ReadWriteWeb

I’ve been meaning to add the RVW module for reviews for a wee while now and tonight I did it. RVW is an RSS module created by Alf Eaton. It’s basically some extra metadata you add to your RSS feed that describes reviews – of books, music, anything you like really. Reviews is one part … Read more

First impressions. Short book, more of a novella than a novel. I finished it in one day (a day off work). Alex Garland, if you don’t know his work, wrote a famous novel called The Beach in the 90’s. The book was much better than the Leonardo Di Caprio movie of the same name. Garland’s … Read more

So I’ve started a topic-focused blog, eBook Culture. Yesterday I outlined my personal goals for the site. Today I’m going to review examples of successful topic-focused blogs, from two people who are leading the way in this type of blog. PVRblog: product-centered content Probably the most well known example of a topic-focused blog is PVRblog. … Read more

Lucas Gonze comments on my post from yesterday: “Richard MacManus is throwing himself into eBooks. A synchronicity is that I ran across an excellent bit of non-fiction by Phillip K. Dick which is available freely on the net and couldn’t figure out what to do with it. It’s not desk reading — it’s too long, … Read more

One of my stated niches is ‘web strategy’ and I’ve written a couple of posts on this subject. However strategy is one of those things that is better practiced rather than preached. I could write a whole bunch of articles on strategy, but the only way for someone to be credible on this topic is … Read more

Summary: Microcontent in the form of sound bites, links and text extracts are the lingua franca of the Web. But the flipside is that context morphs very easily, so what are the moral and ethical implications of that? Following on from my post the other day about Systems Builders, in which I touched on these … Read more

I came across an article in Computerworld that has some good advice on designing and building IT systems. The article is by Michael Hugos and he starts out by defining “Systems Builder”: “This person can speak both the language of technology and the language of business. This person understands the specific business issues that a … Read more

Open-Media.org is an Open Source Media Project launched today by Marc Canter and J.D. Lasica. It’s going to be like the Internet Archive, only for multimedia files. In fact Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive (home of the The Wayback Machine) is providing free storage and free bandwidth for Open Media. Here is J.D.’s description: … Read more

I recently wrote about a new kind of literacy, one in which Generation Y is more fluent than the rest of us. It is transforming the act of reading and it’s also re-defining Knowledge Management, I believe. In my travels (on the Web) I came across a new term that may help us grasp this … Read more

Jon Udell has kicked off a series of articles at O’Reilly Network on what he calls “hypermedia blogging”: “The two-way Web unleashed by the blogging revolution is, and will remain, largely a textual medium. And yet we’re clearly at an inflection point. It’s increasingly feasible to create and share media content. If you needed special … Read more

I’ve started a new topic-focused weblog: eBookCulture.com. It’s going to be exclusively on the topic of eBooks and the read/write culture that I think will develop around eBooks over the next few years. eBooks have so far not broken through into the mainstream, due to a number of factors – e.g. technical limitations of devices … Read more

As a follow-up to my Reliance post yesterday, which was on the subject of my dependence on web servers, I read something by Mitch Kapor this morning that resonates (even though his post was from a different context): “I think I’ve unfairly maligned servers in the past. It’s not the server I dislike, it’s the … Read more

Audio and video blogging seem to be hot topics currently. I myself have done two, pretty low-tech, audio blog posts. Both were readings of textual posts, one of a Read/Write Web classic from January 2004 – The Fractal Blogosphere. And the second audio post was something I wrote just last week – A New Kind … Read more

The thing about web technology – and computing in general – that continues to frustrate me, is that it forces me to rely on hardware and software that is often outside of my direct control. It’s all very well embracing the server side and using browser-based products like Movable Type and Bloglines, as I do. … Read more

Note: This post is also available in audio format (.wav file, 2.9MB). “Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline” announced the headline at the National Endowment for the Arts website on 8 July 2004. On that day the NEA published a report entitled “Reading at Risk” (PDF), which outlined the findings of a 2002 survey of the … Read more