≡ Category: Books, Business, Foreign Language, Media, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
The New York Times has a great article on a professor of management science who has founded an almost completely automated publishing company. The 200,000 books he’s published sound, well, terrible, and terribly overpriced: “Among the books published under his name are ‘The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea’ ($24.95 and 168 pages long); ‘Stickler [...]
≡ Category: Business, MIT, Technology, Web/Tech | ≅ 5 Comments
The New York Times ran a fascinating article today about the feud between Intel and the One Latop Per Child program run by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. If you haven’t heard about it, the initiative is intended to develop a reasonably priced ($200) laptop for primary school children in the third world. The model they’re selling [...]
≡ Category: Media, Stanford, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
I just heard Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speaking at Stanford Law School today. Wales is working on some new projects that he hopes will harness the community-driven collaboration of Wikipedia. He’s already had some success in branching out from the encyclopedia idea with Wikia, which is a “wiki farm” compiling information on a variety [...]
≡ Category: Books, Google, Technology | ≅ 2 Comments
In case you missed it, The New York Times published a piece yesterday previewing two new efforts to bring electronic books to the mass market. In October, Amazon.com will roll out the Kindle (check out leaked pictures here), an ebook reader, priced somewhere between $400 to $500, that will wirelessly connect to an e-book store [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Media, Technology, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
(Continued from Part II)
The most recent major foray into the world of cultureboxes comes in an entirely different size and market niche: the Apple iPhone. It may look different, but it has all the hallmarks of a culturebox. The iPhone wants to deliver video, audio and the best of the Web; it hopes to revolutionize [...]
≡ Category: Media, Technology, Television, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
The online magazine Slate runs most of its arts and culture stories in a section called “Culturebox.” Ironically, it’s taken the consumer electronics industry several years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gadget is marketed as a culturebox, from the shiny iPhone to the pioneering Tivo to the hot-running Xbox 360. [...]
≡ Category: Business, Media, Technology, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
The online magazine Slate runs most of its arts and culture stories in a section called “Culturebox.” Ironically, it’s taken the consumer electronics industry several years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gadget is marketed as a culturebox, from the shiny iPhone to the pioneering Tivo to the hot-running Xbox 360. [...]
≡ Category: Books, Media, Technology, Web/Tech | ≅ 1 Comment
New rule: Books that are short on good ideas should only get short reviews. And so that’s what we’re serving up today — a short review of Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How the Democratization of the Digital World is Assaulting Our Culture.
Keen’s argument can essentially be boiled down to this: Web 2.0 [...]
≡ Category: Books, Media, Technology, Web/Tech | ≅ 1 Comment
Last weekend’s New York Times Sunday Magazine has declared this the Amateur’s Hour, an era when unpaid hobbyists can edit breaking news, design space technology for NASA, and predict the end of the world. That last article is clearly an outlier, but the first two raise an interesting point—are we getting better service from processes [...]
≡ Category: Media, Technology, Web/Tech | ≅ 2 Comments
Ever wondered what Second Life is and if you should care about it? Imagine a 3-D immersive game where you control an avatar and travel through constructed environments–and now take away the game part. What’s left is a fairly wide-open creative space where users can create and sell in-game stuff–houses, objects, clothing, etc–or engage [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Most Popular, Technology | ≅ 42 Comments
New technologies often have unintended uses. Take the Ipod as a case in point. It was developed with the intention of playing music (and later videos), but its applications now go well beyond that. Here are 10 rather unforeseen, even surprising, uses:
1. Train Doctors to Save Lives: A new study presented at the annual [...]
≡ Category: Technology | ≅ 2 Comments
These days, if you spend enough time on the web, you’ll inevitably hear talk about RSS feeds, feed readers, and subscribing to feeds – talk that can seem fairly obscure and off-putting if you’re not already familiar with these terms.
If this has been your experience, then you should really watch this short video below. This [...]
≡ Category: Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
Contrary to popular belief, there are a few professors out there who actually have their own accounts on FaceBook, much to the horror of their students. Now you can hear their take on new media and the university in a biweekly podcast, Digital Campus.
The series features a panel of new media scholars at George Mason [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Technology, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
Earlier this week, we discussed the recent release of Apple TV, the new gadget that lets you wirelessly download videos from iTunes to your cushy widescreen TV. For many consumers, the logical question to ask is whether there’s much to watch if they plunk down the $299 for the hardware. (Check it out in our [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Technology, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
When Steve Jobs announced Apple’s new lineup of gadgets at Macworld in January (listen on iTunes or stream it), all eyes were focused on the planned release of the iPhone. Relatively lost in the commotion, however, was Apple TV, which started shipping this week. (Check it out in our Amazon store.) Despite [...]
≡ Category: Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
We’re not here to write about the State of the Union speech per se (enough other bloggers have done that), but rather to mention a cool new technology that’s been applied to the Bush speech. A company called Pluggd, using "HearHere technology," now gives you the ability to search audio and video files just [...]
≡ Category: Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
Just a quick update on our last entry. Steve Job’s keynote speech from earlier in the week — the one that gave the public its first look at the iPhone — now stands as the most popular podcast on iTunes. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. You can download the podcast in video on iTunes, [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
Each year, Steve Jobs kicks off MacWorld with a big address, which
either confirms or quashes all the
rumors and speculation about the
new wave of Apple products. It’s usually a big deal, and this year
didn’t disappoint. Jobs delivered with flair the iPhone, which Apple hopes will revolutionize the cell phone market as the iPod did the [...]
≡ Category: Podcast Articles and Resources, Technology | ≅ 2 Comments
During a radio interview yesterday (iTunes - mp3), Jon Gordon, the host of Future Tense, asked me
whether universities will continue pouring content into their iTunes troves in 2007. The answer boiled down to this: Podcasting stands poised to proliferate in ‘07, much like the web did back in ‘95 and ‘96. Just a year [...]
≡ Category: Podcast Articles and Resources, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
With all the recent talk about podcasts, you may have wondered how you can create your own. How can you record and distribute via podcast whatever valauble things you have to say? We have recently come across some helpful material that seemed worth highlighting for you.
Podcast Academy
At Boston University, Podcast Academy recently held a two-day [...]
≡ Category: Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
If you’re a savvy technologist, you’ve heard a lot about the debate over "net neutrality." If you’re not, then you should get up to speed on the issue because it could change the face of the web as you know it.
Bill Moyers recently put together an excellent program looking at the Faustian bargain that Congress [...]
