• Turn WordPress Into a Complete CMS For Newsrooms and Multi-User Blogs With Edit Flow – WordPress MU and BuddyPress plugins, themes, support, tips and how to’s

  Useful, perhaps, for journalism classes, but many more beside

  tags: rumilinks, wordpress, plugins, publishing

• Martin Gardner, 1914-2010 | HiLobrow

  A brief interview with Martin Gardner (RIP)

  tags: rumilinks, cosmolinks, obit, martin gardner, interviews, writers

• Video: Merlin’s Time & Attention Talk (Improvised Rutgers Edition) | 43 Folders

  tags: rumilinks, productivity, gtd, attention

• The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People | Zen Habits

  Solitude… yes, you need it. No, you probably don’t get enough of it.

  tags: cosmolinks, rumilinks, creativity, solitude

• How to Save the News (James Fallows, Atlantic)

  “Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects…”

  tags: rumilinks, cosmolinks, journalism, google

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I was an early Twitter adopter– #26603, in fact—and quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of the service as a place to connect with my peers and colleagues. It wasn’t long before hearing someone say “I don’t like Twitter” based on the content made no more sense to me than saying “I don’t like blogs”… in both cases the technology is just a medium for creation, connection, and conversation. Find the right group for any (or better, all) of those three, and Twitter, like blogs, are glorious, dynamic places. Casually drop in on conversations, skim the words of a bunch of people one doesn’t know, or randomly attempt to connect, and they are horrid wastes of time. One may was well say “I don’t like books” or “I don’t like words” because so many of each are terrible.

That being said, a few days ago I nuked my longstanding Twitter account, summarily dropping the 300+ people I followed and the 1100+ people that followed me. And it feels good (this is where my friend Jen can say “I told you so.”) Twitter doesn’t provide any easy way to scratch and rebuild one’s network, which is what I feel compelled to do in light of my changing interests. And even if it did, I don’t know that keeping the username would have been useful.

For at least a year now I’ve become disenchanted and disillusioned with the bigger picture of education and technology. Increasingly, I find myself feeling as if I’m looking through the wrong end of the telescope, my vision narrowed down to a tiny circle. It’s time for me to leave those conversations and battles to my betters, those who are smarter and/or stronger and/or more ambitious than I am. Pressing the button that irrevocably deleted my Twitter account was both frightening and cathartic. Frightening because I severed a primary connection to many fantastic people I’ve come to know and work with… in many cases in no small part thanks to Twitter. I hope I don’t lose (too many of) those friendships. But the deletion was cathartic because the community that supported and sustained me had become, as of late, a kind of weight around my neck, preventing me from looking up in the direction I need to go, and too often shining a bright light on my growing dissonance and contrast with a world I no longer fit in.

The final push I needed to make this long-contemplated decision were the reactions from my community to Larry Sanger’s Educause essay on “Individual Knowledge in the Information Age,” readings which ranged from simply uncharitable to the ideologically-driven, with a healthy dose of willful misreading and cherry-picking added into the mix. It’s not that Sanger is 100% correct or that many of his points aren’t arguable… it’s how forcefully those readings demonstrated to me that I am completely out of step with that community. @fncll was the first casualty… this site may be next. I think I’m finally coming to a point where I’m comfortable merging the two parts of myself—the artist/creator and the technologically-inclined—that have become increasingly (and increasingly painfully) disconnected. The split has always felt artificial—but as of late it has become soul-killing. I’m not sure where my newly-fused, newly-whole self will find its home online. Maybe here. Maybe Cosmopoetica. Maybe somewhere else entirely.

I still exist on Twitter as @cosmopoetica, where I tweet about writing, art, music, literature, publishing, copyright, and whatever else suits my creative fancy. Technology and education topics will surely come into play there, but only as they pertain to these core activities and interests. Technology and education—and most assuredly “ed tech”—as such simply don’t interest or engage me anymore. And that’s a good thing.

• Google Font Directory

  tags: fonts, typography, rumilinks, cosmolinks, webdesign, webdev

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Fever // photography

  Photography sites D’Arcy Norman reads… 

  tags: cosmolinks, rumilinks, photography

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

[CC licensed photo by Dunechaser] 

I’m in fabulously sunny Vancouver, getting ready to head to day two of Northern Voice 2010, the (not-so) little conference that could. Today I will be speaking as part of a panel with the catchy title “Not Dead Yet… Blogging” (which should be followed by intoning, in your deepest possible voice, “or is it?”). It’s always a pleasure to share the stage with luminaries like Brian Lamb and Alan Levine. You should take whatever you can from them… but here are a few links and such I’ll be referring to in my non-tech, unwired, mostly sllide-free portion of the panel:

• The Motley Readers (unbook-club, multi-format experiment)
• Cosmopoetica (my “real” blog)
• Boutin’s “Blogs are dead” article (Wired)
• Lascaux cave paintings
• W. B. Yeats
• Commonplace Books
• Samuel Pepys’ diary
• Michel de Montaigne’s essais
• Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (book by Winifred Gallagher)
• Bilbo Baggins
• Conceptual Art
• Mail Art and the Zine Scene
• Don DeLillo
• Bryan Alexander (generally, and recent reflective Infocult meta-post)
• Scoble’s (zombie) blog
• Technorati’s corpse
• Ezra Pound’s pact with Walt Whitman
• Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (book by David Shields)
• Twitter is Dead

• Hand-drawn maps from firefighters, club-hoppers, Boy Scout dads, grandmothers, and Alexander Calder. – By Julia Turner – Slate Magazine

  Very cool– love the casual, hand-drawn maps!

  tags: rumilinks, cosmolinks, drawing, maps, visualization

• Separate truths – The Boston Globe

  “We pretend that religious differences are trivial because it makes us feel safer, or more moral. But pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous, and more deadly.”

