Image source: Customer Evangelists

Text source: ZDnet

Original post: November 23, 2005

Two pieces of otherwise unrelated news flew past my eyes today while I was hydroplaning through my RSS Aggregator. The first was Amazon has apparently launched, or is just testing out, ProductWiki – a way for Amazon users to enter “customer editable product information” that will appear alongside “most, if not all, of the items the company sells”. I haven’t seen any confirmation of this in official Amazon sites or PR, so consider this an unconfirmed rumor at this point. But it’s certainly a fascinating concept, for anyone and everyone to be able to add information to Amazon product data. I assume that it would be additional data and wouldn’t replace the official manufacturer and retailer data (can you imagine the outcry otherwise).

In another more substantial piece of news, washingtonpost.com has released a “Post Remix site”, with the witty nickname mashingtonpost.com. They’re doing this “to foster innovation, and because we want to see your ideas about new ways of displaying news and information on the Web.” Some interesting mash-ups that people have done already: News Cloud (a tag cloud), Ripped from the Headlines! (a daily news quiz), world map interface, thumbnail quiz of Arts & Entertainment stories, and washingtonpost.com search results via RSS.

What do Amazon ProductWiki and mashingtonpost.com have in common? They both let users remix existing content and create new content. This is what Web 2.0 is all about, folks.

Image source: scifi.com

Text source:  ZDnet

Published: November 25th, 2007

Robert Scoble spent the last week giving his new Amazon Kindle ebook reader a test drive, reading a couple of books and declaring the progeny of Jeff Bezos a failure. He thinks the usability and user interface suck and it lack features such as a touch screen, social networking and the capability to send electronic goods to others. He wants version 3.0 of the device.
David Pogue of the New York Times is far kinder to the Kindle.

So if the Kindle isn’t a home run, it’s at least an exciting triple. It gets the important things right: the reading experience, the ruggedness, the super-simple software setup. And that wireless instant download — wow.

Even though most people will prefer the feel, the cost and the simplicity of a paper book, the Kindle is by far the most successful stab yet at taking reading material into the digital age.

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Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, introduces its new e-book, called Kindle (Mark Lennihan /Associated Press)

Image and text source NYTimes.com 

November 19, 2007

Amazon.com introduced its electronic book reader today at a packed event in New York. Unlike other products in this area, Amazon’s $399 Kindle is designed to be used without ever connecting to a computer. Instead it has a wireless Internet connection that lets users browse Amazon’s online store on the device and download a book in less than a minute.

Amazon is trying to do for books what Apple has done for music. It has linked its device tightly to its own online bookstore, just as the iTunes music store is tied into the iPod. Amazon has 90,000 titles for sale at launch, including books from all major publishers.

Best sellers and new releases will cost $9.99. That represents a substantial savings off of Amazon’s already discounted prices. Amazon is currently selling hardcover bestsellers for roughly $13 to $20 and trade paperbacks for $8 to $11.

Read the entire article at NYTimes.com 

Image source: Amazon.com

Text source: The Pinocchio Theory

Note: A comment on this review was previously posted at Nettime.org by DJ Spooky.

“The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness.” William Gibson’s prose is cool and precise: minimal, low-affect, attuned to surfaces rather than depths. It’s overwrought, filled to bursting with similes and allusions; yet somehow it still manages to feel as if it had been executed skeletally, entirely without flourishes. There’s a sense of density built up in layers, but packaged inside a bland and featureless box; this writing is like a nondescript cargo container (one of the book’s main images) filled with everything from expensive brand names, hi-tech geekery, and the detritus of popular culture to micro-perceptions of psychological shifts that take place just beneath the threshold of conscious attention.

At times, the effect of this prose is one of deadpan absurdity, as when townhouses in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. are described as radiating “the sense that Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren would have been hard at work on interiors, together at last, sheathing inherently superior surfaces under hand-rubbed coats of golden beeswax.” At other times, it’s surreally dislocating, as when one of the protagonists is startled by the actions of her companion, so that “for an instant she imagined him as a character in some graphically simplified animation.” At still other times, it’s slyly mordant, as when one character is described as looking “like someone who’d be invited quail-shooting with the vice president, though too careful to get himself shot.”

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Image and video source: Google Video

Note: Though the term “Remix” may be over-extended in this particular video interview with Harold Bloom by Charlie Rose, one is more than likely to learn a few things about important literary texts and their current interpretations.

Watch the entire video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?
docid=-3586098824214298816

Image source: http://blog.monty.de/?p=256

This text was published in April 2007 in the edited book Installando/Installing, by the Chilean Colletive Troyano.

