Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 672

March 17, 2010

Sunshine Week

*Normally I'm very keen on efforts of this kind, which is why I am blogging this, but…

*I wonder where journalists are supposed to "publish" stuff like this nowadays. Is there anywhere plausible left to "publish" it? If it's "inaccessible federal government data" and it somehow becomes somewhat-accessible searchable NGO website data, are you really gonna get a big block of "public" eyeballs on that? Ever? Or is it rather more likely to become a handy data-dump for commercial entities to d...

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Published on March 17, 2010 17:14

Dead Media Beat: pageviews

*If you think book views are in trouble lately, you should check out web pageviews. Pageviews are already deader than canned mackerel before most people could figure out what they were good for.


http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/03/the-death-of-the-pageview.php


*Now check out all these kinky little metrics this ReadWriteWeb guy wants to measure: stuff like "conversion funnel analysis." How long do you think THAT will last?







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Published on March 17, 2010 16:57

Swift, canny book scanner bodes publishing mischief a-plenty

"Book flipping scanning system developed at University of Tokyo by Takashi Nakashima, Yoshihiro Watanabe, Takashi Komuro, and Masatoshi Ishikawa. For more tech news go to http://www.spectrum.ieee.org "

*Well, so much for the barriers to entry required to turn books into the functional equivalents of mp3s.

*By the way, that new Cisco router is supposed to be able to download the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a little bit more than one second.

*Of course, that's assuming that...

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Published on March 17, 2010 16:21

Dead Media Beat: Writers' computers

*Do nothing much while awaiting the miraculous invention of universal guidelines for rapidly decaying technologies scattered all over the map.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html?sudsredirect=true

(…)

Though computers have been commonly used for more than two decades, archives from writers who used them are just beginning to make their way into collections. Last week, for instance, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, announced that it had bought the...

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Published on March 17, 2010 12:53

More utter weirdness from TIME magazine

*Watching magazines cry about the existential threat to movies is like watching zombies mourning vampires. There must be a sad movie about unemployable journalists someplace. Actually, what would be really cool would be a big-budget movie where journalists, musicians, graphic artists, game designers, novelists, architects and formerly sane Republican white-shoe country-club real-estate guys all gather in a favela bar somewhere to guzzle cheap rum and reminisce about business models.

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Published on March 17, 2010 11:00

Farmville killed your dog, and, by the way, the gaming industry

*That's interesting. It's the specter of traditional computer gaming being wiped out by digital demonetization. Maybe Jaron Lanier was right, when, in his SXSW speech, he said that the state of music today is the economic endgame for everybody.

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i8c42c2e07eaa0e32a9c85abe801dd780

"Every single example of these musicians who did really well by giving stuff away… they don't exist," Lanier says. "There are a lot of people who pretend …...

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Published on March 17, 2010 10:30

Open Structures

*I'll believe in these when I can kick 'em. On the other hand, at least they're

getting vaporware coverage in some of my favorite venues.


http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20100317/kit-of-parts


http://www.openstructures.net/pages/1


http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/02/open_structures_help_create_an_open.html


openstructures2


*If only we'd had the good sense to demonetize food and shelter FIRST.


img_9500







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Published on March 17, 2010 08:32

March 16, 2010

Dieselpunk

*I didn't even know there WAS a "dieselpunk chronology," but I'm glad that these Polish steampunks have revived their site so as to relieve my ignorance in these matters.


http://steampunk.republika.pl/chrono04pl.html







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Published on March 16, 2010 20:13

Arphid Watch: Battling the Antichrist by Outlawing Microchips

*Nice background on the history of fundie cyber-agitation here.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/2353/battling_the_antichrist_by_outlawing_microchips

Battling The Antichrist By Outlawing Microchips

By Joseph Laycock

March 16, 2010

Last month, Virginia lawmaker Mark Cole, a Fredericksburg Republican, sponsored a bill in the House of Delegates to prohibit the involuntary implantation of microchips into human beings. "My understanding—I'm not a theologian—but there's a prophecy in the...

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Published on March 16, 2010 20:12

Design-fiction nonobjects

*I know this guy and I'm quite keen to see this book.


http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2007/04/an_interview_wi/







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Published on March 16, 2010 12:38

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