onfocus

Disappointing exchange, and a textbook example of how not to respond to critics online. Like Derek I'm a huge fan of On the Media so, ugh.

The Internet Archive is now archiving physical books. "Brewster noticed that Google and Amazon and other countries scanning books would cut non-rare books open to scan them, or toss them out after scanning. He felt this destruction was dangerous for the culture."

"...Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship." Excellent rant about the ephemeral nature of Facebook (among other things).

This solid list of Sinatra slang is gasville. (Am I doing that right?)

Kids sing The Smiths.

"I thought I would die, severed from the tweetosphere, but I didn’t."

"The last thing fans of these programmes want is to be confronted with the cruel reality of what life was like in late Victorian and Edwardian England..."

"I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant." heh, Umberto Eco weighed in on the Mac vs. PC war in 1994 by comparing the organization of operating systems with the organization of religions.

"The green children of Woolpit reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, some time in the 12th century..." [via Best of Wikipedia]

Hooray, Alan Taylor's new photography / journalism weblog is live!

Nostalgia-drenched photorealist still life paintings.

Nice browser extension that embeds site previews on Twitter. (It works better than that sounds.)

"Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we've come to call the web?"

Fantastic engravings from an 18th century book on religious practice across the world.

Nice description of the terrifying uniform plague doctors wore in the Middle Ages.

"As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities." Great hypothesis. Hard in practice.

Paintings that capture alchemists, messy labs and all.

"It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish."

Devastating critique of the damage Yahoo! has done to Web culture. "All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: 'Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.' Great work, guys."

More Google Books Ngrams fun.

"The ability to quantify things that had once been subjective 'hunches' on the part of scholars...is nothing short of revolutionary."

"...a new project available in Google Labs today - Books Ngram Viewer - highlights some of the other benefits of digitizing texts beyond better reading and storage."