Review of Ong's Orality In chapter three Ong provides a list of the characteristics of the way people of a primary oral culture think and express themselves through narrative and discusses them in light of memory. The characteristics of thought and expression are as follows:
1. Expression is additive rather than subordinative.
2. It is aggregative rather than analytic.
3. It tends to be redundant or "copious."
4. There is a tendency for it to be conservative.
5. Out of necessity, thought is conceptualized and then expressed with relatively close reference to the human lifeworld.
6. Expression is agonistically toned.
7. It is empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced.
8. It is Homeostatic.
9. It is situational rather than abstract.
All of the above characteristics contribute to the saliency and, consequently, enhance the memorability of an utterance. Ong explains that this would be especially important to those trying to memorize a poem or a tale because, whereas people from a liter ate society can always refer back to a written text, those from an oral society must be able to process and memorize bits of spoken, otherwise irretrievable information quickly.

Slashdot | RMS Says Free Software Is Good Nowadays you see scientists act as if they're in gangs at war with other little gangs of scientists ... we're all held back." And not just scientists -- of anyone who uses computers in the workplace, Stallman said that in the absence of a broad right to modify and improve the software they use, "Their lives and jobs are going to be frustrating -- people protect themselves from frustration by deciding not to care. When this happens, it's bad for those people and for society as a whole."

PowerPoint Invades the Classroom The teacher, Anna Rubio, had asked the students to use PowerPoint to create an electronic portfolio, describing and linking to digital projects that they had done during the year.
One by one, students lumbered up to a computer at the front of the dimly lighted room and opened their slides, which appeared on a screen behind them. They did not say a word or even look at their audience, but simply clicked the mouse button, drilling through their presentations in silence. Wild graphics, garish colors and bold titles flashed by. Their classmates paid almost no attention and, like bored employees stuck in a late-day board meeting, looked at their own computer screens instead.
"I asked them if they wanted to read it or show it," Ms. Rubio said. "I guess no one wanted to read it."

PowerPoint Invades the Classroom PowerPoint's most pernicious quality, critics say, is its potential for substituting presentation polish for thinking skills. The software is not merely a word processor with large fonts: it can also serve as a silent guide on the art of persuasion. Step-by-step instructions are offered by what Microsoft calls the Autocontent Wizard, a tool that provides a template for building an argument. The wizard never fails to offer instructions. Click to add Topic No. 1. Insert real-life examples here

Bibliographical management Bibliographical management and note-taking

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Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentiaiiy the same objcctions commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274-7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind. Today, parents and others fear that pocket calculators provide an external resource for what ought to be the internal resource of memorized multiplication tables. Calculators weaken the mind, relieve it of the work that keeps it strong. Thirdly, a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you can get an explanation, if you ask a text, you get back nothing except the same, often stupid, words which called for your question in the first place. In the modern critique of the computer, the same objection is put, 'Garbage in, garbage out'.

There's more, but I ran out of buffer. And I am still not letting my four year old play with the computer...yet...

The Standard: Nouveau Niche Here's how OpenCola works. Say you enjoy reading about rock climbing. You'd install an OpenCola program on your computer and feed it a couple of rock climbing articles, or simply type in some keywords, such as "flapper," "hang-dogging" and "dirt me." OpenCola will construct a software robot (sort of a single-purpose search engine) that goes onto the Net to dig up stuff that matches your criteria. It does two kinds of digging. First, it fetches files from the Web just like any other search spider. But the robot goes one step further by looking for other users' OpenCola robots looking for the same kinds of things you are. Then, your robot grabs files the other users have fetched and found worthwhile. In other words, you benefit from the decision-making of the other like-minded OpenCola users. It's like a Web-size version of Amazon.com (AMZN)'s "people who liked that book will like this book" service.



The guy who started this company, Cory Doctorow, is a total Disney obsessive, a feted science fiction writer, and just an all around Freak. I like it when interesting people do interesting things and aren't kicked down by The Man.

Test.

Test.

