In support of the Stop American Censorship movement against SOPA & PIPA, this site will go dark tomorrow. If you need a quick introduction to why these pieces of legislation are harmful to the future of the Internet, this video is a great:
I’ll be at the NY Tech Meetup rally in front of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand’s offices at 12:30 p.m. If you’re in New York and concerned about the future of the Internet, I’d encourage you to join me there.
I’ve finished reading Jeff Jarvis‘s “Public Parts“, a book that advocates and celebrates publicness as a force for good. While I agree with some aspects of Jarvis’s argument, I find that too often, living one’s life in public is just a more polite name for narcissism. And on occasion, Jarvis himself crosses into that territory.
Last night, at a meeting of NYLUG, the New York City Linux Users’ Group, I watched Sean O’Meara whip through a presentation about Chef, the system configuration management (CM) tool. I was impressed. The last time(s) I tried to play with automation tools like cfengine and Puppet I got very frustrated at their complexity. The folks at Opscode have definitely succeeded at bringing simplicity (as much as can be had) to the CM space.
But what struck me after hearing Sean had nothing to do with Chef. Instead, I came to the conclusion that pure systems administration is eventually going to die out as a profession. The developer is now king (or queen), and that’s not a bad thing. Continue reading…
It’s not easy being the New York Times‘ public editor. At a recent talk I attended, Arthur S. Brisbane said, half-jokingly, that few people at the Grey Lady want to have lunch with him. But the criticism from outside the paper’s 8th Avenue offices can be just as blistering.
Yesterday, Nokia released its new Lumia 900 smartphone, featuring the new Windows Phone Mango operating system. But the struggling cell phone maker is likely to have problems battling the image and branding problems of its operating system partner, Microsoft.
If you believe the hype, printed books are going to follow newspapers into the dustbin of history. But I think that books, like newspapers, won’t die off completely. They’ll just become niche products, consumed by a small, but avid, group of people who still love the medium and find their digital equivalents lacking.
Nothing illustrates the magic of a physical book like this fun stop-motion video from Toronto independent bookseller Type Books.
Ironically, the fact that books are becoming a niche product will revive the fortunes of the small, independent booksellers who have been hammered over the last 10-15 years by competition from major chains. If they are smart, the independents will remain nimble and provide services that the Amazons of the world can’t: namely, curation. Type, for example, leans towards architecture & design, although they do carry a decent selection of general fiction/non-fiction. The reason they remain a going concern is because the owners have successfully identified the kinds of books read by people who love physical books, and they aggressively stock those.
Note that these two qualities aren’t inexorably linked. I’m waiting for the day when an independent bookstore offers e-books alongside their physical products, thereby enabling them to both serve a niche via actual books, and a general audience via digital download. However, such a day will not come so long as e-readers like the Kindle are closely tied to a major chain, with all of the DRM shackles that such an association implies. How long before we see a truly open-source e-reader? And what aspects of the bookselling market will need to change before that happens?
No new post today. I’ve been starting to learn Processing and working through some of the tutorials. Check out my first toy project.
Yesterday, Poynter reported that the Associated Press and 28 other news organizations have launched NewsRight, “an ambitious venture to license original news content and collect royalties from aggregators.” Ambitious is right. The fact is, articles no longer have significant monetary value; otherwise, a system like NewsRight wouldn’t need to exist. AP and other legacy media organizations are trying to reverse a trend that’s irreversible.
This morning’s Wall Street Journal contains an article about Kodak’s imminent bankruptcy declaration. My only question was: what took them so long?
Continue reading…
Sometimes, you just have to admit you were well and truly wrong about something.
This is a tough post for me to write. But in the interests of not burying the lede, I might as well come right out and say it. I have decided not to continue my master’s program in journalism at the end of the semester. Continue reading…
© 2003-2012 Julian C. Dunn.