Collin Vs. Blog

Johndan has a post today titled "Why I Hate Blackboard," wherein he details his struggle with nigh-unusable "OK/Download" menus that Blackboard offers. I'm sure that there are sites out there that do nothing but complain about good old BB, but until I find them, allow me to offer my #1 pet peeve about the system which is standard at SU.

I taught on BB this summer, against my better judgment, and had much the same experience that Johndan did. The painstaking, multiple acknowledgement process by which any change (no matter how small) drove me positively insane. It's a perfect example of what's wrong with one-size-fits-all software.

My particular tick, though, lasted a good 6-7 weeks into the 12-week session. I wanted my students to swap drafts, respond to each others' writing, etc., but for some reason, several people in the course would post their work, it would appear on our course bulletin boards, and then be impossible to download.

The solution was simple. Every OS that I know of allows users to use spaces in file names. Upload it to the web however, and when someone else tries to access the file, it stops reading the title after the first space. Basic HTML: no spaces in file names. However, none of my students, and I would estimate some 95% of the instructors in our program, have no way of knowing this. Maybe it's changed, but at the time, there was nothing in the Help menus or FAQs to solve the problem, and the tech people in charge of the system had no clue.

And the results? Students couldn't access each other's writing. Often, I had to ask students to resubmit their work to me over email (i.e., circumvent the system). I looked like a twit who couldn't exercise any sort of control over my virtual classroom. And Syracuse locked themselves into perpetual upgrades and thousands of dollars per year in fees for a system that desperately needs a usability overhaul. Lucky us.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was out driving today, running errands, and I swept through McD's to grab a drink. Rather than having to chat into the squawk box, I pulled up and found a young woman standing outside about 10 feet away, taking orders. She did so on one of those notepad computers, not unlike the little portable units that you might see on Star Trek. Not quite as small as a Palm, but obviously much lighter than a laptop.

Next step: a swipe alley on the side of the notepad for one of my cards.

Next step: beam the drink directly to my cupholder.

Next step: merger with OnStar, for anywhere service.

You heard it here first.

Posted by cgbrooke at 7:15 PM | Permalink

From the Eyebeam reBlog comes this link, to VisitorVille, which advertises itself as "a cutting-edge program that takes a radical new visual approach to web analytics." Not for the faint of wallet, this--the service costs anywhere from $30 to $170/month. And even if I wanted to pony up for it (which I was thinking about doing for a month, just for fun and data), it is for the faint of OS (Windows only).

What's interesting about the site is that it tracks website visits/visitors/etc., and offers them to you in a Sim City-style interface:

When you have many visitors on your web site, it begins to resemble midtown Manhattan, and it's hard to get your eyes off the screen! Buildings resize and illuminate dynamically based on the number of people inside, their relative popularity, and how many visitors exited through them. Buses, taxis, and limos race around the streets; pedestrians walk across crosswalks; helicopters ply the air. It's all very real, because it's reflecting something that's also very real: Your visitors are human beings, and they exhibit human behavior. They are not abstractions, and with VisitorVille you no longer have to think of them as such!

Fascinating stuff. Way way beyond what I will ever need, but I could definitely see how this kind of interface would be fun for someone in charge of some hardcore, high-traffic architecture...

Posted by cgbrooke at 7:11 PM | Permalink

Sébastien Paquet's posted a groovy bookmarklet that allows you, with a click of a menubar link, to use Bloglines to find all of the sites that are currently linking to the page you're on.

Very nice. And this was in response to a post by Lilia Efimova, wherein she surveyed the various tools that allow us to trace links in the absence of (or in addition to) trackbacks...

Posted by cgbrooke at 5:40 AM | Permalink

Will over at Weblogg-ed just made note of Seb's Bloglines tool, and says:

Now, if there was just a way to add that functionality to the end of each post, right next to the Trackback link...

I'm not exactly overflowing with technical skills, but I think I've managed it with a quick tweak to my MT template. I'll need to go to the individual & monthly archive templates and give it a try. Seems to work, though...I just used the BL script with the MTEntryPermalink as the URL, and put it in the template right after the comment and trackback scripts...

If someone's got a better idea for what to call it, besides "CiteLines" or "Seb's Bloglines bookmarklet," drop me a note...

And while I'm thinking about it: Seb, if you read this, is there a way to retrieve the number of results from Bloglines as well, and to put it in parentheses as part of the link?

Posted by cgbrooke at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've seen this announcement in a couple of different places (and confirmed it): it seems that the next iteration of Safari will come with an RSS aggregator. This is both welcome and important. Why? Here's Doc Searls (whose feed was I think the first place I heard it):

It isn't just RSS that's getting huge. It's that more people are getting their Web services without the complicating container we call a browser. What we're stating to see is another Web, alongside the static one we browse like the aisles in a store, or the stacks in a library, looking for finished goods to read or buy. This other Web isn't served up the same way as the one we've been browsing for the last eight years. We see it in a news aggregator, or a blog, or a message on a phone, or a search through an engine that only looks for fresh goods. Yes, you can see it in a browser too, but it's different in kind from the static stuff. Most importantly, it's live.

As someone whose reading habits have shifted quite a bit from browser to aggregator, I'll testify to this. There are a lot of people for whom the question isn't only "what's out there?" but also "what's new out there?" And this means that all sorts of definitions will have to change in response (like interactivity, as I mentioned a few days back, but also hits, blogrolls, etc.). It's already added a whole new dimension to my own interaction with the web.

Posted by cgbrooke at 3:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

As a couple of others have observed already, Bloglines has been up and running now for a year. In addition to a new site design that adds a few nice touches, they've added a service called clipping or clip blogs:

And we're really excited to introduce our biggest new feature:

Bloglines Clip Blogs

• The easiest way to create a blog
  
• Fully integrated with all your Bloglines news feeds
  
• One-click blogging from any Web page
  
• Subscribe to friends' Clip Blogs and get notified of updates
  
• Simply click on the 'My Blog' tab to set up your Bloglines Clip Blog
  
• Best of all, your Clip Blog is completely free -- just like the rest of Bloglines!

In addition, Saved Items have been renamed to Clippings, and you can easily move private, clipped items to your public blog and back again.