Whole Earth: Discovery One lovely aspect of discovery is that the required human talents defy rankings, formal education, and professions. This next section will tell a few discoverer tales: of tour guide Ted Parker, a man who held 4,000 bird songs in his head; of novelist Vladimir Nabokov's contribution to butterfly naturalist history; of parataxonomists changing from their lives as farmers to become sharp-eyed field collectors; of painter Audubon's tricks on the true maniac, Rafinesque. Add to these every sort of "amateur" and "professional" naturalist, as well as the academic specialist (Miriam Rothschild and her love of fleas; E.O. Wilson on ants) and you cook up quite a wonderful dialog, tinged with competition, possessiveness, ego and cross-checking, but fundamentally honoring the pursuit of mysteries in life.



I'm always interested in amateur (read: untainted by petty disciplinary politics) scholarship and people following their scholary bliss.

Textism And when I finally saw a copy, it was, as a physical object, an aberration. A POD book is essentially this: a coarsely laser-printed wad of paper bound within an inch of its life by half a pound of adhesive and an even more coarsely colour laser-printed cover (solid colours mottled, continuous tones broken up into chunky screen dots), laminated with crappy Saran Wrap that curls the cover outward.
After a year of this nonsense we’ve given up. Through the combination of an Old Economy offset printer and an Old Paradigm distribution house, the author’s books are now arriving safely into the hands of those who pay for them, who in turn get to curl up with something that isn’t the publishing equivalent of a cheap plastic toy.

UNC Writing Center Handout | Writing Your Dissertation The dissertation marks the transition from student to scholar and is stressful as a result.

When you embark on this large, independent project, you may begin to ask yourself questions about your future in academia. After all, the dissertation is the beginning of the end of a graduate career. When you finish your dissertation, you have to change your life pretty dramatically —you may go on the job market, begin work as an independent scholar, develop classes, move out of a community that you have grown to love, and so on. You may also feel like your dissertation will begin to define your professional identity. You may feel like your research interests, your theoretical influences, and your skill as a writer may all be evaluated by this first piece of serious scholarship. Whether any of these points are true or not, you may find yourself questioning your commitment to your chosen profession or topic and unable to begin the dissertation.



You may start to feel like your head will explode like a bowl of hot lasagna in a microwave if you don't turn in your @#$@#$ prospectus sooooon.

The Chronicle: Career Network: 05/18/2001 I watched my mentors in college and graduate school driven to play Ping-Pong with their academic careers and their children's lives. I haven't had to sacrifice my children for my job or my job for my children. That ease has brought me closer to my work -- just as being a parent has brought me closer to my students.

The desire to meld my work and family life is also what brought me to the community college. It is yet another reason that I can say without qualification: Both professionally and personally, teaching at a community college is the best thing that ever happened to me.



What? Teaching at a community college isn't a shameful admission of defeat? Imagine that!

Diary by Zac Unger, Firefighters' favorite diversion: wildly elaborate practical jokes.  by Zac Unger The worst thing about CPR is that it is almost never effective, yet we persist in this ritual flogging of the dead. By definition we only attempt the procedure on dead people—folks with no pulse or respiratory effort—so the rate of success is understandably low. CPR works best with people who are young and healthy to begin with and suffer some sudden offense to the heart like electrocution or drug overdose. The first time I worked somebody up was early on a Christmas morning, a 27-year-old man who had been shot point-blank in the head. I pumped on him vigorously all the way to the hospital, rode the gurney like they do on television so I could keep doing compressions right into the E.R. Out of breath, I gave my report to a bored-looking trauma surgeon who glanced at me, glanced at the clock on the wall, and said only, "Time of death: 7:23. Thank you, gentlemen." End of story.



Ok. This is the last link I post without some commentary. Because then it's not really a weblog, just glorified bookmarks.

Matchstick Rocket Website Welcome to the Matchstick Rocket Lab, one of the few matchstick rocket web sites on the Internet. On this site, find out how to make matchstick rockets for both wooden and paper matches, with tips to help you fly them.

We have Wash Your Hands! posters, we have Everyone Poops bumper stickers, we have Animal Tails posters. Send us a self addressed stamped envelope: 9 inch by 12 inch envelope with 5 oz. worth of postage for the posters; 9 inch by 4 inch envelope with 1 oz. worth of postage for a bumper sticker.

info@kanemiller.com

Attn: free stuff

Kane/Miller Book Publishers

PO Box 8515 La Jolla, CA 92038

(858)456-0540 phone

(858)456-9641 fax

TNR Online | Automatic Writing by Keith Gessen In the late 1980s, Deena Larsen attempted to construct a spatial epic in her room by linking poems, which were glued to model railroad houses, with thread and train tracks. Around the same time, the poet Robert Kendall was supporting himself by writing reviews of new presentation software; with the software already on his computer, he began to experiment with turning his poems into visual presentations, lugging the (desktop) computer to his readings to show animated text synchronized with music. Something was in the air.