  tags: rumilinks, cosmolinks, religion

• The Unword Dictionary

  “Unwords.com maintains a collection of words that individuals and groups have made up at some point in time to describe things that aren’t associated with a term in the English language, or to describe them with a term that is better suited, or to describe things for which they didn’t know the real term. In any case, these unwords, as we call them, do not normally exist in the English dictionary.” (a fictionary)

  tags: rumilinks, cosmolinks, language, words, reference, dictionary

• “Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black” – Tim Wise

  Worth considering… 

  tags: rumilinks, politics

• 7 Ways to Make Instapaper Rock Even Harder | Digitizd

  Some cool ways to improve the already awesome instapaper service/app

  tags: rumilinks, utilities, browsing, reading, instapaper

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

[CC licensed image by cogdogblog] 

‘The first press accounts of the Apple iPad have been long on emotional raves about its beauty and ease of use, but have glossed over its competitive characteristics—or rather, its lack thereof. Some have characterized the iPad as an evolution from flexible-but-complicated computers to simple, elegant appliances. But has there ever been an “appliance” with the kind of competitive control Apple now enjoys over the iPad? The iPad’s DRM restrictions mean that Apple has absolute dominion over who can run code on the device—and while that thin shellac of DRM will prove useless at things that matter to publishers, like preventing piracy, it is deadly effective in what matters to Apple: preventing competition.’  [read the rest]

I find myself deeply conflicted after reading Cory Doctorow’s excellent editorial about the iPad and Apple’s aggressive, protectionist tactics.

Doctorow is spot-on with his criticisms and his warning is apt. I’ve heard a lot of happy comments that there is “finally some competition for the Kindle that has been monopolizing the e-book market to the detriment of publishers.” Which is true, but skips over the important point that competition from another equally closed and (potentially, for now) predatory entity doesn’t benefit readers or authors much unless we are willing to just accept ceding a significant number of our rights as either.

After making the issue of “code signing” clear, Doctorow draws an imperfect but powerful analogy:

‘Think about what that kind of control means for the future of your e-books. Does the company that makes your toaster get to tell you whose bread you can buy? Your dishwasher can wash anyone’s dishes, not just the ones sold by its manufacturer (who, by the way, takes a 30% cut along the way). What’s more, you can invent cool new things to do with your dishwasher. For example, you can cook salmon in it without needing permission from the manufacturer (check out the Surreal Gourmet for how). And you can even sell your dishwasher salmon recipe without violating some obscure law that lets dishwasher manufacturers dictate how you can use your machine.

Some early reviews have compared the iPad to a TV, a more passive medium in contrast to the interactive PC. But even passive old TV benefited greatly from the absence of a DRM-style lockdown on its medium. No one needed a broadcaster’s permission, for example, to invent cable TV. No one needed a cable operator’s permission to invent the VCR. And, tellingly, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak didn’t need a TV manufacturer’s permission to invent the Apple II Plus, which plugged into the back of any old TV set. Of course, cable operators were sued by broadcasters, and the VCR was the subject of an eight-year court battle to wipe it off the face of the Earth. But by any measure, TV has greatly benefited from this system of “adversarial innovation.” TiVo and all its imitators and successors, including the Apple TV, are good recent examples.

But this is not what is happening in e-book publishing so far.’

The same part of me that remains indignant about DRM in general and implementations of such protection like Apple’s in particular wonders: “how did we let it get this far?” It really is a ridiculous situation.

I was supremely skeptical… while a devoted iPod/iTouch user, I voiced a host of familiar arguments against the iPad, over and above proprietary, monopolistic content lock-in, such as: how the iPad is designed primarily for consumption, not creation; how the iPad has been artificially maimed, Harrison Bergeron style, in an attempt not to create a market that feeds on its sister products; how I already had a netbook and a smart phone and a few iPods—what’s the point of this overgrown iTouch that still doesn’t have a camera?; etc., etc., etc.

Then I got my hands on an iPad and realized how seductive and useful they actually are. That they aren’t a replacement for a notebook or subnotebook or smart phone is precisely why the tablet interface and form-factor works. What I see the iPad as being designed for—80% consumption of entertainment and participation in social networks, 10% creation via web-based and specifically purposed apps, and 10% practical productivity activities—it does exceedingly well. The screen is big enough and the sound good enough to enjoy video outside of those times one is “in a pinch”—and capable enough for two people to comfortably share. The size, akin to a magazine, is comfortable, familiar, and easily integrated into existing bags, nooks and crannies. The keyboard is big enough, in landscape mode, to touch-type at reduced—but still more than serviceable—speed, and big enough in portrait mode for even fat-fingerers like myself to poke and prod a Tweet, a Facebook update, an instant message, or even a reasonably sized email into shape. The browser is a real browser that can do all the things real browsers must do—and a few of the optional things I think they should do.

The iPad is far from perfect (though it may be closest option yet to satisfy my quest for the perfect device for writers, something I’ve been seeking since the days of the luggable Osborne CP/M machine), but it is essentially without peer.

The question is, do I have the courage of my convictions? Can I say no? Should I?

• Wandering Wikipedia: Datamining My Firefox History

  Datamining Firefox history. I really should try this. Though it might be depressing… 

  tags: rumilinks, visualization, wikipedia

• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – a practical guide to web typography

  tags: cosmolinks, typography, fonts, type, style, design, rumilinks

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Traditional Schools Aren’t Working. Let’s Move Learning Online. – Reason Magazine

  We already work online, play online, and shop online. Why isn’t school online?

  tags: rumilinks, education, online

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• The Human Body as a Subway Map

  cool.

  tags: rumilinks, visualization, illustration, cosmolinks

• ShadyURL

  Don’t just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening.

  tags: humor, links, rumilinks

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.