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November, 2009

Maxims
Date : 11-19 20:12:
Views: 1745
Comments : 0
Topic :Aphorisms
Aphorisms
Date : 11-17 13:25:
Views: 1017
Comments : 0
Topic :Aphorisms
Review of The Lexicographer's Dilemma
Date : 11-03 19:51:
Views: 5316
Comments : 0
Topic :Books

gpullman@gsu.edu
Published: 08-22 2009
Title: just the facts
Topic: 8123

Don't know where to put this but it seems worth remembering (link).

Published: 08-09 2009
Title: The End of The Textbook?
Topic: 8123

An article over at the Times asserts that textbooks are on their way out, propelled by among other things the desire to save state money spent on education. (link)

Published: 07-15 2009
Title: digital rhetoric software
Topic: 8123

http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html

Published: 01-15 2009
Title: End of the cult of the book?
Topic: 8123

There's an interesting article over at the New Atlantis that ponders the cutlural shift in reading habits fostered by ubiquitous access to the internet. Here's a taste:
Despite the attention once paid to the so-called digital divide, the real gap isn’t between households with computers and households without them; it is the one developing between, on the one hand, households where parents teach their children the old-fashioned skill of reading and instill in them a love of books, and, on the other hand, households where parents don’t. As Griswold and her colleagues suggested, it remains an open question whether the new “reading class” will “have both power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital,” or whether the pursuit of reading will become merely “an increasingly arcane hobby.” (link)


Published: 01-02 2009
Title: Social Networking
Topic: 8123

Been trying to figure out what part social networking might play in the lives of academics as I prep for my digital rhetoric class -- I know, an idiotic question, too general. Anyway, I blog, sort of, and twitter not really, and facebook only to say I can and I'm very loosely linked-in. I can text message, but don't much. Can't help wondering if all of these quick links to the world aren't somehow un-academic or at least maybe that old academics like myself are accustomed to long periods of uninterrupted concentration and aren't quite ready for the new digital rhetorics. And then I remember that most of the younger academics I know aren't much more geeky than I am and then I realize I'm clueless about where all these new rhetorics are going. I guess I'm still at the adopting stage.

One thing is obvious even to me: web 2 whatever makes each of us our own PR person. Edward Bernays would be astounded by the oportunities here. It is actually possible to write, print, publish, and promote your own academic efforts without any peer review. Obviously a wicked idea from a traditional academic standpoint and I'm not advocating it. It's just kind of interesting that as the means to creating community become easier and easier, the need for one seems to be changing faster.

This semester I'm going to experiment with a comments facility on my digital rhetoric class site. I kind of doubt it will work simply because I've not been able to figure out how to integrate the capacity with actual learning. Another case of I figured out how but I still haven't figured out why.



Published: 12-02 2008
Title: Digital Idiocy
Topic: 8123

Another piece on how the internet changes everything about how we think, or in this case how young people should be educated, and along the way, another dent in the canon of memory. The thesis is that "Schoolchildren should no longer be forced to memorise facts and figures because such information is readily available on the internet, a leading commentator claims." I especially like the "leading commentator" bit of ethos building. Anyway, the piece is written by a Murray Wardrop over at Telegraph UK  The point is obvious enough. Why remember anything if you can look it up on your phone? So how does not memorizing anything change the way our brain functions? Also, though I admit it's a bit snide: why learn to play a musical instrument when you can download the work of a pro for 99 cents. I doubt that any serious teacher ever thought having facts in your head was synonamous with being educated, or that learning was just memorizing. To some extent the fact of ubiquitous computing does render fact-finding trivial. So the question that interests me is really just how are we different now?