Plastic | David Gelernter's New Desktop For the past year or so, I've found myself using my mail client, Eudora, as my default scratch notepad; when I need to jot down a number or sketch out a few quick ideas or take notes during a meeting -- anytime I'm doing quick, spontaneous writing -- I find myself doing it in an email message, and not a word processor or a notepad application. It took me a while to notice that I had developed this habit, but once I did, I tried to figure out what was drawing me to Eudora over more conventional tools.

Mitsubishi Eclipse Song Answer The song is "Start the Commotion" by the Wiseguys.

The Register "The problem with today's Internet is that it's dumb, boring, and isolated," said the company's CEO and chairman George F. Colony. "News, sports, and weather imparted on static Web pages offer essentially the same content presented on paper, which makes the online experience more like reading in a dusty library than participating in a new medium. Now that the novelty has faded, business executives and consumers are going back to reading newspapers and watching TV. Ultimately, the Net hasn't truly become a part of our real worlds."

The Register Email is the biggest headache for tech support staff and a major cause of stress in the workplace, according to a survey out today.

More than a third of IT managers quizzed for the report in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific said email software was the top support problem, says software company Support.com.

Around 23 per cent blamed computer password resets, and 20 per cent cited general enterprise and office applications, such as Microsoft Excel. Ten per cent said networking software errors were the top problem.

bluejack.com ~ the twiddler the speed (or rather, the lack thereof) is frustrating.

every five minutes i toss the thing aside, resume my usual

breakneck pace, and only put it on when i have a very short

email to write, or have a few moments set aside to practice

during.

JamCam hacking Hacking the JamCam

Phantom Model Sports Next, we ran the car at full speed into the wall of the shop. Smack!, and not a scratch, reversed the car and repeated it many times. Apart from paint falling off, I am impressed! We rolled the car, made jumps and ran it down a flight of stairs. Results - not a bruise. The car was taken to the bitumen and concrete carpark next door. On concrete, the standard tyres did not have much traction due to the amount of dust on the floor. At times, we had to brush and clean the mechanical speed controller to keep the car going. On bitumen, excellent grip, however, the tyres were getting chopped up pretty badly, deep scratches also started to appear under the chassis. This is due to the low ground clearance of this car.

MbizCentral, Gateway to the Mobile Economy, m-analyst Adams described frustrated cell phone users driving down Interstate 101 seeking a "pool of reception" -- and then driving as slowly as possible while they were in it.

Salon.com Technology | So long, Douglas Adams, and thanks for all the fun "Anything that's invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things," said Adams. The very young, in contrast, aren't even aware of a natural order that's supposedly being violated. "Anything that's in the world when you're born is considered ordinary and normal." He illustrated his point with a story from his own family. When Adams eavesdropped on his 6-year-old daughter pushing her doll's baby carriage, she was mimicking the satellite navigation system in her father's car

Quit Slashdot.org Today! Alternatives to Slashdot

Twiddler The Twiddler is a pocket-sized mouse pointer and keyboard that straps into the palm of one’s hand leaving the other hand free. It plugs into both keyboard and serial ports on IBM-compatible PC's and works on DOS, MS Windows, Unix, and Palm Pilot operating systems. Its special keypad incorporates "chord" keying which consists of pressing key combinations to generate a specific character. With only 12 finger keys and 6 thumb keys, the twiddler can emulate the 101keys on the standard keyboard.

Advantages for Nursing:

Could replace more archaic methods of transcription

One-handed operation leaves the other hand free

Sealed construction eliminates dust and dirt problems

Fast learning curve claimed by the manufacturer

Yahoo! Groups : dem-press Messages :Message 48 of 49 AL GORE WON FLORIDA BY 145 VOTES - GEORGE W. BUSH SHOULD RESIGN



According to statewide count of Florida's 111,261 overvotes by the Miami

Herald and USA Today, Al Gore gained 682 clear votes - more than enough to

eclipse the 537 vote lead held by George W. Bush when the U.S. Supreme

Court stopped the recount on December 12.



