies" - not only shape our habits of thought but exert an actual physical influence on the neurons and synapses in our brains. I look at the Internet, an extraordinarily powerful intellectual technology, in this context, examining what the scientific and historical evidence tells about the effects it is having on our thoughts, memories, and even emotions - and how different the effects are from those exerted by earlier intellectual technologies such as the printed... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/the_shallows_ta.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/the_shallows_ta.php Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:18:23 -0500 Jay Rosen points to another interesting, if not altogether surprising, tidbit about how the New York Times plans to construct its promised paywall. Essentially, it appears that if you come to a Times article via a link, either on the Web or in an email, you will get to read the whole article, and the article won't count against your monthly limit of articles. This news comes from a Q&A in which Times CEO Janet Robinson and digital chief Martin Nisenholtz answered readers' questions about the subscription plan. Here's what they said: Q: ... will I still be able to... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/the_delayed_lea.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/the_delayed_lea.php Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:11:58 -0500 The soon-to-be-disappeared Sun Microsystems had a knack for prescient slogans. "The network is the computer" has come true. And then there was "write once, run anywhere," which heralded the age of universal software applications. Rather than tailoring their programs to run on a particular type of computer - an IBM mainframe, say, or a Windows PC - programmers would use a language like Sun's Java that was adaptable to any computer. It was a liberating idea: Software developers and users would no longer be locked into one operating system, and beholden to the owner of that system. And it came... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/everybodys_appy.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/everybodys_appy.php Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:47:17 -0500 It's always slightly disturbing, when scrolling through an old book in Google Books, to suddenly come across a page obscured by the fingers of the technician who manned the Google scanner. You find yourself, for a moment, both repelled and beguiled, as if you were witnessing a secret, ghostly act of violation. The writer Caleb Crain, in doing research for a review of Adrian Johns' new book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, came upon a particularly eerie image: And what work, you might ask, is the scanner's hand so boldly groping? It's an essay by Immanuel... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/caught_in_the_a.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/caught_in_the_a.php Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:22:59 -0500 Jeff Jarvis, the popular media blogger, has long ridiculed newspapers for trying to find innovative ways to charge for the stories they publish online. True to form, he had a kneejerk reaction to the New York Times's plan to ask frequent readers of its digital content to buy a subscription. Jarvis argues that in seeking to charge its "best customers," the Times is guilty of "cockeyed economics": So why charge your best customers? Why single them out? Why risk driving them away? The logic eludes me. So do the economics. But it's Jarvis, not the Times, whose economics, and logic,... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/jeff_jarviss_co.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/jeff_jarviss_co.php Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:45:25 -0500 In a mildly anticlimactic announcement, the New York Times let it be known today that in, oh, a year or so it will get around to figuring out exactly how it will charge some people for its stories. If discretion is the better part of valor, the Gray Lady is Rambo. This much we know: The Times will refer to its as-yet-undefined online subscription service not as a "paywall" (which it is) but as a "metered model" (which it isn't). "Paywall," apparently, carries the wrong sort of connotations; it sounds like the type of thing Ronald Reagan would have demanded... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/just_dont_call.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/just_dont_call.php Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:24:50 -0500 Never before in history have people paid as much for information as they do today. I'm guessing that by the time you reached the end of that sentence, you found yourself ROFLAO. I mean, WTF, this the Era of Abundance, isn't it? The Age of Free. Digital manna rains from the heavens. Sorry, sucker. The joke's on you. Do the math. Sit down right now, and add up what you pay every month for: -Internet service -Cable TV service -Cellular telephone service (voice, data, messaging) -Landline telephone service -Satellite radio -Netflix -Wi-Fi hotspots -TiVO -Other information services So what's the... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/information_wan.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/information_wan.php Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:25:15 -0500 In the wake of Google's revelation last week of a concerted, sophisticated cyber attack on many corporate networks, including its own Gmail service, Eric Schmidt's recent comments about privacy become even more troubling. As you'll recall, in a December 3 CNBC interview, Schmidt said, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/other_peoples_p.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/other_peoples_p.php Sun, 17 Jan 2010 15:25:23 -0500 The New Republic has published my comment on Google's about-face on China. I reprint it here: Google is being widely hailed for its announcement yesterday that it will stop censoring its search results in China, even if it means having to abandon that vast market. After years of compromising its own ideals on the free flow of information, the company is at last, it seems, putting its principles ahead of its business interests. But Google’s motivations are not as pure as they may appear. While there's almost certainly an ethical component to the company’s decision - Google and its founders... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/google_and_the_1.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/google_and_the_1.php Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:51:38 -0500