Twitter: Narcissism or Age-old Communication?

From the dawn of civilization, when writing was the province of the few and esoteric, people have been memorizing information and communicating it using truncated, mnemonic bursts. Sizable swathes of the Bible resemble Twitter-like prose.

The Decline of Text and the Re-emergence of the Visual

A picture is worth 1000 words. But, words have succeeded pictograms and ideograms and hieroglyphs for good reasons.

The Economics of Spam

ISPs, spam monitoring services, and governments in the rich industrialized world react by placing entire countries – such as Macedonia and Costa Rica – on black lists and, thus denying access to their users en bloc.

The Revolt of the Poor – The Demise of Intellectual Property?

In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses, the myth of intellectual property stands out.

Games People Play

Players – in contravention of the game’s rules until recently – also trade in EverQuest paraphernalia and characters offline.

Microsoft’s Encarta and MS Student 2008

Enter Microsoft Student 2008: a productivity suite which includes English and foreign language dictionaries, thesaurus, quotations library, assignment templates, tutorials, graphing calculator software and a Web Companion. MS Student comes replete with the entire Encarta Premium 2008 encyclopedia and its dynamic atlas and provides online access to the feature-rich MSN Encarta Premium through October 2008.

The Content Downloader’s Profile

Media companies would do better to adopt new technologies rather than fight them.

Thoughts on the Internet’s Founding Myths

Oceans of information are today at the fingertips of one and sundry. This is undisputed. The Internet is a vast storehouse of texts, images, audio recordings, and databases. But what matters is whether people make good use of this serendipitous cornucopia.

The Six Sins of the Wikipedia

Six cardinal (and, in the long-term, deadly) sins plague the Wikipedia. What unites and underlies all its deficiencies is simple: Wikipedia dissembles about what it is and how it operates. It is a self-righteous confabulation and its success in deceiving the many attests not only to the gullibility of the vast majority of Netizens but to the PR savvy of its sleek and slick operators.