"...a new project available in Google Labs today - Books Ngram Viewer - highlights some of the other benefits of digitizing texts beyond better reading and storage."
Interesting thinking about the current state of weblogs. Will all blog-like activity be consumed by Facebook, or will new tools emerge to help with privacy? And how do private blogs mix with public tools like Newsreaders? Complicated questions to answer.
"Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow."
"If you host your content on a commercial provider or on a social network, there are different points at which you can be cut off." The Wikileaks case is pointing out a weakness in the completely libertarian web ideal.
"A naval officer told the present writer that he had often, when on deck, been both amused and surprised at the accuracy with which some of these girls used this form of signalling out of pure fun." People have always found ways to communicate over distances.
This is a great industrial film by Jam Handy for Hamilton Watch Company in 1949. It explains the mechanics of a wind-up watch. If they were making it today they might call it F*cking Watches, How Do They Work? [via Hodinkee]
"Yet despite all the innovations in the iPhone 4, without basic telephony service it’s just a piece of shit." Matt Honan succinctly sums up Apple's AT&T problem. The frustrating part is that it's potentially solvable by opening things up to other carriers.
"Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty." I've been noticing this too especially on the iPad's potentially gorgeous display. The app-makers, including Apple, just don't seem to care. [via jessamyn]
"Slate ad critic Seth Stevenson tries out a Google service that allows you to run your own commercial on national TV for as little as $100." (Neat. But Slate 5? Did I miss 2-4? har har.)
"The goal is not to prevent them from making mistakes, but to allow them to. Risk assessment, trust development, value determination, responsibility, self-direction — all of these very important skills grow out of the opportunity to explore, to experiment, to make mistakes and correct them."
"I spoke with Haughey this week about how he grew Metafilter from a side project into a profitable venture. In our conversation, he stressed three main things: build the site you want to use, listen to the community, and stay small."
I had this reaction to Avatar too, glad to see io9 spend some time explaining this problem. Hadn't made the Dune connection, that's spot on. [via mathowie]
"What I didn’t appreciate, until I finally unzipped and untarred a copy...is the historical scholarship scribbled in the margins of this remarkable database, or document, or hybrid of the two." [via MetaFilter]