Interesting stuff. As Will implies, Bloglines has taken a pretty big step in the Furl direction with this, and I think it's a smart one. I like also how they're enabling various social features in their service--there was a point where I was thinking about switching over to Shrook, but Bloglines is keeping me loyal...

Posted by cgbrooke at 5:45 AM | Permalink

Steven Johnson was saying, just a couple of weeks ago:

Because what I need now in my iPod is not more storage space, or Mini-style color designs -- what I need is wi-fi. I want my iPod to double as an audio remote control when I'm sitting in my living room. I want to be able to call up any song on any computer in home network, and direct it to any set of speakers, right from the iPod scrollwheel.

I don't know that it's gotten to that point just yet, but the folks at engadget (a link caught at boingboing) now have a how-to column about turning your iPod into a universal infrared remote control. Pretty speedy service, and damn cool, to boot.

Posted by cgbrooke at 1:01 AM | Permalink

I've been thinking lately about the week-by-week for my spring course, and have been figuring out what the course requirements are going to be. First week, we'll spend the time with some of the applications (MT, Bloglines, Furl, del.icio.us, et al.) that I'll be asking them to use during the semester. At the same time, I'm mindful of the question that many of us academic bloggers are asked (and which Madeline and I talked about on Wednesday): where do you find the time to do all of it?

The obvious answer to this kind of question is that it's not really an addition on top of everything else, but a reordering of priorities, a revision of what, this summer, I called "mecology," or "the various ways that I manage and organize my space, time, resources, memory, information, etc." We're more familiar with the idea of a media ecology, a macroscopic network of various media that are both complementary and competitive, amidst which we locate ourselves. But lately, I've been thinking about mecology as the personal version of that--it's affected by the dynamics of the larger media and information ecologies, but there is a degree of agency involved as well.

I started thinking of this again while reading Ton Zijlstra's account of a workshop/discussion with Howard Rheingold:

One of the more interesting things to me was when Howard Rheingold showed us the tools he uses in his personal information strategy. For the bloggers in the room there really were not many surprises. RSS, BlogLines, Del.icio.us, all with actual screenshots, came up. He stresses weblogs as his community filters for information. Most people I talk to blogs about seem to think they're publications, sources next to other sources like papers, where I see them as conversations. Howard spends some 4 hours in the morning engaging with his on-line community and sources of information, after which he spends the afernoon writing. He does keep an eye on IM and e-mail in the afternoon though.

Ton also observes "how little we actually talk about our info-strategies, and info-diet, and the tools we use for it," and part of this, I think, comes from the attitudes that danah boyd is critiquing over at Operating Manual for Social Tools:

The ways in which tools for mediated sociability are conceptualized and analyzed must shift. No longer can we simply study how the user interacts with the tool, but instead we must consider how people interact with each other and how the tool plays a part in that interaction. Note: people, not users. The tool is not a primary actor in sociability, but a tool that mediates. People should not be framed in terms of the tool, but the tool framed in terms of their use.

I tend to shy away from speaking in terms of tools, but that may just be my fondness for abstractions speaking. I'd say that the difference danah is writing about here is the difference between taking a pretty narrow, positivist vision of individual "tools" and adopting instead a vision that understands people at the center of individual mecologies, that include not only tools and texts, but other people as well, all densely interconnected. There are undoubtedly huge fields of overlap in use patterns, but I expect that there are also some significant differences in the ways that some of us take up certain media, applications, tools. I take danah to be claiming, in part, that it's a mistake to try and erase those differences in the name of usability or HCI.

Of course, there's a lot of inertia against this shift, and the question about "how we find the time" is symptomatic of it. And if there's a place where that inertia is drummed into us on a daily basis, it's academia, where we tend to think first in terms of "areas" to be "covered," as though blogging were something like 19th century poetry, an entirely separate area of inquiry, rather than something that cuts across the very activity of academic inquiry (or at least has the potential to do so). One advantage I'll have, though, is that at least some of the students will already have been blogging (testimonials!), so I won't have as tough a case to make. And to a degree, I'll be able to build this into course requirements, with the hopes that eventually, blogging and the like will become more than simply homework. And I think that one of the ways that'll happen will be for me to be more explicit about the ways that my own mecology has changed over the past year...

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (3)

That was like the 2nd thing out of my mouth this morning. I spent a couple of hours today--if by "couple," I mean "as many as I could squeeze out of my day"--working over "The Hand that Feeds." And I should have a variation good enough for sharing in the next day or two. But what I learned was that I need moremoreMORE computing power.

Believe me or not, but I'm not really a power user. I tend to go with middle of the road specs on the machines I get, mainly because I'd rather spend what money I get on software and my attention on a broad range of things. I've found it exceedingly rare that I'll bump up against my capacity. But when Reznor says that he works on a laptop with a couple gigs of RAM, well, he's right to do so. I'm having to take some shortcuts to work with his file. I'm managing, but only just barely.

And oh yeah, I know next to nothing about music, and I have more respect daily for those who do. It's really opened my eyes, getting to unravel a fairly simple 3+ minute song.

And it's a whole lot of fun. Really.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I haven't gotten around to buying David Allen's book of that name just yet, but I have been trying to organize my life a little better. I'm thinking long and hard about requiring all of our students, in the year before they go on the market, to subscribe to Merlin Mann's 43 Folders, if for no other reason to add a relentlessly practical voice to all the other voices they have to deal with as they write dissertations, apply for jobs, etc.

I myself have been making personal use lately of Ta-Da lists, and we're using Basecamp as a way of keeping track (keeping us on track) of what we're doing with CCC Online. I'm even thinking about trying out Backpack as a way of keeping track of the various writing projects I'm always engaged in.

The point isn't so much that there's a single answer for each person's needs, and in fact, my engagement with these various tools waxes and wanes. But I've been thinking a lot lately about how I might manage my workflow better--right now, my operative metaphor is an ice cream on a hot summer day, where I have to keep licking around the edges to keep it from dripping and running all over my hand, without ever sizably decreasing the amount of ice cream. My organizational habits have been learned tacitly, from colleagues and professors, and even then, I never really asked about them or gave mine much conscious thought. They just sort of happened, and I always figured that, as long as I didn't piss too many people off or let too much slide, I was doing fine.

