Tweet Trove 2 (21-28 November, 2009)

Arts, Culture, Literature

"Publishing is changing. I’m ready to see what it turns into and change my expectations with it." http://bit.ly/1weHjv

How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer: http://www.copyblogger.com/twitter-writing/

Business and Economics

The amazing world of Coca-Cola (infographic): http://www.busmanagement.com/news/coca-cola/

Education, e-Learning

Educational games and interactivities from National Geographic: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/games

2009-2014 forecasts of the US market for e-learning: http://tinyurl.com/ydypry8. (Caution: pdf)

A Quick Guide to Social Learning - 100+ examples of the use of social media in learning: http://c4lpt.co.uk/handbook/examples.html

Humor

Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/11/twilight-lessons-girls-learn/

Internet vices: Twitter is crack cocaine? Facebook = cranberry vodka? http://www.patrickmoberg.com/internet-vices/

The Chronicles of Narnia? http://xkcd.com/665/

8 ways to kill an idea: http://www.samiviitamaki.com/?p=336

Internet, Science and Technology

Evolution of storage (infographic) : http://www.flickr.com/photos/7979419@N02/4131812966/sizes/l/

The story of the Titanic Gulp - big *is* beautiful: check out this lovely piece on how whales dine: http://bit.ly/6aBfh6

"Wikipedia is now part of the establishment" Fears over future of Wikipedia as 49,000 volunteers leave site: http://bit.ly/6PnDHN

A useful compendium: Jane Hart's Guide to Social Learning: http://icio.us/db40th

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design: 6 Bones of Contention: http://bit.ly/6mpg6N

Google Image Search meets the Visual Thesaurus: Google Image Swirl -- http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/

Top 5 Misconceptions About The LHC : http://bit.ly/8tBx8G

Silence! The Last of the Giant Radio Telescopes Is Listening to the Universe http://bit.ly/1x4wzo

SETI: Building a Better Alien-Calling Code -- http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/better-seti-code/

The Pursuit of Unhappyness . . .

. . . can actually be fun. Geetha Krishnan shows how to attempt Twittering for Sadness (or tries to. He is having way too much fun to be sad).

A Mote of Dust Suspended in a Sunbeam

Look again at that dot.

Is Social Media the New Opium for the Masses?

. . . It depends. The e-learning maven explains.

Ever Wonder why . . .

. . . such applications are created?

Exhibit 1 — answer.im: Instant messaging answering service

Exhibit 2 — bedpost ("It's business time") : A personal web application that will give you some insight into your sex life. (Alas, no social networking features. Just imagine — a mashup that pulls this into your Facebook profile. Or posts to Twitter.)

What next?

Links via: Geetha Krishnan

I Apologize for any Incontinence . . .

. . . and more examples of the Cupertino Effect: How Spellcheckers Wreak Havoc

Google Chrome Webcomic may be Dangerous!

It looks like Delicious doesn't have much confidence in Google's "Do no evil" philosophy.

When Google launched its browser — Chrome — it also published this webcomic which looked under the hood of the browser and explained the key engineering decisions taken in designing the browser.

I had bookmarked the Chrome webcomic to my Delicious account when it was published. Today, I was trawling through my Delicious bookmarks, cleaning out the ones I no longer needed, revisiting some, when Delicious displayed this warning when my cursor hovered over the Google Chrome webcomic:

This bookmark may be dangerous and is automatically set as restricted.

Click the image for a larger view

Wonder what prompted Delicious to label the webcomic dangerous (There surely is some technical reason). And is Google looking into this?

Favorite Techie Cartoons of 2008

Anybody out there who doubts technology and cartoon humor don't fit?

Why you Need Unlimited SMS-Texting Plans

Finnish Road Administration has introduced smart "Text-to-Pee" toilets in Western Finland. Restroom visitors have to SMS/text "open" to let themselves in.

Virtual Shakespeare

Shakespeare has a very rich lore and fantasy environment second only to Tolkien, . . . Both have elves.

Professor Edward Castronova and colleagues in the Synthetic Worlds Institute at the University of Indiana have built a virtual gameworld - Arden - around the Shakespeare's plays.

Lest you mistake Arden for just another virtual game:

An economist by training, Prof Castronova has led attempts to quantify the economic activity and impact of virtual worlds - be that in the games themselves or in the real world when people pay cold cash for virtual goods.

Arden, said Prof Castronova, was an attempt to go much further than this after the fact analysis. It will give social scientists an entire populated world on which to perform experiments - something always lacking in the real world.

"We're interested in social dynamics and economics," he said.

Read: The Bard Helps Digital Experiment

Are you Feeling Lucky?

On Google's clean, white homepage the little "I'm Feeling Lucky" button has survived in spite of many changes to the page in all these years. Did you know that it costs Google around $110 million in annual revenue? The button takes searchers directly to the top search result and this doesn't allow Google to show search ads on one percent of all its searches.

Then why does Google keep such a costly button around?

Robotic Authors? Don't we Have Enough Already?

White Smoke software announces a computer program that is said to turn "prosaic dunces into lyrical poets".

White Smoke claims that the new version of its "text enrichment" software uses artificial intelligence to not only check spelling and grammar but suggest alternative words and usage that will take your writing from "take your writing from simple to sophisticated". White Smoke claims that its software draws upon millions of examples of well-written English, then applies them to new contexts: from legal forms, to love letters, to creative writing.

Miles Johnson at Guardian's books blog wonders if in the future could not we potentially see a computer being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature?

On a related note, I wonder if some books would be more readable after being put through White Smoke.