Published: 11-24 2008
Title: Digital Idiot
Topic: 8123

Lousy title but I got hooked by the rhyme. Anyway, Since I read a book a few weeks ago about how it is possible to rewire the brain I've been wondering how much impact the constant digital input most of us experience and young people have only ever known is having on how our brains function. There's a lot of alarmist stuff out there on this topic, I'm not buying and certainly not selling it, but I'm wondering about it for sure. There's an article at Macleans.ca that is talking about how the millennials think differently. Here's a taste:

These days, though, Young has noticed a new development: increasingly, she’s seeing a great many young people having difficulties with executive function, which involves thinking, problem-solving and task completion. “It looks like an attention deficit disorder,” she says. “The person has a job or a task and they start doing it but they can’t stay oriented to it. They get distracted and they can’t get reoriented. When I started using the programs, I really didn’t see a lot of this. I would say now, 50 per cent of students walking through the door have difficulty in that area.” The second thing she’s noticing is more frequent trouble with non-verbal thinking skills. These kids struggle to read facial expressions and body language—which can make dating and friendships, and indeed, most social situations, tricky.
Young’s students face more extreme problems than the average teen, but her observations mirror what neurologists and educators are seeing in the general youth population—those in their 20s and younger, often called Digital Natives. The first to be born into and come of age in the digital age, they use their brains differently than any generation in history. At any given moment—or so the cliché goes—they’re wielding an iPod and a cellphone; they’re IMing a friend, downloading a Rihanna video from iTunes, and playing Resident Evil 4 with their thoughts. And that cartoonish caricature isn’t that far off: a study from the California-based Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people absorb an average of 8½ hours of digital and video sensory stimulation a day. By the age of 20, the average teen has probably spent more than 20,000 hours on the Web, and over 10,000 playing video games, according to Toronto-based business strategist Don Tapscott’s new book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World.
Every new technology—from books to television—has brought with it fears of a resulting mind-melt. The difference, in the case of digital technologies, says Dr. Gary Small, a renowned neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the unprecedented pace and rate of change. It is creating what he calls a “brain gap” between young and old, forged in a single generation. “Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool,” Small writes in his new book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, “has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically.”


Published: 10-22 2008
Title: New CSS Table Declarations
Topic: 8123

Explained over at Digital Web (link)

Published: 10-13 2008
Title: Tacitus sententious historian
Topic: 8123

Tacitus the sententious historian: the sociology of rhetoric in Annales 1-6.Patrick Sinclair Pennsylvania State University press University Park Pennsylvania 1995

Whereas the modern mind prides itself on its canny suspicion of, and hostility toward, any attempt to gloss over the uniqueness of the individual, in rhetorical culture like roams the ability to categorize, I apologize, and formulate generalizations on human behavior with concision and force was highly valued and admired, and could translate directly into power competitive hierarchy of Imperial Rome and viewed all aspects of cultural life of the drive to exert one's predominance within the limits allowed by each prince's. Within this regulated system of competition, to maintain a privileged position among the ruling elite -- or decline to such a position, as tacit Tacitus did -- a person had to use rhetoric skillfully creative verbal mask both fashioned to suit the temper of the times and designed to conceal one's personal opinions and motives. Tacitus had succeeded in his world, and it should be no surprise that he uses the same tactics of rhetorical assertion and self concealment meriting Tiberius's principate as he did earlier in making a name for himself in public life. 3

Throughout this book my thesis is that for Tacitus and his contemporary readers rhetoric at Rome had gained the status of a powerful social institution, and if one was perceived to fall short of its standards, one risked becoming the object of ridicule and not being taken seriously within the social hierarchy. The power of the spoken word was immense and social life. As we shall see over the course of this book, Tacitus is very much alive to just eat this, and we will discuss three previously unnoticed occasions on which the historian notes Hammond suffered public embarrassment or ridicule (and probable setbacks to their social and political careers ) because of their lack of sophistication in public speaking. 30


Published: 08-21 2008
Title: The end of journalism?
Topic: 8123

A nice gasp and sputter over at the Globe about blogging and the Beijing Olympics. (link) Here are a couple of lines to wonder at:

The Internet has completely changed the way reporters do business. That much we know... Everyone's a writer now. Everyone's an editor. It's as if the College of Physicians and Surgeons not only encouraged patients to read all the medical websites, but also to do their own diagnoses...This is the democratization wrought by the Web, and if it has actually helped open up closed societies such as China's, in the West its chief effect, at least upon journalism, is to diminish whatever craft, and there is some, is left in the business.