That's pretty weak stuff, though, and it doesn't really put me in a position to give advice to our graduate students, most of whom would benefit from an organizational overhaul about as much as I would, I'm guessing. In fact, I'm wondering if something like Basecamp wouldn't actually be a really interesting way of organizing the various exam and dissertation committees I'm on: I could open up a project page for each student that she or he and I would have access to, and we could collaborate on to-do lists and deadlines and use it to keep notes of meetings as well as chart progress. Hmmm.

That's all for now.

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I have to admit that I was all ready to read Kevin Kelly's piece for the NYT Magazine ("Scan This Book!") and to dislike it. I was ready to dismiss it as this decade's version of Robert Coover's "classic," "The End of Books." A number of blogs that I follow have been moderately aflutter in the wake of Kelly's article, which is normally a good sign, but then there's that exclamation point in the title. Never been fond of the exclamation point.

And predictably enough, it's precisely those places that warrant the exclamation point that I have the most trouble with. (for a nice critique of Kelly's hyperbole, along with a comment thread where Kelly himself makes an appearance, try Nicholas Carr.)On balance, though, the article was a good one. So here's the deal (this is Carr's summary):

By scanning, digitizing, and uploading the words printed on the pages of the dusty volumes caged in libraries, he says, we will free those words of their literal and figurative bindings. They will merge, on the web, into a greater whole providing a greater good:

The static world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of relationships [that we find in hyperlinked web sites], as each page in a book discovers other pages and other books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a [digital] library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book ... All the books in the world [will] become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas.

You will no longer have to read books piecemeal, one by one. Instead, says Kelly, you'll be able to surf from book to book "in the same way we hop through Web links, traveling from footnote to footnote to footnote until you reach the bottom of things."

I think that Kelly underestimates the amount of power and cultural inertia that books, and specifically book publishers, have for us, almost as much as Coover did. Telling for me is the comment from the CEO of HarperCollins, who doesn't "expect this suit to be resolved in my lifetime." I think that the front-end of Kelly's vision will ultimately prove to be a lot more problematic than any of us could possibly imagine.

But for me, that's not the biggest issue, although I can see how it would be for many people. Kelly's essay is less like Coover's and more like Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, now more than 60 years old. In fact, it would be instructive, I imagine, to place the two side-by-side in a course, and, barring references to the technologies of the time, see how closely they resemble one another. Bush's Memex runs on microfilm because that's what he's got technology-wise, but otherwise, there's a similarity in the vision offered by the two articles despite their temporal distance.

One important difference, though, is that Bush is fairly specific about the utility of the Memex--he begins his essay by highlighting a crisis in research that has certainly not abated in the past 60 years:

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. (Bush)

In other words, the Memex (and by extension here, Kelly's "liquid") is most useful for people who use books in a more extensive and varied sense than mere consumption. This is not to say that consumption is somehow "less than"--goodness knows, I do my fair share of consuming books--but I use books in a different way than most of my non-academic friends. Lots of different ways.

The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages. (Kelly)

Setting aside the hyperbole of this passage, what I see is a pretty fair description of some of the things that I do when I do research and write scholarship, although I can't speak for how deeply I weave my words into the culture. But my point is that this is a particularly "academic" list of goals for the vision that Kelly offers. His attempts to tie this universal library to other pop phenomena, though, is less persuasive for me:

Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or "playlists," as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. (Kelly)

Well, sort of. I think Kelly's right to note that this model will work for reference books (e.g., cookbooks, travel guides), because those are pop genres that are specifically built for use in a way that most other books are not. But I'm less convinced that short story anthologies, say, are going to take in the same way that iTunes playlists do, except among more esoteric subcultures. Like academia. Because to have a library shelf's worth of specialized information means, presumably, having to read that shelf's worth of information, whether front-to-back or side-to-skipping-side.

Despite some skepticism in my tone here, though, I like this essay. At the same time, I don't think that the vision offered by Kelly is quite as universal as he imagines, regardless of whether we're able to achieve it. I do, however, fervently believe that this vision will transform academic work (and other fields where research is a core element). I don't think that it's immodest of me to suggest that what we're doing with CCC Online represents baby steps in the directions that Kelly suggests, and so I'm particularly conscious of all the compromises and difficulties that even a single step in this direction entails. Like Steven, I believe that what's most interesting about this article are the hints towards "what kinds of writing and reading practices will emerge as all these books take on new digital lives," but I think that those will take even more time to sort out.

That is all for now.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You may recall that I wrote a couple of months ago about chipping away at my Inbox, and reducing it below the astronomical and shameful status of more than 1000 messages. Since that time, I've kept the Inbox roughly at 100 or so, shaving it back once it climbs to 150 or 200. (Yes, I get my share of email--this happens at least a couple of times a week.) Although it amounts to stalling other tasks on my part, I finally took a little more control over my email today, in the form of 2 plugins for Mail.app:

1. Letterbox: For the longest time, the vertical default arrangement for Mail was simply invisible to me. Then I saw a link to Letterbox over at 43F, and decided to give it a try. It helps that I have a fairly wide monitor. But now, I can see much more of my inbox than I could previously, and I'm able to set a mail message and its reply side-by-side without thinking about it. It took me all of 10 minutes to realize what I'd been missing from my mail interface.

2. Mail Act-On: A couple of weeks ago, Madeline and I were sitting in my office jawing about whatever and I hit upon the idea of being able to keystroke my incoming mail, so that I could color them according to a deadline threat level, e.g., red for "Do it now!", orange for "Do it today!" and so on. I didn't give it much thought beyond that.

Thank goodness someone else did. Act-On is a plugin that allows you to set up keystroke-handy Rules of the sort that Mail allows you to apply to incoming messages. In other words, when I am reading a message, I can bring up the Act-On menu and slot the message where I choose (or highlight it if I want). So my new mail order now consists of the following process:

Question 1: Does it require action? If so, then it goes into 1 of 6 folders, keyed to #'s 1 through 6 in Act-On, depending on immediacy (1=today, 2=next day or so, 3=this week, 4=this month, 5=this semester, 6 is a catchall for possible action items). I never leave the office with anything in folder 1, and I start each day by moving everything in folder 2 up, and I don't let the weekend pass without emptying folder 3. Them's the rules.

