Undesign. Liz Bailey recently wrote an article called Lo-Fi Allstars (PDF) for Graphics International on the trend toward simpler, more usable web design. The article includes a few quotes from me about weblog design. Here's part of a rambling email interview I did for the article: “Weblogs have definitely affected the look and feel of […]

Politics and Happiness?. Two new interesting works with political themes have been released under Creative Commons licenses. Gritty, A Critique of the Global Good Life, by Michael Wadleigh and Cleo Huggins, is an overview of global economics and politics presented in an easily digestible format. The work offers a thoughtful commentary on politics, the media, […]

Words You Won't Be Hearing. If “democracy” is government by the demos (people) and “aristocracy” is government by the aristos, then what would you call a government formed by the connections among people? That's the question I posed, more or less, to the blogiverse's resident Greek-Latin-Aramaic-French-German-Hebrew scholar, AKMA. He responds bravely to my question: There'd […]

Rethinking out loud. I first visited the subject of terror when I read Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, many years ago. I'm revisiting her thinking now. It's complicated stuff, and somewhat dated; but it deals with verities I think we need to factor into our convesations about the War on Terrorism, whatever that is. […]

Houston, We Have a Problem. I host my sites on with Pair, and I've been extremely happy with their service. I don't think I've had a single second of down time that was due to them (due to my computers… months, but never them). They also provide me with statistics, which I looked at last night […]

Kepler – A Digital Library for Individuals “The purpose of Kepler is to give any user the ability to easily self-archive publications by means of an “archivelet”: a self-contained, self-installing software system that functions as an Open Archives Initiative data provider. Kepler archivelets are designed to be easy to install, use and maintain. Kepler is […]

U.S. Universities Competing to Build Biohazard Level 4 Labs [Disinformation] mmmm, coming to a university near you, a new place for radical students to injure themselves and others. up go the armed guards, i suppose.

On-line scientific publications and blogs. Recent editorial of Information Research journal (bold is mine): A couple of issues ago I asked readers whether or not they knew of any work on the 'half-life' of electronic journal papers versus that of print journal papers. I received a helpful e-mail message pointing me to Steve Lawrence's paper in Nature […]

Booktalk “In constructing allconsuming.net, Erik has deliberately left software hooks and information bait dangling from the site, ready for us to connect and consume. Moreover, he encourages us to do so, telling us to “Use [his] XML” and try out his SOAP interface. So I did. While allconsuming.net can send you book reading recommendations (by […]

NEEEERD! – The Streak Of Anti-Intellectualism In Colleges. Plastic::Work::School: “Some college students and faculty are fretting over an 'anti-intellectual thread' running through college.” [Plastic: Most Recent] i think this is occuring more and more. I think it is in part symptomatic of a growing professionalization and profitization of the goals of higher education students.