998987

Moulthrop and Kaplan argue against halio’s typographic bent

This page begins with a brief synopsis preceding an excerpt from “Seeing through the Interface: Computers and the Future of Composition,” by Nancy Kaplan and Stuart Moulthrop. The synopsis contains links to themes within the excerpt.

I seem to be surfing a wave here that is going backwards into what might now be seen as classics, though i did not know of this stuff at the time!

998960

The Bus Stops Beyond Language

I want to open a metaphor for you. A word. Door. With language I can create an opening; on the other side describe, perhaps, a classroom: the space of the room lit with flickering greens or whatever other colors flow from electric screens, the ambiance the humming fans of computers, the cackling of keys. In a MUD I can do that: create a room, or an object, structure it to my liking with my words. I can do that here as well, use my words to create a scene. The disparities between a word world described here and one erected in a social MUD may not be that great. While a MUD is more directly a text-based reality, the reality of this room, this gathering, can depend on the coming together of our language, talk either constructed here through mutual agreement, or mediating our cognitive selves.

This paper has nice words for this very Psybernettic notion.

998127

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond

I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the “cathedral” model of most of the commercial world versus the “bazaar” model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.

Wanted this link handy. It keeps coming up. Damn. I dont actually like the fundamental idea here, but it is still quite a seminal essay!

993933

Geography of the Web – Gunderloy

But then, the web isn’t really a geography. Or if it is, it’s a geography akin to that of dreams and literature as well as to that of the physical world.

From Mike Gunderloy’s short article. He maintains his own site with journal and weblog, Larkfarm as well as cybering

992842

The Economies of Online Cooperation:

The Internet is filled with junk and jerks. It is commonplace for inhabitant of the Internet to complain bitterly about the lack of cooperation, decorum, and useful information. The signal-to-noise ratio, it is said, is bad and getting worse.

Even a casual trip through cyberspace will turn up evidence of hostility, selfishness, and simple nonsense. Yet the wonder of the Internet is not that there is so much noise, but that there is any significant cooperation at all. Given that online interaction is relatively anonymous, that there is no central authority, and that it is difficult or impossible to impose monetary or physical sanctions on someone, it is striking that the Internet is not literally a war of all against all. For a student of social order, what needs to be explained is not the amount of conflict but the great amount of sharing and cooperation that does occur in online communities.

This might be useful in the “commodification” discussion.

983129

The C.G. Jung Page:

The Jung Page was founded in 1995 to encourage new psychological ideas and conversations about what it means to be human in our time and place

This is a new address for the jung page. I thought it had gone defunct. A good place to go.

975894

Atomz.com Search Engine

Atomz.com is the leading provider of hosted Web site applications helping corporations, small businesses, and individual Web developers build better Web sites. Our first service, Atomz.com Search, the leading site search service, allows you to quickly add a powerful search engine to your Web site with no hardware or software to install. We have a variety of services to meet your needs. Choose the right one for you:

You will see that I have ustalled one! It works well.