If no action is required, then Question 2: Should I archive it? If so, then I have a streamlined set of folders all gathered into a metafolder called Archive. Department business, student work, digital receipts, travel arrangements, correspondence, etc.--it all goes there.

If not, then delete the damn thing.

Start every day by emptying the inbox into 1 of 7 folders, and end every day by making sure that folder 1 (and sometimes 2 or 3) is empty. This is a plan I think I can live with.

Oh, and btw, Robin Benson maintains a pretty comprehensive page of plugins for Mac Mail users. It's how I found Act-On. For a more detailed description of it, there's an article I looked at from Macworld as well. If you're using Mail.app, this is definitely worth your attention...

That's all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 1:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last week, when I was young and impetuous, I made a couple of suggestion re the WPA Technology Outcomes Statement. In the interests of positivity, I thought I might revisit one of the suggestions, namely

How about developing an awareness of the variety of search strategies made possible by the combination of physical and electronic information sources?

One of the things that I think is hugely important here is that too many think "search" is simply a single process, delimited by pluses, minuses and quotes. "Strategies" too often refers to the ability to narrow your Google results down from 1 million to 50,000 or so. Problem is that this vision of search is not unlike bobbing for apples. It's a little flip of me to say so, I suppose, but it's true. And at one point, that's what web tech and search tools permitted.

With Google, the tools improved. The strategies? Not so much. For all of the good that Google did, driving out some truly horrid site design and searches so slow you could almost hear the hamster running in the wheel, PageRank was a huge advance that made us pretty darn lazy. There's still plenty of value to be had from Google, but it's still an information retrieval service. I use it on a daily basis, but I use it in a very specific, constrained way that takes advantage of speed and the particular needs I have.

What's happening now is something that Ebrahim Ezzy calls "Search 2.0" over at Richard MacManus's Read/Write Web:

Third-generation search technologies are designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models; they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make information more productive.

Yeah, yeah, third-gen but 2.0. Where this essay (part 1 of 2) potentially misleads is in the implication of 2.0 as something that will replace 1.0, when it's more likely that they will work in concert. One of the things that these new search engines have in common is their potential use specifically for Long Tail information. (I'll get to a review of that book one of these weeks.) The more specific the object of your search is, the fewer people there are who are likely to want it, and thus the less accessible it will be via Google, barring some arcane system of +this and -that. I'm not going to find a new book in my field via Google, unless it's to look up the web address of a publisher.

One of the things that Search 2.0 is about is not finding X, but finding Y who knows X. Here's an example: a friend asked me how I find new music. Usually, it's a combination of three things: what my friends (with similar tastes) are listening to, what selected reviewers (with similar tastes) are recommending, and what iTunes tells me are the proximate bands, songs, and playlists.

Let me talk about that last for a second, because it can sound counter-intuitive if you think about it. I'm talking about "searching" for something that I already know/have, in order to see what else is in its neighborhood. We do it in the library sometimes, right? If we know one book is useful, we might see what else is on the shelf around it. Now think about a service like del.icio.us as a site where thousands of users are building dynamic shelves or neighborhoods. Bookmark an article that you know you want to work with, and you can use del.icio.us to find all the other users who are bookmarking it, all the other things they've bookmarked beside it, and the terms they've used to categorize it.

Goodness knows, these systems and engines are far from perfect. Nick Carr, for example, observes that sites like Amazon are limited in their usefulness:

Fallows makes one observation that hits home with me. He describes how underwhelming he finds all the automated product recommendations that are always being thrown at you on the web. "In nearly a decade with Amazon," he writes, "I've yet to experience the moment of perfect serendipity when it discovers a book I really like that I wouldn't otherwise have known about." I, too, have been waiting years to experience that moment - with Amazon, with Netflix, with iTunes, with all of 'em.

These are Long Tail companies with Short Head motives, and so this isn't that surprising to me--their market share is built on factors other than specialist searches (like convenience, e.g.). I find Amazon almost completely useless for automated recommendations. But they also enable more specialized, community recommendations, and these I've found useful. If I've liked several of the books on a Listmania list, there's a good chance that I'll add one or more unread ones from it onto my Wish List. And there are a few situations where I've found autorecs useful, like when I'm returning to a particular genre after a hiatus, for instance.

As some of us non-science disciplines start to catch on to the benefits of these kinds of networks (e.g., AnthroSource, MediaCommons, et al.), the tools will exist that allow alot of people to bypass Google altogether. Not that the occasional apple bob isn't necessary, mind you, but it shouldn't be the first and last step.

The other little piece of optimism that I have is this: once we start acknowledging the value of this kind of searching and KM, then perhaps more broad-based support will exist for the construction of resources that take advantage of it. Imagine the iTunes interface, for instance, as a gateway to the scholarship in a discipline, where professors can put together "playlists" of texts in the same way that users now publish mixes, only these playlists are the syllabi for the graduate courses taught in the discipline or the bibliographies of our articles and books.

What I come bumping up against again and again is that we're too accustomed to treating our expertise as disposable. How many hundreds of times a year do we put together carefully thematic and specifically paced syllabi/playlists, only to bury them in desktop folders and wastepaper baskets? We don't collect that information in any systematic fashion because our vision of the web lacks an understanding of the motivation behind links and networks. Google was successful precisely because PageRank algorithmizes that motivation, and if these Search 2.0 tools succeed, it will be by leveraging the networks even further.

I hope we're not still bobbing for apples.

That's about it from me. There's some spots above that probably need filling out, but it's getting late. This is part of what I mean when I say that we need to understand search better, both for ourselves and for our students.

(Almost forgot: Dean)

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Paul has a nice reply to my earlier post, Derek's, as well as the comments that Jeff and I left over at his place. A couple of quick things I wanted to mention, maybe to pick up later:

I also feel that reading the professional literature has become much easier. I know what to read carefully (and several times) and what to skim through quickly because I can often predict where I might find certain arguments or pieces of information because of my genre knowledge. Sometimes I can even predict what the text is going to say before reading it based on my knowledge of what's been said and done; in those cases, reading is a matter of confirming my predictions and noting any discrepancies.