Published: 07-31 2008
Title: Campus Technology 08
Topic: 8123

The conference earlier this week in Boston has me thinking, which is fun since conferences often don't. The keynote speaker on Tuesday, Adrian Sannier,  whose main focus was on suggesting that universities get out of the IP business and give that stuff over to companies like Goolge who can do it better for less, was also arguing that the job market of the future will reward skills vastly different from those that the current educational system values, teaches, and rewards. He liked showing pictures of 19th century industrial workers as a backdrop for talking about the drag on change academics seem to be having. Our resistance to letting students use electronics in the classroom, he was suggesting, is based not on our fear that they impede learning but rather that we don't understand the new learning and our relatively insignificant place in the new processes. We are a delivery mechanism, basically, and one that needs electronic enhancements. Nice. Now who's the factory worker?

On the other hand, maybe eliminating network services would save universities money while improving reliability.

The other semi-conscious thought I was having while sitting there wired on Dunken Donuts' iced coffee came while watching a morning long workshop on Web 2.0 technologies. The presenter,Bethany Bovard , showed us a bunch of 2.0 company offerings and places to find hundreds more. I was reminded of the hours I spent in the late 90s looking for shareware or freeware to do various tasks, none of which I use today, most tasks of which I no longer perform or do so completely differently. I was watching how free these things are, you give them your name and email address and who knows what else they can gather from your hard disk and they give a service, with advertising. I am not, I realized, all that social. And if being part of the social network means telling strangers everything they need to know to pwn me, i'm more antisocial than I thought. So the message that the millennial kids are different from even the enlightened tail end of the boomers was real enough at that moment.

And then the thought that made me think I may be approaching the twilight of my career a few years earlier than expected. I'm a fan of computer technology, mostly for its own sake, and i've always experimented with using assignments that make students use technology to solve communication problems. But I've never been entirely happy with the idea we should be teaching students how to use computers instead of teaching them rhetorical principles. Yeah, they should learn a graphics editing package, but it doesn't have to be photoshop and the reason for learning such things isn't to be able to say on  a resume, i know photoshop. The reason is to know how images are manipulated for rhetorical purposes and how to do that. The core of our training is rhetoric, the context is the software. There's an interesting educational institution located in Vancouver BC that sells courses in computer skills for certificates, most of whose students are in third world countries. They recently started a service where people can outsource their web needs to bidders from all over the world, with the result that a company that could have paid a local company or worker say 7000 for a website could get a Philippino worker to do the same job for 200. The Philippino worker makes a big pay check, the American or Canadian company saves beaucoup, and the student who spent hours in a university perfecting her computer skills instead of her English language and rhetorical skills? She's been down sized and out sourced. Suddenly I don't think we need to teach Web 2.0 skills anymore than we needed to teach baby boomers how to dance to rock and roll. What is the university's core mission? Huh. rhetorical intelligence, old school facility with the English language. So i no longer want to make technology the front and center of a writing course? I guess I never wanted it front and center. I wanted weblogs, like I want whatever is next, to be part of the context, not the core. I wanted to use them to teach what the students don't know. But then maybe the millenials don't really now how to dance. So they can text from a number pad without removing it from their pocket. Cool. But do they know why they do that and in that way and will they be able to adapt when those conditions no longer apply, when the rhetorical situation changes? I'm becoming older school by the minute. Guess I better go back to work.



Published: 07-28 2008
Title: campustechnology08
Topic: 8123



Published: 04-22 2008
Title: Memory
Topic: 8123

From a Wired essay

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn — words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details — don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.
The disadvantage of this comforting notion is that it's false.
One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. "The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the extent they take current performance as their guide, are going to do the wrong things," Robert Bjork says. "It's almost sinister."


