Awake for an Hour: Some Items “Read”
I wonder how much of this I’ll retain. Probably not much, because I’m never actually reading. Always I’m just flipping through. Articles, books, meals, conversations…. I think we do it more than we realize. And it hurts us.
But for now we won’t worry about that. Just enjoy these:
“Vinyl May be Final Nail in CD’s Coffin” at Wired:
“For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release,” said Matador’s Patrick Amory. “The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music.”
A nine-year-old on file sharing at TorrentFreak (via Kottke):
TF. Do you think it’s ok to copy the music?
- Yes it’s ok because she only does it to make her page better.
TF. So you’re sure that it’s ok to copy it? What do you think about copying?
- I suppose it’s not ok to copy but people copied it off her site so she just copies theirs. It’s like, you’re copying my t-shirt so i’m copying you on shoes.
Jean Burgess “On Distributed Presence (and Blogrolls)”:
… perhaps the lack of a strong explicit interest among bloggers in pursuing the idea of blogging as a networked practice is due to the obsessive characterisation of blogs as a kind of ‘personal publishing’ (or at most ‘journalism’), and the continued reification of ‘authorship’, rather than as a conversational or networked form of cultural production. And in fact, perhaps the technological architectures and relatively stable cultural norms around blogging simply shape it towards individualistic and self-referential forms of textual production.
Summary of Matthew Ericson’s InfoVis keynote, “Visualizing Data for the Masses: Information Graphics at The New York Times” at information aesthetics:
I was happy to hear Matt talking about some of the intricacies of bringing visualization to “the masses.” For instance, he mentioned how certain visualization techniques that are favored by the scientific community actually do not work well for lay users. Premier in this category was the scatterplot. That’s right, good ol’ scatterplots are not used by the NY Times because readers simply can’t make sense of them (a lot of people expect to see time on the x-axis.)