Had these votes been counted on Election Day - as required by Florida law -

Al Gore would have been declared the winner by 145 votes.

Salon.com News | California gas artificially overpriced El Paso Natural Gas Co. and its affiliates negotiated contracts with each other and boosted the cost of natural gas nearly 500 percent during the 12 months ending in February, the Energy Oversight Subcommittee says in a report to be issued Monday



Deep in the Heart, of Texas!

elearningpost - June 2001: Grassroots KM [Knowledge Management] through blogging One line of KM thought says that the problem with information is that there's too darn much of it. Thus KM is really about selective forgetting. This part of the culture uses words like "filter," "focus," and "knowledge mining." Another cultural segment says that the problem with information is that it lacks context. KM is about seeing the broader implications of information. You hear words such as "strategic," "trends," "synthesizing," and "mapping." Each of these approaches takes an aspect of information and tries to ratchet it up so that it becomes knowledge.

kulesh.org - Weblogging: Lessons learned Weblogging: Lessons learned

elearningpost - June 2001: Grassroots KM through blogging There can be no doubt that blogging is a form of storytelling. Let us look at some of the salient features of stories and how they map on to blogs

elearningpost - June 2001: Grassroots KM through blogging Storytelling could provide a useful tool for capturing and disseminating knowledge in organizations. Stories are already a necessary part of an organization’s life. They are told around the water cooler, confidentially whispered in the elevator, distributed via email. Moreover, organizations are beginning to understand that storytelling is not an optional extra. Stories are something that already exist as an integral part of defining what that organization is, what it means to buy from it, what it means to work for it.

The Peculiar Ruins of the New Economy Now we're at one of those pivot moments, when one fascination pales and the next object of our entrancement and contempt hasn't come into view. What will it be? Biotech? Religion? Only Madonna knows for sure

The Peculiar Ruins of the New Economy And so just like a used-bong sale in 1978 or a yellow-tie auction in 1990, scenes like this, replicated across the country, bring a psychological decade to a sobering close. What started out as the biggest revolution in communications since Gutenberg ends up as a giant yard sale. Ironists will note that the technological revolution, which was supposed to move us beyond materialism, certainly is producing a lot of junk. Schadenfreuders, on the other hand, are now getting more pleasure out of the dot-com collapse than the dot-commers ever got out of their ascent.

MIRACLES OF THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS The best way of visualizing the new world of A.D. 2000 is to introduce you to the Dobsons, who live in Tottenville, a hypothetical metropolitan suburb of 100,000. There are parks and playgrounds and green open spaces not only around detached houses but also around apartment houses. The heart of the town is the airport. Surrounding it are business houses, factories and hotels. In concentric circles beyond these lie the residential districts.

Tottenville is as clean as a whistle and quiet. It is a crime to burn raw coal and pollute air with smoke and soot. In the homes electricity is used to warm walls and to cook. Factories all burn gas, which is generated in sealed mines. The tars are removed and sold to the chemical industry for their values, and the gas thus laundered is piped to a thousand communities.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Lament for Douglas Adams He laughed at himself with equal good humour. At, for example, his epic bouts of writer's block ("I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by") when, according to legend, his publisher and book agent would lock him in a hotel room, with no telephone and nothing to do but write, releasing him only for supervised walks. If his enthusiasm ran away with him and he advanced a biological theory too eccentric for my professional scepticism to let pass, his mien at my dismissal of it would always be more humorously self-mocking than genuinely crestfallen. And he would have another go.



Richard Dawkins, on Douglas Adams.

Wanna Be a Project Manager? Project management isn't rocket science. People have been doing it for a long time in many disciplines other than Web production, such as software and game development.

(((Meanwhile, as I was saying earlier, 2001 is
America's 1983 Redux. People who didn't believe that Al
Gore invented the Internet should be properly surprised to
see it vanish so quickly without him around. In the
corny zeitgeist of Bush II, 1989 never took place, so
we've got Cold War II, Energy Crisis II, Star Wars II, and
Stagflation Economy II, while telephone monopolies and
giant oil companies rule the Congress.
--Bruce Sterling,

Using the Internet to Pick up Babes and/or Hunks . I may look like a wreck myself with my sagging flesh and fluorescent tan but after watching 97,000 hours of network television, I feel entitled to a life partner who looks like Christie Brinkley.