Revised in January 2007. Originally published in Netartreview in March, 2005

Read in Spanish

Abstract:

This text considers the position of the “collaborator” as defined by Walter Benjamin in the first half of the twentieth century in relation to the blogger at the beginning of the twenty-first. The text considers the concept of anarcho-communism and the role of the gift economy in online culture as defined by Richard Barbrook to better understand the critical position of bloggers.

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Origen de Imagen: http://blog.monty.de/?p=256

Read in English

Revisado, Enero 2007. Publicado originalmente en Netartreview, Marzo 2005.
Este texto fue publicado en Abril del 2007 en la publicación Installando/Installing, editada por el Colectivo Chileno Troyano.

Abstracto:

Este texto considera la posición crítica del “colaborador” de acuerdo a Walter Benjamin durante la primera parte del siglo veinte en relación al bloger al princípio del siglo veinte-uno. El texto considera el concepto del anarco-comunismo y el papel que juega el intercambio de regalos en comunidades virtuales de acuerdo a Richard Barbrook, para mejor entender la posición de los blogers en la cultura de la red.
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Text source: reconstruction.eserver.org

Focusing specifically on City of Glass, analyzing the relationship between the story’s protagonist and the city he inhabits (or the city that inhabits him), Richard Swope furthers the growing scholarship of Auster’s work and its relation to space through an examination of Auster’s detectives and Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theories. Coming to grips with a shattered reality, Swope argues, Auster’s detective makes a thoughtful excursion into the uncertainties of urban life and the unreliability of the facts that has come to be understood as postructuralist reality.

Supposing a Space: The Detecting Subject in Paul Auster’s City of Glass [printable version]

Richard Swope

1. Paul Auster’s City of Glass, the first book in The New York Trilogy, offers a prototype for metaphysical detective fiction, a genre marked by its use and abuse of the conventions of the classic detective story. While the classic detective arrives at a solution to a crime, the more recent metaphysical “sleuth finds himself confronting the insoluble mysteries of his own interpretation and his own identity” (Merivale and Sweeney 2) [1]. Auster’s work in particular has been recognized for its investigation of such mysteries. As Alison Russell notes, rather than locating a missing person or solving a murder, Auster’s detective “becomes a pilgrim searching for correspondence between signifiers and signifieds” while also undertaking “a quest for his own identity” (72-3). In City of Glass, however, the questor can never arrive at his desired destination, for in this world signifiers are not attached to signifieds, while the distinction between self and other no longer holds. Language (or its interpretation) and identity are not, however, the only “insoluble mysteries” that we confront within the pages of City of Glass; Auster’s novel also explicitly speculates on the nature, or to use Henri Lefebvre’s terms, the production of social space [2], which includes exploring the connections between the production of space and the formation of identity.

Reat the entire text at  reconstruction.eserver.org

Dr. Octagon Chapter 8

Image source: my.illhill.com/

Text source: CTheory

December 4, 2002

“I can’t pay no doctor bills but Whitey’s on the moon.” Earlier this year, while Mark Shuttleworth orbited the earth at a dazzling 66 sunrises a day in a piece of space junk called Soyuz, an email did the rounds of left-leaning South Africans, and ended up in my inbox one day. The message reproduced some complaints from a poem by Gil-Scott Heron:

The man just upped my rent last night cuz Whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey’s on the moon.
I wonder why he’s cheap tetracycline uppin me. Cuz Whitey’s on the moon?
I was already givin’ him fifty a week but now Whitey’s on the moon.

Thirty years after Gil Scott Heron chanted his dissatisfaction with the US cold war space programme, race relations have changed, perhaps not entirely but significantly, in the US and at the tip of this continent. Other things have changed too.

Read the entire article at CTheory.

Image and text source: ifbook

May 02, 2006

The networked book, as an idea and as a term, has gained currency of late. A few weeks ago, Farrar Straus and Giroux launched Pulse , an adventurous marketing experiment in which they are syndicating the complete text of a new nonfiction title in blog, RSS and email. Their web developers called it, quite independently it seems, a networked book. Next week (drum roll), the institute will launch McKenzie Wark’s “GAM3R 7H30RY,” an online version of a book in progress designed to generate a critical networked discussion about video games. And, of course, the July release of Sophie is fast approaching, so soon we’ll all be making networked books.
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The institue will launch McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY Version 1.1 on Monday, May 15

The discussion following Pulse highlighted some interesting issues and made us think hard about precisely what it is we mean by “networked book.” Last spring, Kim White (who was the first to posit the idea of networked books) wrote a paper for the Computers and Writing Online conference that developed the idea a little further, based on our experience with the Gates Memory Project, where we tried to create a collaborative networked document of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates using popular social software tools like Flickr and del.icio.us. Kim later adapted parts of this paper as a first stab at a Wikipedia article. This was a good start.

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