This is a test posting — by email!
Found a good source for general information about the Weblogging phenomenon. [More.]
‘The term “Nasdaq”, it seems, has entered the language as a verb. It means to crash, or slump. “His quarterback rating”, The Denver Post wrote of a footballer recently, “has Nasdaqed”‘. From a Financial Times review of John Cassidy’s book about the Internet bubble — Dot Con: the greatest story ever sold .
There’s a new online publication — The Free Software Magazine. Foreword by You Know Who. The mag is earnest and well-intentioned, but not the world’s slickest read. And there’s a whiff of the collective navel-gazing one often sees in embattled or evangelical groups. But then most mags need time to settle down.
Ever wonder why newspaper reviews of new cars are, well, somewhat tame? Hint: it has something to do with the fact that the local dealers tend to be big advertisers. Any journalist who attempts to do really critical pieces about cars will sooner or later find him- or herself in conflict with the men in suits from the advertising department. That’s where the Web comes in — it provides a medium in which people can actually tell one another the truth about products. And they do. This interesting piece by J.D. Lasica in the Online Journalism Review looks at three sites devoted to telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about industrial products and services. It’s a useful reminder of the Cluetrain Manifesto’s credo that “markets are conversations”. The Net is a powerful enabler of those conversations — which of course is why car dealers and manufacturers loathe and fear it.
XEROX Parc researchers have created some interesting software for enabling web-based group work. They call it Sparrow Web for some reason…
Quentin’s written an excellent one-page guide to the Web for absolute beginners.
I know people who know Bill Clinton and they always surprised me by the way they clearly regarded him as a formidable individual. Some months ago, the BBC invited him to give the annual Dimbleby lecture. It was a stunning performance — part sermon, part analysis, part theatre. Although he had a script, large parts of the lecture seemed to be delivered without glancing at it. The contrast with the current, grammatically-challenged incumbent of the White House was, of course, unmistakeable. Those who missed it can now find the text here.
My column about the implications of Google (held over from last week) is in today’s Observer. Phew!
According to the New York Times, the creation of tools for spotting plagiarism has become a growth industry. As someone who has to mark online assignments, I’m astonished at how easy it is to spot plagiarism — at least in the form of unacknowledged copying from web pages. (A Google search for a phrase is usually enough to locate the real origin of a suspiciously elegant phrase.) Some academics are very po-faced about online plagiarism, treating it as a heinous crime almost on a par with sleeping with one’s pupils. But the whole point of the Web is that we have easy access to other people’s ideas, and sometimes I’d prefer my students to locate and make good use of intelligent stuff than trying to make up their own (mediocre) summaries. The problem is not copying per se, but unacknowledged use of other people’s material — so what we should be teaching them is (a) the search and discriminatory skills which enable them to find and evaluate suitable material, and (b) the importance of always being scrupulous in acknowledging the provenance of what they find and use.