👓 Facebook sold a rival-squashing move as privacy policy, documents reveal | the Guardian

Read Facebook sold a rival-squashing move as privacy policy, documents reveal (the Guardian)
Documents from a 2015 lawsuit allege that the tech giant’s policies were anticompetitive and misrepresented to the public

👓 Humane Ingenuity 8: Ebooks: It’s Complicated | Dan Cohen

Read Humane Ingenuity 8: Ebooks: It's Complicated by Dan CohenDan Cohen (buttondown.email)
In this issue, I want to open a conversation about a technology of our age that hasn’t quite worked out the way we all had hoped—and by we, I mean those of us who care about the composition and transmission of ideas, which I believe includes everyone on this list. Twenty years ago, literary critic Sven Birkerts reviewed the new technology of ebooks and e-readers for the short-lived internet magazine Feed. They sent him a Rocket eBook and a SoftBook, and he duly turned them on and settled into his comfy chair. What followed, however, was anything but comfy:
Image from a deck of cards by Rene Descartes

René Descartes designed a deck of playing cards that also functioned as flash cards to learn geometry and mechanics. (King of Clubs from The use of the geometrical playing-cards, as also A discourse of the mechanick powers. By Monsi. Des-Cartes. Translated from his own manuscript copy. Printed and sold by J. Moxon at the Atlas in Warwick Lane, London. Via the Beinecke Library, from which you can download the entire deck.)

My immediate thought is that this deck of cards was meant as a memory palace. I’m curious what training in rhetoric/memory methods Descartes must have had?
November 06, 2019 at 08:49PM


We are beginning a renovation of our main library at Northeastern University, Snell Library, and have been talking with architects (some of them very well-known), and I’ve found the discussions utterly invigorating. I would like to find some way to blog or newsletter about the process we will go through over the next few years, and to think aloud about the (re)design and (future) function of the library. I’m not sure if that should occur in this space or elsewhere, although the thought of launching another outlet fills me with dread. Let me know if this topic would interest you, and if I should include it here.

Dan, this is definitely interesting. Please include it here or on your main site!!!
November 06, 2019 at 08:43PM


But wait, there’s more. Much more. We generally encounter four different acquisition models (my thanks to Janet Morrow of our library for this outline): 1) outright purchase, just like a print book, easy peasy, generally costs a lot even though it’s just bits (we pay an average of over $40 per book this way), which gives us perpetual access with the least digital rights management (DRM) on the ebooks, which has an impact on sustainable access over time; 2) subscription access: you need to keep paying each year to get access, and the provider can pull titles on you at any time, plus you also get lots of DRM, but there’s a low cost per title (~$1 a book per year); 3) demand-driven/patron-driven acquisition: you don’t get the actual ebook, just a bibliographic record for your library’s online system, until someone chooses to download a book, or reads some chunk of it online, which then costs you, say ~$5; 4) evidence-based acquisitions, in which we pay a set cost for unlimited access to a set of titles for a year and then at the end of the year we can use our deposit to buy some of the titles (< $1/book/year for the set, and then ~$60/book for those we purchase).

Nice to see this laid out. I’ve never seen a general overview of how this system works for libraries.

I’ve always wondered what it cost my local public library to loan me an e-book whether I read it or not.
November 06, 2019 at 08:40PM


It is worth asking why ebooks and e-readers like the Kindle treaded water after swimming a couple of laps. I’m not sure I can fully diagnose what happened (I would love to hear your thoughts), but I think there are many elements, all of which interact as part of the book production and consumption ecosystem.

For me, and potentially for a majority of others, our memories have evolved to be highly location specific. It’s far easier for me to remember what I’ve read when I read a physical book. I can often picture what I was reading at the top, middle, or bottom of the left or right page. This fact in addition to how far I am in the book gives me a better idea of where I am with respect to a text.

These ideas are very subtle and so heavily ingrained in us that they’re not very apparent to many, if at all.

See also Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture by Lynne Kelly (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
November 06, 2019 at 08:32PM

👓 BumpySkies is my masterpiece, alas | Fogknife

Read BumpySkies is my masterpiece, alas by Jason McIntoshJason McIntosh (Fogknife)
Three years ago I thought this project was my future. I have let that dream go.
This is totally the type of project that I could see David Shanske appreciating.

👓 We’re hiring: Come work for Nieman Lab as a staff writer | Neiman Lab

Read We’re hiring: Come work for Nieman Lab as a staff writer (Nieman Lab)
We have an opening for a staff writer here at Nieman Lab. If you're interested, apply over here! The job's pretty easy to describe: You see all the stories on this website? The ones about journalism innovation — changes in how news gets reported, produced, distributed, discovered, consumed, an…
Except that they won’t take remote… I’d almost move to Boston for this… alas.

👓 Using the WordPress mShots Screenshot API | Terence Eden

Read Using the WordPress mShots Screenshot API by Terence Eden (Terence Eden’s Blog)
A few years ago, I wrote about Google's secret screenshot API - a slightly cumbersome way to take website screenshots for free. There's another service which you may find simpler to use - mShots from WordPress. Here's how it works:Take any website link:https://twitter.com/JennyVass/status/1067855777...

