I have to confess to a sick joy. I find the blog MagazineDeathPool.com full of dark humor and interesting news, even if it is a bit twisted. It’s also very funny and informative. Written by Grim, an anonymous magazine editor […]
I don’t know if this is an insight others will find impressive, but when I heard it, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Maybe it’s because I wrote software documentation for a short time, and know from both […]
In recent months, a lot of new citation approaches have landed in my email box. Alternatives and tangents seem to have arisen amidst angst about the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and their traditional impact factor. (Note to ironists: displeasure […]
Thanks to Nicole Colovos of Goris.com, the Scholarly Kitchen has a great new look! The design is meant to carry through the notion that we’re chatting in a kitchen, and Nicole captured it perfectly. Neat. Thanks!
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently covered a “noteworthy” copyright case in Florida. Why the air-quotes? The intellectual property at stake is literally class notes, more or less. A professor who recorded his lecture notes in both written form and […]
In a blend of savvy commercial sense and forward-thinking strategy, HarperCollins is launching a book division that won’t pay advances to authors, won’t pay “bricks” stores a premium for upfront retail space, and won’t accept returns. Instead, it will focus […]
Online beats print in so many ways: it’s searchable, has greater storage capacity, and supports multiple media (i.e., audio, video, animation), just to name three. Here’s more whimsical evidence that print is inferior. In this case, online makes a print […]
How quickly they grow up! It seems like only yesterday that GenBank was a two-volume listing of alleles cavorting at our feet. Now, it’s a strapping (300 pickup trucks’ worth) bruiser of genetic information. Congratulations to GenBank on reaching the […]
An experiment in having a book peer-reviewed online has concluded, and the results are detailed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The book entitled “Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies,” examines the importance of using software design […]
A good article in the Economist outlines some of the important social roles the Internet is playing in China, even though it is tightly controlled (Wikipedia banned, Google filtered, for instance). China will soon boast more Internet users than any […]
The mainstream media may be registering the revolution, but is it too late? A recent New York Times story reveals in all its glory how younger readers parse news through social media. One focus group participant is quoted saying, “If […]
Source: WikipediaFor me, the Amazon Kindle has turned out to be the first useful eBook. I say this having used mine for a few months now. Yes, it has some drawbacks in its current packaging, mainly large navigational paddles that […]
A new book publishing venture called Fractal Press seeks to anthologize blogs and publish the resulting books using print-on-demand technologies. An interview with co-founder Navanit Arakeri can be found on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 blog. Arakeri will start with personal […]
According to the CrossTech blog at CrossRef, Microsoft has released a beta version of their plug-in for marking up manuscripts with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) DTD. The plug-in is called the Article Authoring Add-in. The goal is to […]
In a superb article by Eric Alterman, the New Yorker has assessed the state of American newspapers, and the rise of the Huffington Post. The (r)evolution is viewed through the lenses of Walter Lippmann‘s debates with John Dewey in the […]