Published: 03-11 2008
Title: co-branding
Topic: 8123

HBO and the Postal Service are teaming up to promote themselves by promoting the practice of letter writing, according to an article in the NYT. Several things are interesting about this, i think. One is that, as the article observes, letter writing is an art. Writing a letter worth keeping takes time and practice and matterials not always to hand anymore. It would be interesting to see if there's any increase in letter writing as a result of this, but I suppose the real goal is to hide the promotion of the hbo show John Adams and the postal service behind a high brow concept. advertising as literacy . . .

If you want to learn about the tradition of letter writing, have a look at Letter-Writing Manuals And Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical And Bibliographic Studies (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication) by Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell or Murphy's Three Medieval Arts



Published: 11-06 2007
Title: My Ad Space
Topic: 8123

From the Globe and Mail (link)

News Corp. has taken the next big step in the move toward commercializing social networks Monday by expanding MySpace's advertising platform, allowing advertisers to deliver precision-targeted banner ads based on user-created data.

Advertisers can now pinpoint exactly who they want to reach, based on data collected from users' personal profiles, the groups they join and the messages they post for their friends. For a studio looking to promote its latest vampire film, the technology represents the difference between advertising to movie fans en masse and reaching the 205 members of the Doomed Moviethon Horror Review group and others like it more directly.



Published: 09-29 2007
Title: Edit any webpage
Topic: 8123

I just stumbled across this code that turns any webpage into an editable page, not that after editing it one can update the page with it, just save the edited copy to another location. I can't quite figure the utility of it yet, but it is interesting.

Go to a page you want to edit

  1. replace the url with javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void(0);
  2. hit enter
  3. and then you can push pictures around and edit text.

To turn it off, type in

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='false'; document.designMode='on'; void 0



Published: 09-26 2007
Title: DB :: Website
Topic: 8123

I've been thinking about how DBs and Websites intersect and an idea has occurred to me that has probably occurred to others a long time ago, but i thought i'd flesh it out for myself. Link book marking seems in some ways to be an important activity on the web, although being able to re-google anything perhaps makes it less so. on the other hand, having a db of links might offer some good site dynamics.

  • link id
  • link text
  • link url
  • title tag
  • context
  • related links

You could then pull links by id and keep the content fresh from the db instead from the text surrounding the places where a given link appears.



Published: 09-25 2007
Title: My Ad Space
Topic: 8123

From an article over at The New Atlantis called "Virtual Friendship and the New Narcicism"

Procter & Gamble has a Crest toothpaste page on MySpace featuring a sultry-looking model called “Miss Irresistible.” As of this summer, she had about 50,000 users linked as friends, whom she urged to “spice it up by sending a naughty (or nice) e-card.” The e-cards are emblazoned with Crest or Scope logos, of course, and include messages such as “I wanna get fresh with you” or “Pucker up baby—I’m getting fresh.” A P& G marketing officer recently told the Wall Street Journal that from a business perspective, social networking sites are “going to be one giant living dynamic learning experience about consumers.”


Published: 09-19 2007
Title: My Ad Space
Topic: 8123

According to a NYT article, MySpace and Facebook are exploring ways to target advertising based on self published details about individual users of the social networking sites. Makes sense. Sites like these are mines filled with personal data unavailable elsewhere. The practice will further blur the lines between public and private, news and gossip. Everything is an ad. You can't quite make it out in the photo below, but the caption by the picture I uploaded says, "1 photo Created 2 minutes ago". And the ad that came to my screen right after I uploaded a picture of a pug?



Published: 09-07 2007
Title: History of the home page
Topic: 8123

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/vernacular-web-2/

I’m far from imagining this process as painful and dramatic, though there are examples that cause mixed feelings – like, for instance, when the heroes of the 90’s such as Peter Pan convert their pages to another format, to the language of MySpace.
It’s worth noting, and can be of special interest for designers, that home pages in the other sense – meaning first pages of sites or projects – lost their significance as well. Nobody really needs them anymore. They have been replaced by a modest-looking Google start page, which wraps itself around every website like a dust jacket.


