Land o' Links

It's a lukewarm list! This land o' links is territory that I thought would interest me but haven't necessarily even checked it myself yet. Scribbles on little yellow stickies or backs of envelopes gleaned from newspaper articles or Web pages or Usenet posts often wait for me to have that uninterrupted 72 hours of Web surfing with no other obligations. They're so patient. Let me know if I should rush to see any of these. Thanks.

• Anne Lamott, author of the amazing, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, is turning out a biweekly diary online that copped a good review in The New Yorker. If that's not a recommendation . . .
• Earth Island Journal
• Walter's War with Wired website, and an interview in HotWired's own Head Space.
• Internet peering and why Holub was fired, from the Voice.
• A project to envision anew how to design Web pages: focus on communities of users rather than whizzyneatcool tech.
• OTOH, whizzyneatcooltech: a VDOLive version of CBS' piece on Wired's piece on The WELL. Go figure.
• (more OBcool)The Shannonizer: rewrites your prose in the style of literary luminaries.
• A volunteer-maintained Bob Dylan site, it seems, carrying updates on his hospitalization.
  
  
• The Berkeley Technology Law Journal article on regulation of spam.
• S 442 seeks to prevent taxing netstuff or something like that.
• A *free* on-line dictionary.
• Unfamiliar terms about life on the screen? Perhaps you might consult The New Hackers Dictionary or The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing.
• All the gestures you need.
• Brock Meeks has a column at MSNBC now, called, if you can believe it, wwwashington.
• The Future History of the Book.
• Using cookies to analyze user activity & create custom pages from Netscapeworld, with all the bliss and lack thereof that such practices might yield.

  ---

  
  
  
  
• The "Great April Fools Day Comic Switcheroonie," for a limited time only.
• A Webreview piece on cfp.
• Find and catch the rats. Or something.
• Interesting software, I think. Consider yourself with a sense of walking through a field of data.
• TrueType fonts from Microsoft.
• More fonts.
• A good 404.

  ---

  
  
  
  
• So, Newt and the gang were overheard. Hmmmm.
• Some interesting reading, on Internet origins.
• A dead medium, I am told.
• Public cybersquares? Declan McCullagh and Solveig Bernstein face off.
• Stanford human-computer interface seminars.
• The MediaMOO Anniversary ethics symposium. What about doing research online?
• The Psychology of Cyberspace:
  1. One article.
  2. Another.
• Are computers any good for education?
• And what about lectures? The National Academy of Science Report: "Teaching Reconsidered," and more.
• And something else in a similar vein?
• Nettime.
  

  ---

  
  
• Web conferencing programs:
  • There's a masterful list here.
  • This link involves Web-based conferencing. You might also take a gander at Motet. There's also Engaged.
  • Electric Minds has launched. (Speaking of Web-based conferencing!) Read about it in ReWired. Or in Wired News.
  • And there's The Gate.
  
  
• "The best in unapproved information" it says.
• Kesey's back on the bus (or on the bus is back).
• You know about the whole six degrees of separation thing, right? It's come to the Web. Beware.
• How many use the Web? the Net? Doing what? Moreover, how would we find out?
• What's the Web good for? Vote totals in the (1996. U.S.A.) Presidential race, the most complete numbers
• What's the Web good for? The Holden Server. Is no more. This was good. You can read what happened.
• What's the Web good for? Salary calculator.
• There is or was a Dr. Seuss game of searching the Web at livingbooks.com, I am told.
• Godwin's Law
• Web pages by Serbian students involved in recent demonstrations there.
  
  
• The whole Wired Ventures IPO thing. I think that's what these are.
  1. One
  2. Two
  3. Three
  4. Well, these are just links to urls I jotted down
• More Wired stuff, including a parody of Negroponte.
• Bill Gates: What does he think about censorship, hmmm?
• The Game of Life for Windoze
• PEZ! and more Pez.
• Live, on your computer screen, KAPOW!
• From the ever popular Department of Spoof o' Rama:
  • That story about cleaning people unplugging life support equipment is an urban legend.
  • Don't be taken in by virus hoaxes: GOOD TIMES, Dayenda, etc.
  • And do some checking, or even a little thinking, before writing about the terrible new gangs on the World Wide Web.
    1. Looks like someone's home page. Gangsta? Or teen espirit?
    2. Gangsta?
    3. A hoax, you say?!?
  
  
  
• An essay in Geek Cereal.
• I didn't find this in a fortune cookie.

  Look, the question is no longer what sort of statists we should be supporting Republicans or Democrats, communists or fascists. The question really is what sort of libertarians we should be supporting. There is no alternative to a world out of control.

  This article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian includes that quotation, and discusses that attitude and its failings.
• Interview in many parts, with sound samples. In which William Gibson, tall, lean protogeek, is described as 'the fat controller of steampunk', and since he smokes and drinks coffee it's concluded that he's 'wired'. I half relate.
• How 'bout the following:

  The upcoming elections remind me of an idea I had some years back: Perhaps people should be allowed to register to be represented in various legislative bodies by interest group rather than by geography. Suppose one seat in a legislative body was there to represent all homeowners, another was for low-income people, still others were for particular ethnic groups, and so on, with voters who belonged to more than one such interest group having the choice of which seat to register to be represented by. Geography wouldn't matter, so long as the voter lived in an area the legislature had jurisdiction over.

  This, from SILICON SOAPWARE by Tom Digby, appearing on the occasion of each New Moon.
  
  

• The Saint Louis Philosophical Calendar
• Hacks. This is good.
• So much NBA stat-type action.
• Also, there's the official NBA Web site.
  
  
• Internet domain names. What to do, what to do?
  • See the report of The Internet International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) recommending new Top Level Domains like .firm and .arts and so on.
  • Network Solutions
  • Internic
  • The Internet Society
• WIPO treaty documents
• Modem Tax Redux. The FCC considers how to help the poor local phone companies meet the terrible burden of connecting end users to the packet-switched network. Extra points if you can explain the virtues and defects of the decision.
• Global Business Network. (I don't have the Trilateral Commission url.)
  
  
• You enter a URL and it rotates the entire page 180 horizontally, so we are having some fun now!.
• Read the entire run of Calvin and Hobbes comics, one day at a time.
• A home page to which I was pointed.
• Also a home page, I think.
• Another. One more.
• A graphic image.
• Another. Caveat emptor on these, okay? One more. From Jacobs Field, I am told.

Hey, it's only a lukewarm list, alright?

back to the Philosophy Department home page

to the Webster University home page

Bruce Umbaugh's Home Page.