Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 802

Good Try, Phisherman

*Next time get a pointier spear. This one's too general.

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Dead Media Beat: Newspapers

*"There isn't time. It's simply too late."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-jarvis/to-newspaper-moguls-you-b_b_184309.html

I could go on all day about the colossal tragedy that is paper journalism.
I'm gonna suffer. People I know are gonna suffer. A lot. But... well...

*As Merlin Mann recently tweeted: "If you find that cynical, leave your comments about my comments about comments in the "Comments" section of my Commentorium in Second Life."

"It's simply too late." Can't re

Twitter Does Deep Knee Bends

http://www.comscore.com/blog/2009/04/twitter_traffic_explodes.html

"Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic recently authored an interesting blog post about the demographics of Twitter users. What he discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average

The Electronic-Book "Readers" Who Refuse To Sit Still As an "Audience"

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/04/kindle-readers.html

What's the right price for an e-book? No more than $10, says a group of Amazon Kindle e-book owners — and they have found a novel way to make themselves heard.

Some 250 Kindle readers are using Amazon's own book-tagging system to mark e-books priced more than $10 with the tag '9 99 boycott'. Their argument: A Kindle book is more restricted in its use than a paper book and therefore should not cost as much.

"It just doesn't seem right,"

Deadly mayhem for you, Your Children, YOUR GRANDCHILDREN

http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/22/an-introduction-to-global-warming-impacts-hell-and-high-water/

*I'm not asking you to do anything in particular; just don't moan and whine that nobody
ever told you about this.

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Wired Italia distributes celebrity-chef Italian recipes in Twitter format

http://www.wired.it/news/archivio/2009-04/06/sei-celebrity-chef-creano-mini-ricette-in-formato-twitter-.aspx

*Buon tweetin' appetito to a doubting world.

Ma è possibile scrivere ricette più sofisticate in meno di 140 caratteri, ovvero nel formato Twitter? Altrochè. Ecco perché Wired.it ha deciso di lanciare una sfida.

Abbiamo contattato alcuni degli chef più importanti d’Italia e abbiamo chiesto loro di mandarci delle mini-prelibatezze in meno di 140 battute.

In esclusiva per i nostri

Who Needs Science Fiction When You've Got Viral Video

*"It has an orbit kind of shaped like a kidney, and I'm also a fan of moving cities..."

*As for fans of science fiction on conventional commercial television,
these aging wretches can't die and get buried fast enough:

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2009/04/star-trek-burie.html

"Now, Eternal Image has signed a deal with Paramount and CBS to distribute Star Trek-themed urns and coffins. Soon, you can be buried in a full-size re-creation of the torpedo tube (above) used to launch Spock's c

Lost Tribes of New York City

*Nice "social intelligence embedded in urban objects" riff.

http://vimeo.com/2860274

The Lost Tribes of New York City from Carolyn London on Vimeo.

*Maybe the theorists are right, and viral video really IS gonna kick the
ass of commercial television. I just blogged two classic pieces of viral video
here, while my commercial television has empty hand-wringing about the
recent Italian earthquake.

*I get it that earthquakes are terrific human tragedies requiring news coverage,
but inste

Smash That Chocolate Easter Egg

*Via Core77. I especially like the embedded soundtrack and the acts of
hackerly recursion on the Rube Goldberg assembly line.

*Obviously everybody and his sister is gonna link to this guy's cutesy
viral-entertainment here, but what the hell, bring on that monolithic
block of eyeballs. That was hard work.

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Here, Carla, Take This Guitar

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/04/gifter-in-chief.html

Gifter-in-Chief? Michelle Obama gives Carla Bruni a Guitar

April 05, 2009 8:07 AM

From Sunlen Miller and Yunji de Nies

Much has been said about the Obama’s gift giving recently. The Queens Ipod, the DVDs given to Gordon Brown after his visit to the White House.

But Michelle Obama may have struck the right cord (((that's "chord"))) with her gift to her newest friend, Carla Bruni -Sarkozy.

After meeting the wife of