Or what happens to a room full of journalism students when you start handing out typewriters. All on Paper was a project at Florida Atlantic University, and it involved a handful of 20-something trainee journalists turning off their iMacs and getting out the typewriters, TippEx, and photo-developing chemicals. This was technology older than they were, […]
So, an introduction is necessary. What is Unconvenient all about? Getting closer to the action The modern world is full of wonder: we have machines which can do almost anything for us, including wash our clothes, cook our food (then wash up), help us go to sleep, to wake up, to find our way around, […]
Ebooks are not books. They’re not ‘electronic’ books. In the same way that MP3s are not vinyl and Second Life isn’t real life (who’da thunk?). The book industry is not moving to ebooks. The publishing industry is expanding from paper to electronic screens. The losers will be those who think they are moving to electronic […]
All this ‘shopping shifting’ – from physical goods to electronic goods, and shopping in physical spaces to shopping from ‘wherever you are’ (i.e. via mobile phone web/app) – will further reduce the quality of the stuff we can buy. Of course there are many advantages to replacing a bookcase with something equivalent and yet which […]
I want an operating system that doesn’t define me. Or perhaps, one that defines me better. In a sense this is why I use Linux. I can make all manner of choices with it which reflect my personality when it comes to computer use. However, I don’t think it does it well enough. Default Definitions […]
Writers should be thirsty for all the assistance offered to them. Hell, everyone who works daily to improve a skill should. And there are plenty of formulae, methods and structures out there for the writer (and I don’t mean that in any negative sense). Larry Brooks’ Six Core Competencies is one of my favourites. You […]
Jan O’Hara posts on Writer Unboxed about worrying about your stats. In this web-a-day world there’s no shortage of stats to tell us how we’re doing, how popular we are (as popular as our last post? Please, God, no!). As a blogger, and a writer who can only get his Bad Self published online, there’s […]
What does open source innovation look like, and how will it win out over iOS and Windows? (This post inspired by a recent episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast (UUPC).) Here’s a list of open source innovations: And here is a list of things which open source has emulated, and yet failed to break free […]
David Hume (1711-1776) was, amongst other things, a philosopher. In his essay Of Tragedy (included in the Four Dissertations volume) he explores the reasons why humans are so keen on tragedy. Tragic plays include scenes of joy only to better plunge the audience into the next dramatic act. But push the audience – or reader […]
As with many things that I blog about here, a couple of articles and a podcast have come along at once to suggest a change in the air. This time it’s the end of the expectation of free stuff that we’ve come to love on the Net. OK, so it’s not the end of them […]