Published: 09-01 2007
Title: Future of the book?
Topic: 8123

There is an interesting article at Ars Technica that discusses how university presses are becoming increasingly irrelevant, due to changes in the publishing industry brought about by electronic publishing and academic attitudes. The article concludes with an interesting observation about the UP of Michigan which has begun doing some pioneering work in electronic publishing

Apparently, the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office has been paying attention to both its role in the Internet era and the technology to enable it, as it has hosted the text of the Ithaka report via CommentPress. The system appears to work quite well, but it's hard to judge the general utility of it based on this report, as there have only been three comments appended to it so far. This is probably indicative of the greatest challenge that academic presses now face: even when they do everything right, it can be hard to get anyone to notice and participate.

I think the author of this article has missed a significant point about cultural lag and the fetish of the book. People don't much care to comment in the margins of online books -- univocal texts that are merely the electrification of the paper medium. People love to leave comments on blogs because they are conversational provocations, not purportedly definitive statements, as are books. "Publishing" -- making public -- isn't about making books. it's about communicating idea. The book was a means to that end. And when the book no longer serves that end, the commercial and social ends which it also met will be met by other means.



Published: 08-14 2007
Title: Typography in the real world
Topic: 8123

Interesting article over at New York Times Magazine regarding typface and highway signs. (link)

Published: 05-17 2007
Title: Late Antique Rhetoric
Topic: 8123

The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch, Raffaella Cribiore. Princeton UP, 2007.

Rhetoric had landed on the rocks, and many recognized that it was not the path to worldly success(eudaimonia). ... Knowledge in shorthand writing, of the Latin language, and of Roman law appeared to improve the chances of getting coveted posts. It is usually said that Libanius was sharply intolerant of all these disciplines and that his stance hardened considerably during his late year, when he depicted a general flight from the logio. . . Shorthand writing threatened rhetoric particularly during the reign of Constanius, who gave preference to men skilled in it and appointed them to the highest positions. These notaries (hypographeis) came from humbler classes that students of rhetoric, and Libanius characterized them as "savages" (barbaroi) and considered their skills appropriate to slaves. Julian put an end to the practice of his predecessor, and Libanius asserted that, whereas parents had preferred shorthand before or had considered it equal to eloquence urged their sons to learn it, under the emperor the opposite occurred . . .under later emperors shorthand was still valued, even though it never regained its former predominance; Latin and Roman law, then represented the strongest threats to eloquence's prestige 206 207


Published: 04-19 2007
Title: Assignment idea
Topic: 8123

I was inspired to think this outloud by a sidebar I saw over at designobserver.com (link). Down the right side they have a list of books with jpg covers as links, author, title, and press. Creating the db for this early in a class and then having students use it to gather and present books related to digitial rhetoric would be interesing.

Design the DB

cover
link
title
author
subject(s)
abstract

Design the information space (the visual container for each record printed to the screen). A sort by author, subject option would be cool.

 

 



Published: 12-11 2006
Title: Books
Topic: 8123

Author: Cooper, Alan. Title: The inmates are running the asylum / Alan Cooper. Publisher: Indianapolis, Ind. : Sams, c1999.