That's something that I should have mentioned but didn't, the fact that it does get easier. The advantage of any relatively closed network of texts is that we read for content, yes, but we also read for the strategies and tropes that frame that content. I like "genre knowledge" as a description of it. While it may be somewhat disconcerting to realize that there really aren't all that many ways to say what we have to say, I've always found that it makes my reading easier, too.

And lately, in the past year or two, I've really become interested in the kinds of mental mapping that we inevitably do as scholars. My personal crusade has been to think of ways that this mapping can be aggregated so that we aren't each reinventing the wheel, but on a smaller scale, I've been asking my students (in the last 3 grad courses I've taught) to really think explicitly about mapping as knowledge production.

And that's part of what I mean by managing the collection of academic texts and ideas. I think that there are intermediate steps between reading on the one hand and writing on the other, steps that can, if not shorten the distance between the two, at least allow us to make the transition with more certainty.

The tools that we're using to put together CCC Online are almost all available to anyone with a web browser, and I think they're scalable to the individual user pretty easily. Paul's right to note at the end of his entry that it's crucial to reach a critical mass, though, which is the flip side of the sustainability argument that I make. Any system must be simple enough to accomplish on a regular basis, and done often enough that it achieves critical mass. I look at the tag cloud emerging from our work with del.icio.us, and while it's only a map of 11 or so years of the journal, I feel like it gives me a pretty good idea of that span. And when you add in the fact that the tags themselves link out to specific essays, it's a pretty darn useful little "paragraph." Imagine having a cloud like this for each of several exam lists, for example:

I'm going to be doing some experimenting over the next couple of weeks to try and make our own process even more useful and streamlined. With a little luck, I'll be posting about it soon enough. But this is one of the ways that a collection might be managed to a scholar's advantage, emerging or no...

That's all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

There are days where I wish I could do more with Garr Reynolds's Presentation Zen than just send adulatory links his way. But oh well. He has a great piece on translating Scott McCloud's work on comics into presentations. Maybe it's more accurate to say that he's talking about learning from comics when it comes to presentations. Either way, as I gear up for what will be several talks this year, I'm going to keep going back to PZ over and over as I plan out this year's presentations. You should, too.

Update: It is a conspiracy. McCloud is giving a talk next Monday in Rochester, and where will I be? Yes, that's right. At a faculty meeting. AARGH.

Posted by cgbrooke at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's a little question for you:

I was talking with a colleague last night who teaches some of our professional writing and/or technology courses. He and I were talking and he asked me if there was a term for this phenomenon: not so long ago, when he would ask his students if they had ever heard the word hypertext or had authored web pages (via HTML, CSS, etc), most of them hadn't. And he had the sense that they hadn't yet arrived at that point. Now, though, he asks these questions, and has the impression not that his students haven't arrived there yet, but that they're beyond it and would think of it as backsliding. In other words, given all the SNApps, like blogging software, Facebook, MySpace, etc., there's been an emphasis on allowing users to avoid ever having to go under the hood, such that the idea of teaching those under-the-hood skills like coding may start to appear quaint.

Anyhow, my colleague asked me if there was a term for this, and the best I could come up with was leapfrogging, although I think I've heard of it more in the context of diffusion studies, where particular societies will skip intermediate steps in a particular line of development for whatever reason.

I also thought that retromediation might make for a workable term, in the sense of these interfaces remediating particular skill sets, but doing so in a way that makes the skills themselves seem "retro." Maybe I'm overreacting to what is unquestionably a limited sample, but I wonder if being able to tweak one's own HTML and CSS isn't rapidly becoming akin to being able to keep your truck running with a coat hanger and duct tape. Useful, yes, but also a little old school.

Then I look up the word, and find that Derek's already coined it, albeit in a more punceptual fashion than I'm using it.

Hmm. Just thinking, I suppose, with the question implied. That's all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

There was a letter to the editor in the SU paper this week that I happened to see, despite the fact that I don't pay a whole lot of attention to said periodical. This letter complained about the words whitelist and blacklist, for their reinforcement of particular attitudes towards white and black folk.

I have to admit that my first reaction to complaints like these is to come down on the side of language, which pretty much does what it does without paying particular attention to the complaints or efforts of we individual speakers. But it stuck with me. I make a real effort to avoid gendered terms in my writing, and I've always been a fan of Douglas Hofstadter's Person Paper on Purity in Language. And, as it happens, I'm slowly assembling a list of the email addresses of valid commenters, so that all y'all don't continue to fall afoul of the tighter spam restrictions I've had to adopt lately.

Even though the plugin itself that allows me to do this is called Whitelister, I think I'm going to describe what I'm doing as red- and greenlisting. I don't fool myself into believing that this terminological change is going to sweep the country like wildfire or anything, but making reference to traffic signals actually comes closer to describing what I'm trying to accomplish.

So if your comment doesn't show up for a spell, please be patient. I'll add you to the ol' greenlist...

That's all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Speaking of CCCC, or of the CCCCCCCCC referenced in my title (8 Cs!), Derek and I were yappin tonight about how we might go about indexing the CCCC Program using TagCrowd, a tool I came across via Jill and recommended to Jenny. It overlaps a fair bit with what we're doing over at CCCOA, but one difference is that TagCrowd allows you to upload a file, whereupon it generates a cloud of frequent terms.

So here's what I did:

1. I went to the searchable program for the 2007 CCCC, and searched for all panels under the 106 Area Cluster (Information Technologies).

2. I added each of the 50 or so panels to my "Convention Schedule," and then hit the button to email it to myself. The result is a window with all of the panels & descriptions in a text file. Copy and paste into TextEdit.

3. I stripped out all of the speaker information, including titles. I could have left the titles in, but it would have taken longer (and been a little more debatable in terms of focus).

4. Find/Replace on 2-word phrases (new media, social software, et al.), variants (online and on-line), making them a single word in the case of the former and standardizing in the latter. (I thought, too, about just deleting "speaker," which appears in the prose with some frequency.)

