Good news: in the new HTML5 spec, you don’t need Flash or another plugin to play audio files from standards compliant browsers. Instead, you can put your audio link between <audio> tags, and all should be well. New releases of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera all support the audio tag. Bad news: Safari, Chrome, Firefox [...]
I had lunch last week with Mitch Joel (t/w) and Alistair Croll (t/w). Amid lots of brain-exploding chatter, Mitch had a nice idea: how about each week we each pick a good link for each of the other two guys. So, every week, six good links, specially chosen. Our own personalized weekly Givemesomethingtoread, that other [...]
I have a post up over at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog, Sifting through all these books: …We have a massive and growing supply and demand imbalance in the book business. And, as the technologies for creating and distributing books becomes trivial, the supply of books is just going to keep growing exponentially. There is [...]
We are getting to a point where all data – web sites, books – are accessible as raw, structured datasets, to a point when we users can/and will do as we wish with the outputs. This is the case with web sites now. You can force your browser to display things in a particular way. [...]
I had lunch with Mitch today; he’s a new convert to Mac. He asked for some suggestions of software that I love, so I sent him this list (that leaves out a few obvious ones that he’s already using – eg Skitch): 1password: encrypted password manager, changed my life … have not got it working [...]
I’m doing a little informal survey. I’d like to know what you think are the three most important books about the web, the digital, and its cultural implications. These could be books about technology, about sociology, about philosophy; but generally books that have helped, and will continue to help us navigate the future as it [...]
Ever since Book Oven shifted focus in November 2009 to Bite-Size Edits, I have been wanting to write about one of the major reasons for the shift: my realization that: a) the world needs an open book-publishing platform b) rather than building from scratch at Book Oven, we should have started with WordPress, and built [...]
I just posted this to Twitter, but I think it might be important enough to commit in the hard stone of a blog. And the thought is the following: The distinction between “the internet” & “books” is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.
Instapaper on the iphone is the best reading medium for long articles of non-fiction. It’s always been that way, but Matt Forsythe just revealed one reason why it’s so amazing. Because years of experimentation has settled on a standard magazine/newsprint column-size and font size, optimized for reading. And, lo, Instapaper replicates that column and font [...]
In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani takes on the Internet, remix culture, post-modernism and the technology-induced Decline of Western Civilization. She quotes the usual suspects: Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen, Nicholas Carr as well as Cass Sunstein, Farhad Manjoo. Picking on traditional media has become a tiresome sport. Much more interesting to explore successful new [...]