The Rebecca Game is a child response to the Ivanhoe game. Games like Ivanhoe are interventions and Rebecca, as its given name suggests, is an intervention after Ivanhoe. It is entranced by Ivanhoe. It is a daughter.
These notes are from my conversation with Steve Ramsay.
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Libraries: How They Stack Up by the Online Computer Library Center is a short set of facts about libraries. For example US libraries spend $14 billion a year out of a total of $31 billion spend on books. U.S. libraries circulated four times as many items as Amazon each day.
Continue reading Library Facts
E-Book Scenarios Updated is an article looking back at predictions about e-books. E-books didn’t take off the way the author expected – we don’t all have readers in our pockets. He does however see some clear trends: Use, Not Read; Aggregations, Not Single Works; Instutional Customers, Not Individuals; and Subscription Pricing, Not Transactional.
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Richard Powers: American Novelist a web site about the novelist. Powers was a programmer, among other things, and that shows in novels and short works like Galatea 2.2 and Literary Devices.
Continue reading Richard Powers Web Site
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s blog is an excellent example of an academic blog such as I want this blog to be. Glad I know him, can’t wait to read his book.
What does a Professor do All Day, Anyway? is a short essay by Ed Ayers at the University of Virginia. It needs to be updated to a multimedia version.
Continue reading Multimedia, What does a Prof do all week?
Core77 Articles: Pixelvision is an article on the history of the pixel. I got the link from Matt K’s blog.
Continue reading Birth of the Pixel
The CyberFrontier and America at the Turn of the 21st Century is an article on First Monday that deals with the adaptation of Turner’s ideas about the “frontier” as important to American identity to the Internet. It is interesting how the myth of the frontier played out in ideology for the net.
Terra Nova is a blog by multiple authors on MMORPGs, toy worlds, social worlds and other “realms of emergent collective reality”. The authors discuss things like how “Avatars Become Storefronts” – how markets emerge slowly, but irresistably, for/in games for exchanging things.
Continue reading Terra Nova, Game Blog
In an article by Fred von Lohmann, the attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the issue of all the RIAA suits against individuals who are file swapping is discussed. Lohmann, inRIAA’s college lawsuits a wrong answer | CNET News.com, argues that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 makes people guilty until proven innocent because organizations can get subpoenas automatically by “merely making allegations of infringement.” (In other words, the federal court issues them automatically without review of a judge or a lawsuit being filed.) Universities are responding to these subpoenas that they don’t know who is responsible for the IP address, since they are assigned dynamically. Thus universities can’t help the RIAA – one wonders if universities are setting up their systems so they cannot know who used the offending IP address to frustrate the RIAA.
Continue reading RIAA and P2P Music