👓 Festivus, for the Rest of Us | Hot Pod News

Read Festivus, for the Rest of Us – Hot Pod News by Nicholas Quah (hotpodnews.com)

Over the past month, we’ve been running a call for opinions built around a fairly straightforward question: “What are you most frustrated by?” (With respect to the podcast industry, of course.) To put it mildly, folks obliged.

Let me start by establishing what I tried to do this with this piece. Editorially, the goal was to lay out various clusters of frustrations being felt by a cross-section of the Hot Pod readership — at least, to the best that I could with the format I’ve chosen. Creatively, the idea with the format is to communicate what it feels like to live with my inbox and various messaging accounts. That’s pretentiously phrased, but you’ll see what I mean soon enough.

Some reading notes:

  • Different chunks represent different people, in case it isn’t clear.
  • The sections marked as “Deep Dives” represent entries from a single contributor who took the time to lay out an extensive, effectively-written submission.
  • For practical reasons, I’m not publishing every response — so don’t take it personally if you don’t see yours.
  • In adherence to the retweets =/= endorsements principle, I don’t necessarily agree with what’s being printed… nor should what’s being printed necessarily be taken as fully accurate. The point, instead, is to illustrate that person’s truth.
  • Almost everybody requested anonymity. So, for simplicity’s sake, I decided to implement blanket anonymity for all responses, including from those who listed their names.
  • There were a handful of very specific frustrations, which I’m setting aside for now to vet as leads for future columns.

Alright, enough wind-up. To the question: what are you most frustrated by?

👓 LO, The Internet Turned 50 Today | Interdependent Thoughts

Read LO, The Internet Turned 50 Today by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)
The first message was sent from one computer to another over ARPANET on October 29th at 22:30. ‘LO’ for Login, but then the computer crashed as Charley S Kline typed the G. Famous first words. Leonard Kleinrock describes the events that led to that first internet message in a blogpost. I was bor...
Note to self: get a picture of the logbook and release it with a more permissive CC attribution.

👓 Christmas Films | Colin Walker

Read a post by Colin WalkerColin Walker (colinwalker.blog)
It's the start of November and we've got enough Christmas films recorded such that my wife worked out we'd have to watch seven a day, that's right seven a day, to fit them all in before the 25th December. What is it about them? They're obviously "feel good" fodder but they're formulaic according to ...
I resemble this remark… er, um, I mean I resent….

Oh heck, I wholeheartedly identify. It’s so bad that I’ve even got a tag on my website for Hallmark Christmas movies.

👓 Five Things You May Not Know About Me | gRegorLove.com

Read Five Things You May Not Know About Me by gRegor MorrillgRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)
San and GFM wrote this type of intro post so I figured I would do one too. It is entirely a cool coincidence that this five things post is on November 5th. My name is Gregor and I typically stylize my name online as gRegor. Why? A long time ago I was signing an email and I mis-capitalized it. I look...
A nice writing prompt here. I think I actually knew about 2 1/2 of the 5, but only because I’ve been reading for a long time…

👓 How “Don’t Be Evil” panned out | Memex 1.1 | John Naughton

Read How “Don’t Be Evil” panned out by John NaughtonJohn Naughton (memex.naughtons.org)

My Observer review of Rana Foroohar’s new book about the tech giants and their implications for our world.

“Don’t be evil” was the mantra of the co-founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the graduate students who, in the late 1990s, had invented a groundbreaking way of searching the web. At the time, one of the things the duo believed to be evil was advertising. There’s no reason to doubt their initial sincerity on this matter, but when the slogan was included in the prospectus for their company’s flotation in 2004 one began to wonder what they were smoking. Were they really naive enough to believe that one could run a public company on a policy of ethical purity?

👓 The Liberal failure | Memex 1.1 | John Naughton

Read The Liberal failure by John NaughtonJohn Naughton (memex.naughtons.org)

From Dave Winer:

Just thinking out loud here. I am sure there’s a new journalism out there, that it’s not the journalism that gets so much acclaim, the reinvention of Woodward and Bernstein, the two Washington Post innovators who brought down Nixon. We should be way ahead of that by now. We need to be, because the forces opposing democracy, the equivalent of 1974’s plumbers, are moving much faster. We’re erecting Maginot Lines now, getting ready to fight the Battle of 2016, ignoring that the enemy already controls our capital. They’ve been innovating. We haven’t seen the results of their most recent innovations, yet.

Yep.

👓 Right diagnosis, wrong remedy | Memex 1.1 | John Naughton

Read Right diagnosis, wrong remedy by John NaughtonJohn Naughton (memex.naughtons.org)

And his solution? Use antitrust law to break up Facebook and Twitter.

That’s not going to solve the problem. And even if it did, Trump would be into his fifth term before break-up was accomplished.

👓 Mean | Life with Adders

Read Mean by Adam TinworthAdam Tinworth (microblog.onemanandhisblog.com)
Yes, I know that this was yesterday’s prompt, but I didn’t get to it (even though I posted other things) and I did have something I wanted to say: One thing I try not to be on the internet these days is mean. But it is an effort. I’m good at the snark. I can bring the snark. Some people encour...