Date: December 2009
Emmet Connolly over at Thoughtwax writes about the virtues of taking things slowly:
Without the restrictions of regular media, we pajama-wearers can do whatever we want. For the most part, something is written when it’s ready to be written, and then it’s only as long as it needs to. Some people, like me, have very few things to say, so we say them infrequently.
Indeed, there’s much to be said for “the idea of posting infrequently as a deliberate editorial approach”.
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I love Murakami, and I don't care about the clichés (the enigmatic women, the jazz, the pasta), nor that his stories are one-off experiences (as I never re-read books anyway). #link
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This is lovely. I can haz it now? #link
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This is a great idea (more about it here) akin to the countdown timers for pedestrians on many traffic lights here in Dublin. Those certainly work for me -- but then my mammy raised me right. #link
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I thought this was how everyone did it. #link
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O RLY? Actually this might be one of the few instances where the comments section is better than the article itself -- which needless to say is hideously ill-informed. #link
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"The essence of [the] argument is dead on: superior fidelity and resolution is terrific but overrated in comparison to convenience... Actually, it’s the content that really matters." Hear, hear! Fidelity is great and all, but there comes to a point when I care less about the quality and more about the content. Actually, it's more a spectrum of appreciation than any fixed point on a graph. #link
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The annual Google Zeitgeist seems like the only time of year when us English-speaking Westerners realise that there's a whole other world out there using the web just like we are. #link
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Do people really still believe that (the vast majority of) artists get anything like a fair deal from major labels? #link
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Courtesy of the Royal Society, a pretty neat timeline of cultural and scientific achievements from 1650 to the present (and beyond...) #link
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I thought this was an Onion story for a minute. #link
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Nice of the Guardian to pay tribute to Captain Lou. #link
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Matt Jones of BERG describes the company's work in the tangible-ness of intangible things. I particularly like the idea of raw data as a material to tell real stories that are 'human readable', for lack of a better expression. #link
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"If I was standing in 1995 and looking ahead to 2009 and was told how all of those technical restrictions would be lifted, of what would be technically possible, I’d imagine 2009’s web to look a lot more exciting than it does. I’d expect it to look less like a magazine or a newspaper and to look more like what the web could be." Agreed. But I think that the fact that this question is even being asked is a sign that we might see a more exciting web in the near future. The last few years have mostly been about function, about what's under the hood. But we've got that sorted, more or less; now's the time to have some fun with the web again. #link
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