Internet

Mar. 4, 2011

Neil Gaiman: Web piracy is good publicity

Neil Gaiman on the benefit to authors of having their work pirated on the web. It turns out, it’s good publicity.

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Sep. 2, 2010

Tumblng

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, [...]

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Aug. 22, 2010

Why the novel will survive the disappearance of the book

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 [...]

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Aug. 7, 2010

FontFonter

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. [...]

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Jun. 5, 2010

Writers Unplugged

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 [...]

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Jun. 2, 2010

The Way We Virtually Live Now

Nicholas Carr asks: What happens to the human self as it experiences more and more of the world through the mediation of the screen?

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May. 21, 2010

Writing Like It’s 1999

Why I use a ten-year-old, slow, WiFi-free ThinkPad: it’s the perfect writer’s computer

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Apr. 15, 2010

Only Disconnect

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 [...]

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Apr. 13, 2010

Nexted

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 [...]

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Apr. 11, 2010

Is an ebook still a book?

When a printed book is transferred to an electronic device connected to the Internet, it turns into something very like a Web site. — Nicholas Carr, “The Post-Book Book,” quoting his own upcoming book The Shallows

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