Category: The Future
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Bring Your Camera to your Polling Place
On Election Day (Tuesday!), please bring a camera with you to your polling place and take some pictures of American democracy in action. Then submit your photos to the ingenious Polling Place Photo Project, which will document every one of America’s election locations through good old fashioned web-based citizen journalism. I can’t even begin to…
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Where Writers Can Learn from Programmers
I generally consider myself a capable writer, at least in the technical sense. In particular, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how to punctuate properly in written English. But there are some areas where the language’s “standards” are in continual dispute, some areas where I think the standards are just plain logically…
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A Movie Studio in Your Pocket
Stills from Nuovi Comizi d’Amore (New Love Meetings) by Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi. Two Italian filmmakers, Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi, have completed a feature-length movie shot entirely with a mobile phone. It’s an interview-centered documentary, which seems the ideal form for a mobile phone movie. Here’s what they have to say about the…
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Video Lingo vs. Web Lingo: What is “Broadband”?
TV snow, soon to join the record-needle scratch and the dial tone in technology oblivion. It’s well-known that the entertainment industry has its own distinct and secret language. Variety magazine’s slanguage is infamous, in which “mitting” is applause, a “skein” is a TV series, an “oater” is a western, and, most confusing of all for…
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Be Evil?
What if Sergei Brin and Larry Page were actually evil? What if they were in reality sinister villains planning to take over the world, like Lex Luthor or Dr. Doom? If so, they’re certainly going about it with great efficiency, controlling all of the instruments we use to function in the information age: web search,…
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I am large, I contain multitudes.
Emily Dickinson’s totally awesome MySpace page In which half-baked connections are made between American poetry and Internet social networking. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is like an 19th-century personal homepage, in which the poet constructs his profile/identity with the stuff he sees in his neighbors, peers, family, friends, and countrymen. He gives shout-outs to his…
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Social Networks are Brands
Six Apart, maker of MoveableType and TypePad, has apparently been recalibrating their product development away from targeting professional web developers like me and towards the massive “teen/tween” market. TypePad was the first step in this direction, but now they’ve been working on a new social networking app called Vox which is obviously designed to enter…