5. TagCrowd the file, and voila!

You can look at the bigger graphic over at FlickR, but here's a cloud of the 100 most frequently used terms in CCCC proposals for the 106 cluster. "Speaker" and "presentation" are throwaways, and you could argue the same for "discuss" ("In this presentation, Speaker X will discuss...."). Looks pretty sensible to me--I'd say that blogging and Facebook are the flavors of the year. I may have caused the word "remix" to drop out of the cloud by not including titles--I'm not sure.

One caveat is that not all the panels included prose descriptions--that may just be a matter of time, though. Again, I'm not certain.

One thing I do know, though, and that's that this whole process took me less than an hour, and it would be child's play to go back in, and do it for each cluster, as well as all of the "focuses" and "emphases." Not that I have the time, energy, or schedule to allow me to do so. But it's a fun little experiment, nonetheless.

(I should mention, if anyone sees fit to do some of these, that TagCrowd allows one to create a blackredlist of terms that won't be included. In addition to speaker, presentation, and discuss, I'd probably (were I to redo this one) add become, consider, examine, important, include, and panel. They function here as mostly empty proposal jargon.)

That's all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:30 AM | Permalink

Before I happened upon TagCrowd, I threw together a little quick description for Jenny of how one might generate a cloud given a list of terms and frequencies (since that's what we work with for CCCOA).

Fairly simple stuff, I suppose, but if anyone's interested in taking a look, here's a pdf of my tutorial for building a tagcloud by hand. The tagcloud isn't the tricky part so much as getting to the point where you have that list of terms. Once you do, a little size and color scheming, followed by a quick alphabetic sort, is all it takes.

Posted by cgbrooke at 1:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've seen this link crop up in several places over the last week or two, but you never know who's seen it or not. So...

Chirag Mehta has generated tagclouds for Presidential documents/speeches (State of the Union Addresses and others), going back to 1776, and offered them for your perusal. (Usability note: I found it a lot easier to use the arrow keys to move the slider back and forth one at a time, but didn't figure out that I could use them until the fourth time I visited the site...)

It's an incredibly cool project, and what we're doing over at the CCCOA is obviously related, although our output is structured in different ways. Although we've got other things occupying our front burners at the moment, this site has definitely got me thinking about how we might build on our work there. More broadly, and perhaps relevantly, it's also got me thinking about how visualizations of trends in language usage might be folded in to some of the work we do in our field.

That's all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It may just be a matter of confluence. I've come across a couple of blogposts talking about playlists in the past week or so, 43F has featured a couple of tips and tricks entries about iTunes playlists, and Bloglines just announced a playlist feature as well. Seems like I'm seeing them a lot recently.

My first thought was that it's one of those metaphors (taken from radio?) that's quickly becoming stretched beyond its original meaning--my fave example of this is Jakob Neilsen's complaint about the shopping cart metaphor. But I'm more of a descriptivist than a prescriptivist.

And playlists have more than a little in common with tagging. In a lot of ways a playlist can be little more than a unique tag. In iTunes, you drag a song over to the playlist and add it, but this is only superficially different from adding a tag to the songs you want on the list, and then opening up the page of all items tagged thusly. The music doesn't move or anything.

It's interesting to me because one of the things that I didn't really get to a few days back in talking about tagging was a quibble that I had with defining tagging as the addition of "descriptive" terms. Reason for that is that one of the first uses for del.icio.us that ever made sense to me was when I saw Jill Walker use it in a talk (at the MEA conf) as a quick way of gathering up the links for the sites she was talking about.

In other words, my first "click" moment with del.icio.us was seeing it used as a way to gather certain bookmarks into a playlist.

In the strictest sense, this isn't descriptive tagging, since the playlist/tag refers to a particular context rather than anything intrinsic about the resource itself. More and more, I've been thinking about making a distinction between descriptive tagging and what I think of as procedural tagging, or tags that function in some way other than simple description.

The best account of this I know of (and there may be others, certainly) is Bradley's discussion of using del.icio.us as a teaching tool. I tried something similar in my networks course, but I didn't really think it through to the degree that Bradley does there. In other words, procedural tags can be used to set aside certain bookmarks for course reading (and not others), they can be tagged for particular units (or multiple, to indicate connections), with due dates for reading the texts, etc. You can tag a set of resources for a talk, as Jill did, tag them with someone's name if you want that person to find them easily, etc. Right now, the Teaching Carnivals are assembled every couple of weeks (in part at least) through procedural tagging. None of these particular tags are descriptive in the strictest sense, although the Carnival tags come fairly close. They point outwards, connecting the bookmark to some additional context.

Over at the CCCOA, we use tags as keywords for CCC essays, but we also have some hybrid tags, so that you can look at all of the articles from a particular issue, or see which of the articles are converted CCCC Chair's Addresses or Braddock Award for the best in a given volume. What del.icio.us calls tag bundles, we might also call playlists.

What's got me thinking tonight, though, is the place where the smart playlists of iTunes go beyond descriptive or even procedural tagging. Certain of the tags in iTunes are variables. For example, "Play Count" is a tag that increases by 1 every time the particular song is played, and "Last Played" and "Date Added" are simply automatically attached to the song by iTunes itself, as opposed to the 5-star "My Rating" a user can apply. Where the playlists go beyond this is in allowing users to set rules for the playlist that are based on these variables. Merlin's entry is focused on keeping an iTunes collection manageable, but I find myself wondering about how much of the smart playlist idea is transferrable.

Here's where I'm stalling out a little. I have a sense that there's something to this, but I'm having trouble figuring out how it would function outside of my head. Part of me thinks that there's a degree to which sites like digg already accomplish what I'm talking about. In other words, I think about the variables that could be assigned to a blog entry or essay, and how a playlist might incorporate them, and digg does some of what I'm after. I could also be creative with the RSS feeds from interior pages of del.icio.us users (add something to the playlist when User X tags it with Y). But it seems to me that there are other functions that might be of use as well. It'd be interesting to have a smart list that captured bookmarks on topics that had crested a certain number of users, or that had attracted steady attention (a combination of Date First Tagged and Frequency). Or even one that fed resources tagged with a user's top 5 tags, but allowed that top 5 to change over time, so that as that person's attention shifted to new issues, so would the feed.