Plastic | Reducing The Juice By Zipping The Lip -- Bush Recommends Email Cutbacks For California those damn email fairies, using up all our electricity! everyone knows when you don't give them their email they just stay asleep in their fairy cities, or "servers" whatever that means! I'm glad Bush understands email as much as me!

FEED | Digital Culture - The Taste Test I think -- and this is a subject on which reasonable people can disagree -- but I think that implicit information that's gathered about how people use information is much more valuable than explicit. The great example of that is the Nielsen ratings. It used to be that the Nielsen ratings were generated with journals. And the average American household according to Nielsen watched Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street.

FEED | Digital Culture - The Taste Test Interestingly enough, his latest, as-of-yet-unpublished book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, documents a future where Walt Disney World is run by an elaborate collaborative filtering system. The overlap between Doctorow's day job at OpenCola and his night job writing fiction makes for a unique combination: It's almost like William Gibson launching a company that sells neural plugs and stim-sims.

((((( Vox Pop ))))) Perhaps my all-time favorite non-fiction radio piece was produced in 1984 by Scott Carrier. For several months he hung with the mostly homeless protesters living across from the White House in "Lafeyette Park." These two 2.5-minute segments, from this 15-minute documentary5, start with Scott's intro narration, and end with one of the wackos Scott came to call a friend: 28K | 14K (5:21 excerpts).

Radio College - Speaker Series Scott Carrier replying to Rebecca Rumsey.

Karma applies to interviewing in that I think you
immediately get back what you give out, and it applies to
production or the finished piece in that I am responsible
and accountable for the validity of my work.

As far as Bowden is concerned, I like his work because he
doesn't write like anyone else. I like all those things
you mentioned about him. He writes what he wants to write,
and doesn't worry about the critics. Maybe someday he'll
get the attention that he deserves. Right now, hardly
anyone reads him.

As far as your other questions, I just don't understand
them. Sorry. Maybe if you could say them in another,
simpler, way. It seems like you're asking, How do I know
I'm doing the right thing? And the answer to that is I
don't. I just try to do the best thing I can think of at
the time. It's entirely possible I'm completely f***ed up,
most of the time.

Reply to Nick:

I really like that sentence, "Monday morning I call a big
drum woman at the Mole Lake Chippewa." I bet it was a good
piece of tape.

Radio College - Speaker Series Reply to Phil Easley's question about hearing good tape.

Phil, if you can be moved emotionally by other people's
stories, then you are capable of being moved by tape that
you gather yourself. If you have some tape that doesn't
seem to be doing anything, then go get some more, either by
re-interviewing the same people and asking the questions
that you really want answers to, or by finding somebody
new. "If the wine is no good then throw it
out"--Charleston Heston in "The Agony and the Ecstasy" (I
think). The process is usually painful. Another piece of
advice, from the writer Charles Bowden--"Do what you want
to do", meaning, first figure out who you are, and then
don't be swayed by other people's opinions and rules. Ask
yourself, What do I have to lose? In radio, the answer is
usually, not much.

Scott Carrier

Wonder if this works for research.

Linux Magazine | February 2001 | FEATURES | Double Agents Of course, Linux is good for a lot more than just serving up Web pages -- a Linux box running SAMBA makes a better SMB-based file and print server for Windows clients than native Windows servers do. We've all heard stories of system administrators who snuck a Linux server running SAMBA into a Windows network, and the only thing users noticed was that the file server seemed to be faster and never crashed any more.

TIME.com: Health -- The Nun Study So he and Mortimer, along with University of Kansas psychologist Susan Kemper, began analyzing the autobiographies for evidence of such extra capacity. Kemper, an expert on the effects of aging on language usage, had earlier shown that "idea density" — the number of discrete ideas per 10 written words — was a good marker of educational level, vocabulary and general knowledge. Grammatical complexity, meanwhile, was an indicator of how well memory was functioning.

