books
They can smell the wood
Morioka Shoten
Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups
An Article by Maggie AppletonWe would need a system that enables people to:
- Publish a list of books they would be willing to discuss with other people to the open web. Antilibraries – collections of books you haven't read yet but would like to read – are particularly well suited to this proposition.
- See which books people in their social network want to discuss, and/or subscribe to other people's lists
- Be notified when 4+ people in their network have the same book on their discussion list – possibly via an email thread?
- Coordinate and schedule a time to read and discuss the book with that group.
press.stripe.com
A WebsiteStripe partners with millions of the world’s most innovative businesses. These businesses are the result of many different inputs. Perhaps the most important ingredient is “ideas.”
Stripe Press highlights ideas that we think can be broadly useful. Some books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work reimagined, and others are republications of previous works that have remained relevant over time or have renewed relevance today.
Between the Words
An Artwork by Nicholas RougeuxMoby Dick.
Between the Words is an exploration of visual rhythm of punctuation in well-known literary works. All letters, numbers, spaces, and line breaks were removed from entire texts of classic stories...leaving only the punctuation in one continuous line of symbols in the order they appear in texts. The remaining punctuation was arranged in a spiral starting at the top center with markings for each chapter and classic illustrations at the center.
How the Blog Broke the Web
Homepages had a timeless quality
On the early web, there were thousands and thousands more personal homepages than weblogs.
Homepages had a timeless quality, an index of interesting or useful or relevant things about a topic or about a person. You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)
Chronological content was in the minority.
When Movable Type ate the blogosphere
Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it.
When you produce your whole site by hand, from HEAD to /BODY, you begin in a world of infinite possibility. You can tailor your content exactly how you like it, and organize it in any way you please. Every design decision you make represents roughly equal work because, heck, you’ve gotta do it by hand either way. Whether it’s reverse chronological entries or a tidy table of contents. You might as well do what you want.
But once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost.
Movable Type didn’t just kill off blog customization.
It (and its competitors) actively killed other forms of web production.
Reverse chronology bias
Once you’ve had a taste of effortless updates, it’s awfully hard to back to manual everything.
So they didn’t.
And neither did thousands of their peers. It just simply wasn’t worth it. The inertia was too strong.
The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died.
And the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before.
There are no more quirky homepages.
There are no more amateur research librarians.
All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience.
That’s not cool at all.