Hugh McGuire

publishing, technology, media, philosophy, a bit of politics.

Category: web

You Can’t Shut WikiLeaks Without Shutting Democracy

My mother just asked what i thought about WikiLeaks … and finally I had an answer (my gut reaction from the beginning has been to support WikiLeaks, but i haven’t articulated that support till now): 1. There is nothing you can do about it. The internet is designed to support anonymous dumping of masses of [...]

Forbes and Me

My O’Reilly article, about books and the internet, got picked up by Forbes: The Vanishing Line Between Books And Internet.

Books as Web Objects: Publishers with APIs

I’ve been meaning to write this post about truly connected books for ages. It’s up on O’Reilly Radar: Ebooks to date have mostly been approached as digital versions of a print books that readers can read on a variety of digital devices, with some thought to enhancing ebooks with a few bells and whistles, like [...]

Good Links- Weekly: August 28

This weeks’ Good Links wherein Mitch (w / t) Alistair (w / t) and I choose links for each other. A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education – Edutopia. “This piece looks at how school textbooks are purchased in the US, and how a strange combination of Gerrymandering, industry consolidation, and book budgets are [...]

Good Links – Weekly: August 14

This weeks’ Good Links wherein Mitch (w / t) Alistair (w / t) and I choose links for each other. Top Secret America – The Washington Post Alistair for Hugh: Put on your tinfoil hats: they really are out to get you! This Washington Post piece on Top Secret America includes an interactive exploration of [...]

HTML5 Audio Tag Mess

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 [...]

LibriVox Turns Five

On August 10, 2005 I put up a website, called it LibriVox, and posted the following: LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting? LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the [...]

Good Links, Weekly – July 24

More Good Links: Mitch (w / t) picks a link for me and a link for Alistair (w / t). Alistair and I do the same. Star Wars: Episode 1 – Red Letter Media. Alistair for Hugh: Techcrunch recently covered a three-hour, candid discussion with Conan O’Brien in which he said of Big Media producers, [...]

Good Links – Weekly (July 10)

The Great Montreal Link Exchange continues (sorry this is late): Every week Mitch (w / t) picks a link for me and a link for Alistair (w / t). Alistair and I do the same. Losing Our Cool”: The high price of staying cool. Alistair for Hugh: Since Montreal’s in the middle of a heat [...]

Good Links – Weekly (July 3, 2010)

This is week two of the Good Links Exchange, with selections from Mitch, Alistair and me. Each week, each of us choses one link each specifically for each of the other two guys, for a total of six links a week. For more info on this little project and the original post, check Mitch’s blog. [...]