TIME.com: Health -- The Nun Study Because the records were relatively standardized, Snowdon could extend his study of aging far beyond the few years in late life that such studies traditionally cover. Most precious of all were the autobiographies written by each sister on her entry into the order. They were full of basic information about where the sisters were born, who their parents and siblings were, and why each one decided to join the order. With these documents, moreover, Snowdon now had an objective measure of the sisters' cognitive abilities while they were still young and in their prime. An epidemiologist could not have designed a better way to evaluate them across time. "For many years," says the National Institute's Suzman, "we had an inadequate sense of how connected late-life health, function and cognition were to early life. But in the past decade, spurred by the Nun Study, there is a growing appreciation for that connectedness."

William Gibson Globe and Mail Story "I'm owning Rydell's awareness of its banality. It probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, I've been much more conscious of that over the last few years. It's probably because my friend Jack Womak has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south, in a culture that violence had always been a part of. It wasn't an aberration, though I realise that in retrospect, it was. I grew up in the part of the U.S. where all of Cormack McCarthy's novels are set -- that's a pretty violent place. There's violence in my culture. It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is -- that evil is inherently banal."

William Gibson, on the banality of Southern Violence.

OJR Tools of the Trade: Web Publishing with XML Online media conferences are rife with talk of XML. Industry pundits proclaim how well it slices, dices and tenderizes your cherished Web sites. The term adorns headlines in all the weekly rags on the boss's desk, but no one can figure out how to translate the gloss into something of substance for your online presence. It seems to be everything to everyone -- but what is it?

SIQSS Home Page The Press Release for the Study of the Social Consequences of the Internet are now available, as well as the Preliminary Report. The Preliminary Report requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. All available documents and information concerning the Internet Study can be found at this page. The Principal Investigators are Norman Nie and Lutz Erbring.


The Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society (SIQSS) is dedicated to employing empirical data, and statistical methods informed by the best of social theory, to address complex questions about the nature of society and social change.

University Creates World's First Internet Institute LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Oxford University says it will create the world's first institute dedicated to studying the Internet.
The Oxford Internet Institute, set up at a cost of $22 million, will carry out research and make policy recommendations about what effects the Internet has on society.
``You can already shop, bank, vote, debate, argue, consult a doctor and get your degree over the Net -- and do so all around the globe,'' said Andrew Graham, Master-Elect of Balliol College, where the institute will be based.
``However, there is also an enormous amount of rubbish out there and some material that is harmful,'' he said in a statement late on Friday.

Mark Warschauer's Recent Papers Mark Warschauer's Recent Papers (Partial List)
The Internet and Society
Warschauer, M. (2000). What is the digital divide? Work in progress. (Download in PDF format).
Warschauer, M. (in press). Does the Internet bring freedom? Information technology, education and society.

Engaged: Conference: inkwell.vue, Topic 111 >surfed several of the hot ones for a year. He said they were all about
>everyone's mood swings, medications, cat, cubicle job, car...

Actually it sounds like your friend wasn't surfing weblogs, but was rather
surfing web diaries, a phenomenon that preceded weblogs by a couple of
years. Web diaries or web journals are entirely personal sites, and many of
them are very popular, but they tend to be quite different from weblogs.

Most weblogs, in fact, contain little personal information; a lot of them
are just annotated link lists (this is the "canonical" format for weblogs).
The ones more interesting to me, however, are those that contain not only
lists of links with brief comments, but also contain the author's personal
thoughts and insights, sprinkled with some tidbits from their personal life
to give them a more concrete and embodied flavor. My favorite weblogs
(some of which I listed in my introductory post, above) are of this style;
a combination of personal journal, personal commentary and thoughts, and
references to interesting developments in art, science, technology, and
other things.

P2PTracker - Opinion | 7 Questions with Cory Doctorow Give us a brief history of OpenCola and tell us how it works.
OpenCola was the brainchild, initially at least, of Grad Conn, John Henson, and me -- the three founders of OpenCola. We set out to build a technology that we could use to stay abreast of some Web sites, finding new stuff that interested us and suggesting it to our attention. Feature-creep and fertile imaginations set in and before long, we were talking about building a gargantuan, generalized, realtime collaborative filter -- whew! -- that is, a piece of software that you could throw any kind of file at, and it would nearly instantaneously put that file in front of everyone who'd likely be interested in it.
In the real world, this turns out to be something very like a "TiVo for the Internet" -- a piece of software that figures out what your about by looking at some explicit information (dropping files you like into your Folder, telling your TiVo to record your favorite program), and thereafter devotes itself to tirelessly scouring the Internet for two things:

Fortune.com Free to Be Mezines
While online content plays continue to struggle for profits, a growing group of writers are finding personal publishing may also make for good business.

