Month: June 2012

I’ve been reading more of the writing behind the notion of a singularity since some chats with Daniel a few months back. I forget how I came across it but I got around to reading Vernor Vinge’s original essay on the Singularity. It’s fascinating the read this and know that it was written in 1993. I have Vinge’s “A Fire Upon the Deep” up next on my reading list.

Local newspapers, news deserts, and simple stuff:

But truly, there’s no divine law nor any practical argument to explain why newspapers are the preferred caretaker and distributor of community information.

Stijn does a great job illustrating why local newspapers are not irreplaceable.

Full crowd for the WordPress meetup

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The room’s filling up for this month’s WordPress meetup.

My Gettysburg oration: A vision for journalism that can long endure:

But let’s be honest: Most of the content we publish isn’t stories. It’s news. It’s facts. It’s information. Let’s respect the pure, traditional story – the narrative string of paragraphs – by reserving that form for real stories that have story elements such as plot, character, setting and theme.

This whole speech is phenomenal.

There’s no such thing as an objective filter: Why designing algorithms that tell us the news is hard. An objective filter for news may not be the algorithm we need, but that doesn’t mean the right filter is any less difficult to build.

I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to read Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. One of the more interesting non-fiction things I’ve read in a while.

How Jonah Lehrer should blog

The problem with Jonah Lehrer, like the problem with Zach Kouwe, is not that he was humbled by the insatiable demands of Blog. Instead, it’s that he made a category error, and tried to use a regular blog as a vehicle for the kind of writing that should not be done in blog format. Lehrer shouldn’t shut down Frontal Cortex; he should simply change it to become a real blog. And if he does that, he’s likely to find that blogs in fact are wonderful tools for generating ideas, rather than being places where your precious store of ideas gets used up in record-quick time.

Felix Salmon – How Jonah Lehrer should blog.

Hood and Adams

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Portland to Denver for TBEX

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