Entries classified under essays

Dan Gillmor points to an excellent example of distributed journalism in action over at Daily Kos. I was completely blown away by what I saw when I got there. I'm still trying to soak in all the background around the Plame Leak / Jeff Gannon thing but, to be honest, the specifics of this event are not as important to me as the general phenomenon occurring there. This seems an obvious glimpse into a future where involvement by the general population in issues of import to the general population is increased substantially. Herewith some rant and analysis of our present toolset and humble suggestion for improvement...

Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning was the Command Line was recently put online (legally and with permission from Stephenson, of course). I've always heard this was a must read for anyone with even a mild interest in the history of the computer industry. My vertical scrollbar is at about 37% and already I have to agree.

This alone will be worth the read (and it doesn't even have anything to do with computing):

I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television.

And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.

I fell in love with Stephenson's writing style with Snowcrash. The day after I finished Snowcrash, I purchased Cryptonomicon - in hardcover. I have not yet found the time to take on the Baroque trilogy.

Oh yea. There are some mixed feelings about the copy of Command Line linked to. The guy who got Stephenson's okay to put it online felt it necessary to annotate some bits that were slightly out of date. I read the first couple of annotations, couldn't really follow, and skipped the rest. They aren't overly intrusive and might even make sense to a different monkey.

Check out this Review of Firefox at Net Gazette. It looks like a good old fashioned site at first but look closer. There is no actual text! The review consists completely of images... images of text. Each paragraph is a separate image arranged into tables for layout. What's even more interesting is how they, uh, "implemented" links. Each image-of-text has an image-map attached to it defining each links coordinates. I realize we need all the good press we can get but this site championing your browser is a bit like having the Ku Klux Klan back your presidential candidate.

I thought this was a really great example of a web architecture antipattern and it reminded me of something I wanted to point people to. The w3c recently put out the Architecture of the World Wide Web as a Proposed Recommendation. I really cannot express how much I like this document. It's very different from the recent slew of crap that has been flowing from the w3c. It isn't a specification at all, really, but rather a look at what the web got right. Sadly, using images-of-text-wrapped-in-tables isn't covered.

All content that comes to the web goes through a sucky phase before reaching true Web Zen. Reaching this elevated state requires answering the question, "What is it about the web medium that improves on existing forms of content delivery?" and then seizing them.