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...
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?





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





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





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...
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/





Bruce Sterling's Blog
- Bruce Sterling's profile
- 1196 followers
