Tumblr is having a moment. A big profile in the Times, a lot of buzz in the geekier precincts of the interwebs, phenomenal growth (the service adds 25,000 new accounts daily). For the uninitiated, Tumblr is a platform for “short-form blogging,” meaning that a “tumblelog” is a blog with very short posts, usually a single, [...]
Categories: Blogging · Internet
Tags: Facebook · social media · Tumblr · Twitter
Media evolution, of course, does claim casualties. But most often, these are means of distribution or storage, especially physical ones that can be transformed into digital bits. Photographic film is supplanted, but people take more pictures than ever. CD’s no longer dominate, as music is more and more distributed online. “Books, magazines and newspapers are [...]
Categories: Books · Internet · Publishing
Tags: ebooks · technology
A very neat tool: FontFonter allows you to see any web site with different fonts substituted for the defaults. Here is how this web site looks with different fonts (very handsome, if I do say so myself). And here is the New York Times refonted. Great tool for web designers, great toy for everyone else. [...]
Categories: Internet
Tags: Typekit · typography · web design · williamlanday.com
Myself, I’ve set up a second computer, devoid of internet, for my fiction-writing. That’s to say, I took an expensive Mac and turned it back into a typewriter. (You should imagine my computer set-up guy’s consternation when I insisted he drag the internet function out of the thing entirely. “I can just hide it from [...]
Categories: Internet · Productivity · Writers · Writing
Tags: Jonathan Lethem · writing tools
According to recent media surveys, the average American spends some 8.5 hours a day peering at a screen — TV, computer, or cell phone — and that number continues to rise as smartphone use explodes. We’ve reached a point, in other words, where it’s more likely than not that we’re looking into a screen at any given [...]
Categories: Internet
Tags: Nicholas Carr
John Dvorak had an interesting piece recently on the transformation of computers “from being a mathematical tool used for calculations, to a communications device.” Initially, computers were used for calculations. The first intended purpose was for artillery trajectory calculations — hardly a noble purpose, but certainly a practical one. In the early days, computers were [...]
Categories: Internet · Productivity · Writing
Tags: AlphaSmart Neo · computers · technology · ThinkPad · writing tools
Two recent tweets by Alain de Botton capture the way I’ve been feeling lately: Awkward mathematics of my profession: for every one hour of actual writing, I need four hours of daydreaming. So cruel that the machine I use for concentrated, slow thinking is also, in another window, more exciting than any TV could ever [...]
Categories: Internet
Tags: Alain de Botton · web fatigue
Facebook introduced the verb to “friend.” Chatroulette has introduced “nexted.” When two strangers meet randomly face to face either one can “next” the other, immediately, or at any time in the conversation. The NEXT button terminates the meeting and brings on the next stranger. If you are not female, or over 30, you’ll most likely [...]
Categories: Internet
Tags: Chatroulette · wordplay
I thought I would love Google Buzz. Really. I am a Google fan. I adore Gmail, and in all the other Google products I’ve used — Calendar, Maps, Documents, the iconic search page — the company has gotten things mostly right. Also, I try to maintain as many portals as possible for readers to find [...]
Categories: Internet
Tags: Google · Google Buzz