Software to Craft Your Literary Masterpiece

From Get With the Program:

From the fountain pen to the word processor, writers have always embraced technology to make their task less arduous. Mark Twain was an early enthusiast of the typewriter, and his “Life on the Mississippi” is believed to be the first typewritten literary manuscript. “The machine has several virtues,” he remarked of his Remington. “I believe it will print faster than I can write.”

Today, most novelists don’t venture beyond the word processor — and many still write longhand. But others are finding that sophisticated software is invaluable to the literary enterprise. While Dickens and George Eliot had only notebooks and their wits to keep their Victorian triple-deckers in order, novelists like Richard Powers, Vikram Chandra and Marisha Pessl have used everything from Excel spreadsheets to logistics programs like Microsoft Project to organize their imaginative universes.

[. . .]

Vikram Chandra had similar results with Microsoft Project, which he used when writing “Sacred Games,” his sprawling new novel about the Mumbai criminal underworld. Employed more often by contractors managing personnel and supplies through complex building projects than by novelists structuring imaginative space, the program (which he says he first heard about from an Israeli crime novelist) helped Chandra keep track of the nearly three dozen characters across 900 pages — “not just people by themselves, but people in relation to time and place,” he wrote in an e-mail message. Since the novel uses flashbacks to cut between different plot lines — a narrative structure Chandra likens to a mandala, a series of concentric circles used as an Eastern meditation device — “it was really useful ... to be able to see the events arranged on a timeline.”

And I thought MS-Excel was only good for creating bug-sheets. Maybe that's why I am unable to write that sci-fi, fantasy masterpiece that I have been dreaming about for so many years.

My skills don't go much beyond using notepad and MS-Word. That's why I stick to blogging.

Science Fiction and the Technological Singularity

A few decades ago, the most popular science fiction epics were works like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy or Frank Herbert’s Dune series—stories that were set thousands or even tens of thousands of years in the future but involved human beings more or less like us and societies more or less like our own, but with more advanced technology. Today, by contrast, many of the genre’s top writers are unwilling to speculate more than 20 years ahead. The acceleration of technological advance, they argue, has begun to make traditional visions of far-future humanity look increasingly myopic and parochial.

Vernor Vinge in an interview voices his thoughts on the Technological Singularity and how rapidly accelerating technological progress is building a future that may be impossible for us even to imagine.

The Golden Age of Access to Books

The web is profoundly changing the way books are found, read, and talked about, and in almost every case, Victor Keegan feels, the change is for the good.

The Future of Bookstores

It's the morning of July 21st, 2007. The last Harry Potter book is out. You forgot to pre-order it. You decide to go to the local bookstore and pick up a copy. You walk into a bookstore, browse the bookshelves but can't find the book. It's sold out. The bookstore manager checks the store computer and confirms that no print copy is available. You are disappointed. The bookstore manager says that they can order a print copy for you but it will take a few days. Everybody else will have read the book by that evening, except you. That's not how you read a Potter book. It HAS to be read on the day it hits the bookstores. You curse your memory, your laziness, and your lousy luck.

And then the store manager adds " [. . .] we can sell it to you in other formats, some of which could be ready for downloading by the time you get home. How would you like it?"

Is that even possible?

In fact it is imperative that bookstores, if they want to survive and thrive, also distribute books in multiple formats, including digital content.

With books increasingly available in multiple formats -- among them digital "e-books" and audio versions downloadable to your iPod -- what's to prevent people from bypassing brick-and-mortar bookstores entirely, further undercutting enterprises already under pressure from online competitors?

The Caravan Project -- a tiny, experimental venture is just what might help brick-and-mortar bookstores survive.

Economics of Attention

Because of this information explosion, we no longer read - we skim. The news that used to last a day now lasts just a few hours, simply because we need to pay attention to the new news. So it is becoming increasingly difficult to juggle all the news sources and keep on top of things. [. . .]

Things get more interesting when we realize that our attention crisis is not only our problem. It is also a big problem for news sites, blogs, search engines and online retailers. Our scarcity of attention hurts their economics. The web sites that contain content relevant to us have a big incentive to make sure that we find it. [. . .]

The basic ideas behind the Attention Economy are simple. Such an economy facilitates a marketplace where consumers agree to receives services in exchange for their attention. The ultimate purpose is of course to sell something to the consumer, but the selling does not need to be direct and does not need to be instant. For example news feeds illustrate the point well, since they ask for consumers attention in exchange for the opportunity to show him/her advertising. The Search engines are similar in that respect, because they show ads in exchange for helping users find answers online.

It is important to realize that the key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. As long as a consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell. [. . .]

The Read/Write Web analyses The Attention Economy and how the web is affecting our "attention space."

Nokia: Connecting People

We have one of our clients from Germany visiting our office for a few days. One of my colleagues who was closeted with the client in some long meetings shared an interesting observation made by our client.

The German said that everything about India is very different from what it is in Germany. But he found one similarity: the Nokia ring tone. He said that he hears that everywhere in Germany and he heard it quite a bit in Mumbai as well.

Word Perfect

Tired of using the same old, boring MS Word? Word Perhect is the program for you.
Any program that asks you to "make sure your alarm is set for the next appointment before taking a nap," and seriously informs you when you click Save — "Sometimes things get lost," and that features a bored icon that advises you to "Go and play outside" is surely worth a try.

Try Word Perhect here.

Link via Geetha Krishnan.

We Are the Web

A neat video that traces the evolution of the web: from hypertext links to linking people.



Link via Geetha Krishnan