Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Political science redux: Marketing, the Internet, and all that

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Reading yet another article about how !!11!!ZOMG politicians are learning to use the interwebs!!11!!! suggests an observation, which I’ll try to make as politically neutral as possible:

If one particular candidate I’m thinking of wins the Presidency, one of the reasons is going to be how easy his Web site makes it to do volunteer work for him.  I’ve volunteered for several candidates over the years, but I have never seen anything this user-inviting.

Just an observation, but one that I think fits the mission of this site.

(Hint: His name ends in a vowel besides Y, which would be another first)

[Internet poster by Sebastian Prooth]

Blog

Would you ever use ePaper?

New corporate spinoff Liquavista are beginning work to develop practical epaper:

The technology is based on a process called electrowetting, which uses electricity to manipulate a thin layer of liquid so that it changes colour. It uses far less power than a traditional liquid crystal display (LCD) and, crucially, the individual cells change fast enough to run video.

Newspaper editors, grappling with declining circulation and the migration of advertising spending to the internet, have been hoping for years that e-paper will move beyond the drawing board into reality. The dream is for a device allowing readers to upload the newspaper in the morning, then update editorial content and ads as the day goes on, perhaps using a mobile phone or wireless connection.

I wonder if epaper-newspapers will be one of those technologies, like videophones or vitamin-pill-meals, that become technically feasible but never really take off commercially?

Think about it: you get a free paper-paper on the bus every morning and free news content on the web at work or on your laptop.

Also if devices like Microsoft’s Surface (corporate video) become ubiquitous then why bother carrying around a sheet of plasticky stuff when every table, wall, and counter has an interactive Internet-linked display?

I think it will be around as a technology, but I don’t think it will “save the newspaper” any more than wireless laptops or mobile phones will.

The issue is how you monetise content creation – rather than how it is displayed and delivered to the consumer.

[story in Guardian Unlimited][image from eriwst on flickr]

Blog

Multitasking: You can’t do it, my friends

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babbage

It might seem like a strange thing to say, coming from a person who’s drinking coffee, answering office email, listening to Juliana Hatfield’s great new album How to Walk Away which I really recommend, and blogging, but multitasking is just about impossible, according to MRI experiments.

…[A] man lying inside the scanner would be performing different tasks, depending on the color of two numbers he sees on a screen. … [W[hen the man in the scanner sees green, his brain has to pause before responding — to round up all the information it has about the green task. When the man sees red, his brain pauses again — to push aside information about the green task and replace it with information about the red task. If the tasks were simpler, they might not require this sort of full-throttle switching. But, [U. Michigan neuroscientist Daniel] Weissman said, even simple tasks can overwhelm the brain when we try to do several at once.

Modern life expects us to do more and more things more quickly, if not simultaneously. If that’s not even possible, at what point do we reorder our tasks and expectations? How will your Bartleby-like character cope?

[Charles Babbage’s brain by Gaetan Lee]

Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 3rd October

It’s Friday, and this week the free fiction cup runneth over…

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Just one (very short) story from Manybooks:

  • “Cully” by Jack Egan

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Feedbooks have yet another Futurismic re-release: “Maquech” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

And a bunch of other stuff:

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Here’s another couple of free chapters from The Quiet War by Paul McAuley; chapter 4 parts one and two, and chapter 5.

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Via SF Signal, Elizabeth Bear is in on the free excerpts game, too. Here are chapters one, two, and three of All the Windwracked Stars.

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It’s new issue time at Subterranean Online:

Chris Roberson kicks off the Fall 2008 issue of Subterranean Online with part one of a long novelette set in the world of his Celestial Empire, in which the future space race doesn’t go quite as anyone intended. “Mirror of Fiery Brightness” is action filled, the result of strange conjectures, and imbued with humanity, as are most of Chris’ entries in this future history.

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This week’s offering from Strange Horizons: “Kimberley Ann Duray Is Not Afraid” by Leah Bobet.

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From the charmingly affable Paul Cornell (yeah, that guy who writes Doctor Who scripts; he does other stuff too, y’know):

I was very pleased to have a story included in Pyr Books’ new original SF anthology Fast Forward 2, which will soon be available in all good book stores. I was even more pleased when editor Lou Anders told me he’d be launching the anthology by putting my story “Catherine Drewe”, complete, up on the Pyr website…

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Tor have got a new original Terry Bisson story available to read in full; it’s called “Catch ‘Em In The Act“.

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Via the superbly-monikered Cat Rambo, who’s holding the fort at Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days at the moment:

The new issue of Farrago’s Wainscot is up, which includes my story, “The Fisherman’s Child“.

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SpaceWesterns have got themselves a spiffy RSS feed, which makes keeping on top of their updates much easier from my point of view. It also means I’m pleased to report that the following stories have materialised over there:

  • A serialised version of H.P. Lovecraft and Zelia Bishop‘s “The Mound” in seven parts; latest updates are parts two and three.
  • Amanda Spikol‘s “Old Habits“, which is apparently a prequel to “A Few Sunsets Too Many“.

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Being the beginning of the month, it’s new issue time for many a webzine. First up, Clarkesworld:

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From Apex Online:

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Lone Star Stories:

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Reflection’s Edge seems to lean toward fantasy, but the new issue has one story marked out as sf:

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Via BoingBoing, Small Beer Press are at it again:

To celebrate the publication of Kelly Link‘s new collection, Pretty Monsters, most of Kelly’s previous collection Magic for Beginners is now available as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0) license…

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John Joseph Adams just can’t stop himself – maybe he got bitten by something?

I’ve just added the following two free stories to the Free Stories & Excerpts page of The Living Dead’s website:

There’s now six free stories here on the website in their entirety, plus all the excerpts. Be sure to keep checking back to see more!

(I’ve only linked to the HTML versions; there are other portable formats available too.)

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Pick up the twenty-fifth piece of Jayme Lynn Blaschke‘s Memory… but mind you don’t cut yourself.

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A quick message from Ben Rawluk:

Here’s another shameless, shameless self-plug for some of my short-short fiction: “Night on the Compost Heap“. Thanks!

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And while we’re talking short-short fiction, here’s a handful of Friday Flash:

Nothing new from Phred Serenissima this week, but he has collected together his previous Friday Flash stories into a digital book called Consent To Be Monitored, now available on Scribd.

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That’s it for this week – plenty to keep you busy there, I’m thinking. Don’t forget to send us your plugs, links and pitches before 1800 GMT next week… but for now, have a great weekend!

Blog

Virgin Galactic declines to take Rule 34 to space – suborbital sex movies delayed

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Virgin Galactic logoSay what you like about Richard Branson, but the man’s got standards and he sticks to ’em. One of those standards would appear to be not corrupting his brands with what some punters might consider to be unsavoury business… at least that’s my guess after hearing that Virgin Galactic have declined an up-front offer of US$1 million cash to film the first* zero-G pr0n movie on SpaceShipTwo.

Who says ethics and entrepreneurship are incompatible, eh? Looks like Rule 34 as applied to zero-G will have to rely on camera tricks and cartoons for a while longer. [via SlashDot]

[ * – Well, the first one featuring humans, at least. ]