No grand conclusion here, except to say that there's something here in the mix of procedural tagging and playlisting that may be worth pursuing. And I would, given time enough and skillz. As it is, though...

Posted by cgbrooke at 1:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For the most part, this is just a placeholder for links to Elaine Peterson's Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy, to David Weinberger's reply and Tom Vander Wal's reply as well. I've got some work and at least one meeting before I can turn to them, but turn to them I will. It shouldn't take too much sleuthing to figure out where I'm going to weigh in...

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the telecoms is running commercials featuring the myriad conversations that might be ruined by the dreaded "dropped call"--you know, like when you start singing "Jimmy cracked corn and I don't care" to Jim, your future father-in-law. Boy, I can't tell you how many engagements that's ruined for me personally.

Anyhow, I was feeling like my calls had all been dropped this weekend. When I recommend RSS readers to folks, I recommend Bloglines almost exclusively. I've been using it for years now, and never had much call to complain. Until this past weekend, where a day or two's worth of feeds weren't picked up. And in the land of NotADayGoesBy, that puts a serious crimp in my inventional processes. I rely upon the ecology of feeds I've developed to supplement my more immediate life, particularly when it comes to topics for blogging.

And so I'm flirting with Google Reader right now. I'm already seeing ways that it may change my reading habits, based on things like download/upload times, refresh intervals, etc. We'll see how it goes. I can manage two different readers for a spell, switching back and forth and using liberally the "mark all read" feature on each.

It's funny, though, how all it takes is a little hiccup in a service to start me down the path of looking at other options. Bloglines has benefitted from its relative invisibility for me over the past couple of years--as long as it worked just fine, I had no reason to think about changing. I don't really use it to its fullest capacity, so if I'm going to be looking at the full capacity of a reader, it doesn't really cost me much to shop around. And in the meantime, I'll be checking individual sites more often than normal, just to see what I've missed in the past few days.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As the regular reader will remember, this year's MLA kicked off with a stirring rendition of the second chapter of my book manuscript, with the unusually expository (for me, at least) title "The Rhetorical Canons as an Ecology of (New Media) Practice." Gee, I wonder what the talk was about?

Hee. Today was also the 3rd step in the epic self-transformation that will see me turn from a reader of conference papers to a speaker of conference presentations. I worked from an outline and from the slides, but otherwise, did not script the specifics. I think it went okay, but I do have to confess that the fellow in the 3rd row who used his cameraphone to take snapshots of each of my slides, and whose phone rang not once but twice during our session, was a bit of a distraction.

And yet, it was he who inspired me to go ahead and try out SlideShare, which is basically a YouTube-like service for PP presentations. Keynote exports to pdf, which I can then upload and turn into a shareable Flash doodad.

(Update: The doodad was taking serious download time, so I'm replacing it with a link to the SlideShare page instead. Those readers uninterested in unnarrated PP slides may now breath an appropriately grateful sigh of relief.)

The pdf option, far as I can tell, preserves original layout and font better, and has the virtue of being about 1/10 the size of a PP export. So even though there's no support for a Keynote native presentation, it works out just fine.

The slides themselves are probably a little oblique without commentary, so I'll use ProfCast when I get back to Syracuse and offer a full-service version. In the meantime, suffer in silence. I'm done with my talk, and have a much more leisurely conference ahead of me.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For the last couple of years, I've been pushing CMap to anyone who'll listen. A concept mapping tool, CMap is a fairly easy tool to pick up and use, it's free, and it's available in a rainbow of OS flavors. I've found better tools, but often, they're OS restricted, or they cost money.

In the past couple of days, though, I've seen a couple of different entries over at LifeDev on concept mapping (or mind mapping) tools that have shaken my faith in CMap. Exhibit 1: Bubbl.us:

Bubbl.us is quick and easy to use, with minimal cognitive overhead. Really. If I wanted someone to experiment with concept or mind mapping, and didn't want to spend any time on the software itself, it'd be hard to go wrong with this option.

Exhibit 2: Thinkature:

Thinkature is a more complicated app, to be sure, but a couple of points worth making. First, the interface is a lot more flexible, and includes things like being able to upload images and to write directly on the surface, like a whiteboard. Plus, and this is the biggie, it allows for real-time collaboration. I'm not exaggerating when I say this feature opened up all sorts of possibilities in my teaching mind.

Again, there may be tools that are better out there, but free and online? Not that I've seen so far. So if you're a c-mapper, give these a test drive, and see what you think...

(LifeDev on bubbl.us and thinkature)

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Tonight's entry is prompted by the arrival today of several entries in Google Reader, the most recent entries fed there and published at the Kenneth Burke Journal:

The KB Journal is, unfortunately, one of the only journals in our field that is (a) using RSS feeds, and (b) using them correctly. Exhibit A in how not to use them comes from the Project MUSE journals. I was excited to see that their journals had feeds, until the first one arrived. Basically, they feed a link to the table of contents page for new issues. This is okay, I suppose, but differs little from sending announcements to email lists.

What the KB Journal does (and Written Communication and CCC also do) is to create entries for each article, with more information than the fact of its existence. Hell, even the author and title would be an improvement. I use a reader to skim a lot of sites, and to make decisions about whether to follow up. Using them to draw readers to their site, as MUSE does, is to make a bunch of Web 1.0 assumptions about eyeballs, traffic, stickiness, etc. With the MUSE journals:

• I don't know what I'm getting until I've loaded their page
• Unless I have an immediate need, I'm likely to forget their content, since there's little point in bookmarking random TOCs
• I can't bookmark an article to return to it when I have time
• I can't bookmark one to download to my office machine, where my access to MUSE is automatic
• I can't look back through recent articles
• I can't use the journal in any way other than I'd use it if I saw it on a colleague's shelf

But you know what? At least they HAVE. A. FEED. Even if MUSE is doing it wrong, at least they're trying to do it. There are so many journals in our field that haven't even bothered to create feeds that it should be embarrassing to us. And we all know who they are, including some pretty unlikely suspects, journals that should be at the forefront of providing this kind of access.

