This June a passion for Iranian politics is lighting up Facebook and Twitter. The rigged election and resulting protests feel like history in the making, so the spike in interest on the web is no surprise. Yet I suspect a good number of tweeters and bloggers now tracking events had … Continue reading
Kevin Kelley, Wired Magazine “Senior Maverick” or something like that – & spawner of any number of trendy Pacifica insights – invites you to map the internet! Go ahead, you live with it enough, it’s changed your life — now render its landscape. Only requirement: somewhere on the map, please … Continue reading
I might be. The Wolfram|Alpha “computational knowledge engine” has been generating buzz for some time, especially since Stephen Wolfram, its eccentric progenitor, announced that it would be going live in mid-May. Expect the twittering to reach a crescendo. Since the Wolfram|Alpha (WA, let’s say) promises to answer questions typed into … Continue reading
The occasion of a little makeover for good old Clayfox (thanks Jai in New Delhi!) has me thinking back over all its incarnations, most of which have been slightly hideous. Without WordPress and its myriad of free themes, I hate to think of the garish rags that might be tricking … Continue reading
Are you partial to absurd lists? So is Time Magazine! This bastion of old media has been developing a “World’s Most Influential” franchise over the past few years, addressing or cultivating some mysterious need to rank Vladimir Putin against Miley Cyrus on a fuzzy scale of “influence.” You can watch … Continue reading
In the perfect world we never seem to live in, migration of scholarship to the web would mean endlessly networked citations. It would mean new metrics for gauging the impact of any given publication, substantiating tenure/promotion and grant proposals with hard evidence. It would give us new tools to map … Continue reading
It’s late January, another semester is gearing up, and yet once more I’m preparing another round of Lit Hum — must be time for Stanley Fish to say something risible about the humanities. Last year around this time, Fish reveled in the inutility of it all: “To the question “of … Continue reading
How did you experience the American Century? Much of it, for me, was framed through Life Magazine. It was always a pleasure to leaf through Life’s photos in issues collected by my grandparents — vibrant, propagandistic, king-sized. TV news killed the big tent photo circus off, and frozen pop images … Continue reading
Every once in a while Clayfox drifts into the tag clouds. And yet its heart has never quite followed. Maybe that’s because most often those clouds don’t prove to be so very informative after all. Let’s review: tag clouds are a way to visualize the frequency of application of (usually … Continue reading
Who is this woman, and why is she crying? This photo, from a collection of early news photos housed at the Library of Congress, is part of an experiment that has that venerable institution dipping a toe into the Web 2.0 waters. Compare the photo on LC’s own website, versus … Continue reading