Plastic | Never Let Them See You Sweat -- Harvard Sit-In, Day 16 I think it's great to see ultra-smart people doing something positive for the community, rather than building doomsday devices to hold the Super Bowl hostage, or devising giant lasers that would blow up the earth unless a hefty ransom is paid.

Someday these kids are going to be sitting in a giant office, smoking cigars that they lit with hundred dollar bills and deciding which small town factory to shut down. But for now, they're giving something back. And that's really something.

AskTog: Internet Perspective The day of endless free stuff on the web is coming to a close. It may be replaced with a foolish economic model requiring endless and expensive subscriptions to services most people would rarely use. It may be built on a model that allows a whole lot of people to pay a tiny price for accessing those tiny pieces of information they actually need, either through micropayments or some sort of collective purchase system, a la AOL. If it is the former, the Web will grow slowly. If it is the latter, it will grow vigorously. Either way, it will grow.

Handheld Library Handheld Library
Resources for handheld devices.

This page contains all of the LDS stuff for your palm pilot. It requires you to download *their* specialized reader, which is pretty good but also proprietary. Ugh. You can get conference talks, sunday school reading schedules, the priesthood/relief society manuals, etc.

peanutpress.com: Home Free Download
Palm OS v1.0.2 English--palm reader

This is the palm doc reader put out by Peanut Press. It's got more features than Cspotrun, but may only use proprietary doc formats.

Visor Village: Text Editors: DocInOut DocInOut 2.41

This is a great program for converting plain text to palm pilot docs.

Avantgo Blogger A Blogger client for Avantgo

No Gadget Safe From Home-Style Hacks No Gadget Safe From Home-Style Hacks

gladwell dot com-- The Pitchman If Ron had been the one to introduce the VCR, in other words,
he would not simply have sold it in an infomercial. He would also
have changed the VCR itself, so that it made sense in an infomercial.
The clock, for example, wouldn't be digital. (The haplessly blinking
unset clock has, of course, become a symbol of frustration.) The
tape wouldn't be inserted behind a hidden door--it would be out
in plain view, just like the chicken in the rotisserie, so that
if it was recording you could see the spools turn. The controls
wouldn't be discreet buttons; they would be large, and they would
make a reassuring click as they were pushed up and down, and each
step of the taping process would be identified with a big, obvious
numeral so that you could set it and forget it.

O'Reilly Network: JavaScript: How Did We Get Here? [Apr. 06, 2001] JavaScript has conquered the Web. So why don't you know more about it? What is there to know? How should you begin to address your long-standing neglect of this powerful and mature language? We'll address these issues and more in our next article.

About Xanga Premium Xanga will always offer its Xanga Classic accounts for FREE. But we're excited to announce a new level of services - Xanga Premium - that make it even easier for you to publish online and get even more out of your Xanga Site. It's also the best way to help support the Xanga Community!

Novice vs. Expert Users (Alertbox Feb. 2000) It is time to take expert user performance more seriously on the Web.

Novice vs. Expert Users (Alertbox Feb. 2000) It is time to take expert user performance more seriously on the Web.

Boston Globe Online / Living | Arts / Obsession with writing is a world unto itself Writers - and engineers and scholars and scientists and inventors and lawyers and detectives - who are fortunate to find a problem that cannot be contained in a course or a semester look up one day and find a lifetime has passed and an itch has become a career.

Pearson Techonology Group - Literacy Acquisition and Social Context Literacy Acquisition and Social Context 1/e

Delivery Action research points in the direction of a Copernican revolution in professional development and school improvement by placing teacher learning, rather than teacher training, in a prominent position in the teacher-education sky.

ITworld.com - Conquering the interview: An ITworld.com special report "No one is better qualified to cover the subject of interviews," he confesses. "I job-hopped my way through life making every interview mistake in the book, short of hurling obnoxious interviewers out windows. I speak from experience."