Here's what it takes to provide a feed of recent articles for a journal:

• A free account with a blog provider like Blogger or Wordpress


• The ability, for each article, to:
  
  • copy and paste relevant information into a textbox
  
  
  • Click on "save" or "publish"
  
  

That's it. You don't need crazy designs, blogrolls, any modification whatsoever. It doesn't have to be integrated into a larger site or do anything fancy. For pretty much any journal, with readable files for the articles, I could post a new issue in roughly 15 minutes. Four issues a year? Maybe an hour total. One hour. Per year.

You can't tell me that the resulting increase in circulation, were our field to cotton eventually to the notion of RSS readers, wouldn't be worth it. And the benefits to us?

Here's what I see when I go to List View for my Written Communication feed:

Not only am I notified when new articles are published, but I have access to the last three or four issues of the journal at all times, from any computer. And I can star them for future reference. Want to follow up on a title? They're expandable:

This functionality currently exists for a mere handful of our journals. If the time spent gnashing our teeth about the overwhelming amount of stuff to read were spent instead putting together feeds for all of our journals, you know what? All of a sudden, we'd be able to manage that load much more easily. And I'm not kidding when I suggest that it's really that easy. It is. There's a lot more that could be done, but if our journals would take the tiny step of being responsible for RSS feeds at the point of production/publication, the resulting benefits would be colossal. And that's not me being hyperbolic. Imagine being able to open a browser window and being able to search, read, and bookmark abstracts from the last year or two's worth of journals in our field. Seriously, how much easier would that make our academic lives?

And yes, we have been doing this at the CCC Online Archive for the past 2+ years: http://inventio.us/ccc/atom.xml. But my point isn't to gloat--it's to ask instead why the heck our editors, including many for whom this should be obvious, haven't followed suit.

And that's all. I could get a lot snarkier about this, and I could name names, but let me instead close with an offer. On the off-chance that someone's reading this who wants help setting a feed up, please let me know. Honestly. I'd be happy to show someone just how easy this is.

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Okay. The gauntlet has been thrown down. How best to talk about Kindle without falling prey to "snark, ennui, [or] carping about the DRM?"

It's not too bad. I've been interested for almost 10 years in the possibility of a reasonably priced, portable screen reader. When I was at ODU, I remember having conversations with colleagues about the possibility of a Kindle-like machine upon which students could store texts from multiple courses, allowing them to search across course materials, link between them, annotate, et al. And it's genuinely exciting to see that Amazon is putting serious weight behind it--there's been little incentive, I fear, for the book industry to do so (and this despite some warning signs). My gut reaction, when I saw the announcement on the Amazon page, was to figure out whether I could get my hands on one, and how soon.

I've owned 3 or 4 iPods, including the very first model, and I'm happy with my iPhone, and that's not to mention my wireless keyboards, mice, presentation clicker, iTrip, etc.--I'm a fiend when it comes to gadgets. Adding the Kindle to my repertoire seemed like the next logical step.

And yet. One of the problems that I don't see a great deal of discussion about is that the book is an incredibly mature (and thus highly variegated) technology. Think about it. You can talk about the innovations like spaces between words, standardized fonts, apparati like TOC's and indices, etc., but fact is that our books today haven't changed that much from those in circulation centuries ago. And most of the real changes have been of degree rather than kind.

In that time, so many different rituals, habits, and dispositions have emerged with respect to books--the variety of ways that we use them is one of the keys to the success of that medium. And it's why the "death of the book" stuff in the 90s was so overblown. It's not just a matter of happening on "better" technologies, because they already exist right now. The book has had hundreds of years of cultural, social, personal, psychological, and aesthetic embedding--and that's not going to be dislodged overnight.

Contrast that with the emergence of the MP3 player. This could be oversimplifying, but there are 3 basic milieu for music in our lives: home, office, and car. For the vast majority of music consumers, the only thing wrong with the CD is that most collections exceed the bounds of easy portability/storage. The computer solves the storage issue, the MP3 player solves portability. But the experience of listening to music isn't really that varied. I might listen to it in a range of places, but the basic action is the same whether I'm rocking out on a road trip or want some soothing background in my office.

The uses to which I put books vary much more. It could be argued that I'm a power user of the sort that I disallowed above in my music analogy, but I don't think that I'm that unique in that regard. I think a lot of people use books in a range of ways, although perhaps not as often or as intensively as I.

So my trouble with the Kindle is quite simply that it only really targets, in pricing, restrictions, and promotion, one of the kinds of reading that I do. First, at 10 bucks a pop, I'm only really saving money if I'm a big hardcover bestseller reader (which I'm not). The books I buy that are more than $10 are those least likely to be prioritized by Amazon, like academic books. And I'm certainly not going to pay for blogs, but even then, most of the content is A-list, which is not where I hang out anyway.

Second, 200 books, which is what Amazon is claiming it will hold, is nothing. Seriously. If indeed someday academic books are part of this, the Kindle is really only the size of a decent bookcase. Last time I counted, I had 8 or 9 in my apartment, and that's not counting the wall in my office. And that's where the DRM will begin to drive me crazy, I fear. I already avoid the iTunes store when possible because I hate having to figure out which machine stuff is okay on. And given that I upgrade machines every couple of years, even a 5-machine permit is going to run out on me fairly quickly.

Third, "it's like an iPod for books." Well, no. I'm trying not to snark here. It's actually like an iPhone for books--the iPhone is a much more restrictive, expensive gadget, problems offset for me by what it does well. But I don't use the iPod features on the phone--can't sync with multiple machines. The iPod is really just a portable hard drive, running one piece of software, with a minimal interface. And it answered a complex of needs: the obsolence of tapes, the convenience of the Walkman, the fragility of the CD, and the size of the personal computer. The iPhone was a feature-heavy entry into an already crowded market, relying upon flash because the substance is pretty standard.

There are a lot of good posts out there about Kindle, and some of the other models that people have suggested are intriguing. In the absence of competition, though, I don't see Amazon moving too far away from the model they're currently working with. Which is too bad, because I'd still like to take it for a test drive. But I just can't see myself spending four or five hundred dollars for something that meets such a small portion of my reading needs. At the very least, I hope they think about embracing the epub standard.

At the very least, the Kindle is worth watching, and I hope that someday I'll think it's worth owning. That is all.

And only a little bit of carping.

Posted by cgbrooke at 1:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)