Published: 12-04 2006
Title: Google how to
Topic: 8123

A nice explanation of smart searching over at informIT (link)

Published: 10-06 2006
Title: color palette generator
Topic: 8123

http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

Published: 09-20 2006
Title: Computers and Writing
Topic: 8123

Technical communication is not applied poetry. The advent of the content management merely underscores what should have been obvious before, literary concepts of "voice" and "authority" and "authorship" are irrelevant to a rhetorical setting where the focus is on getting work done by "readers" who don't want to read and sure as hell don't want to listen. "Show me where the fricken button is and stop calling it a wine-dark plunger, you . . . "

Published: 02-12 2006
Title: Why nav doesn't matter
Topic: 8123

From "The Page Paradigm", by Mark Hurst
Users only come to the website when they have a goal - usually finding a specific piece of information, or conducting a specific transaction. The Goal is very specific, and it's the defining motivator of that user's experience on the website. Fulfill the Goal quickly and easily, and it's a good experience; otherwise, users will try to avoid the site in the future.
(link)

Published: 01-31 2006
Title: Dumber and dumberer
Topic: 8123

There's a reprint with interspersed commentary of an article apparently from Esquire magazine called "Greetings From Idiot America" over at some blog called Pharyngula (link), the contents of both of which i can respond to by saying only: Damn, i wish i'd said that.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise.


Published: 01-19 2006
Title: Usability is not enough
Topic: 8123

Many Web businesses do not provide a compelling customer experience; some sites are simply unusable, while others fail to provide content, goods and services that match their customers' needs and expectations. To make matters worse, most e-tailers do a poor job of effectively assessing their customers' experiences. They fail to learn why their customers behave as they do, a step vital to mapping any strategy for improvement. To truly understand customers and gather the information necessary to make strategic business decisions, Web companies need to employ methods that yield richer customer insights.
(link)

Published: 01-15 2006
Title: Web Design
Topic: 8123

From News@nature.com

"Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye"
Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds.

So what are the key ingredients of a good-looking website? Caudron suggests that the amount of graphics on the page should be strictly limited, perhaps to a single eye-catching image. "It's not about getting as much stuff on the page as possible," he says. (link)


Published: 01-13 2006
Title: Would you rather study online?
Topic: 8123

Interesting article over at CNN asserting that students or at least some students prefer online to F2F classes and that the distinction is quickly breaking down. (link)

In fact, the distinction between online and face-to-face courses is blurring rapidly. Many if not most traditional classes now use online components -- message boards, chat rooms, electronic filing of papers. Students can increasingly "attend" lectures by downloading a video or a podcast. At Arizona State, 11,000 students take fully online courses and 40,000 use the online course management system, which is used by many "traditional" classes. Administrators say the distinction between online and traditional is now so meaningless it may not even be reflected in next fall's course catalogue.


Published: 01-12 2006
Title: Host providers
Topic: 8123

  • http://www.siteground.com
  • http://lunarpages.com
  • http://www.site5.com/hosting/
  • http://www.hostway.com/
  • http://networksolutions.com
  • http://www.dotster.com/webhosting/webhosting_pkg_standard.php
  • http://www.fatcow.com/fatcow/index.bml
  • https://www.godaddy.com/
  • http://www.register.com/retail/index.rcmx
  • http://www.phpwebhosting.com/
  • http://www.ifroggy.com/
  • http://www.e3servers.com/linux-web-hosting.htm


    • Published: 01-11 2006
    Title: old pages
    Topic: 8123

    http://weather.ou.edu/~femrhets/

    Published: 01-10 2006
    Title: Title
    Topic: 8123

    You type the contents of your blog here.

    Published: 12-14 2005
    Title: Personas in user interface design
    Topic: 8123

    From Chapter 5 - Modeling Users—Personas and Goals
    About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann
    Personas represent classes of users in context Although personas are represented as specific individuals, at the same time they represent a class or type of user of a particular interactive product. Specifically, a persona encapsulates a distinct set of usage patterns, behavior patterns regarding the use of a particular product (or analogous activities in the domain if a product does not yet exist). These patterns are identified through an analysis of ethnographic interviews, supported by supplemental data if necessary or appropriate. These patterns, along with work- or lifestyle-related roles define personas as user archetypes (Mikkelson N. and Lee, W. O., 2000). The authors refer to personas as composite user archetypes because personas are in a sense composites assembled by clustering related usage patterns observed across individuals in similar roles during the Research phase.


    Published: 12-09 2005
    Title: CSS using php constants
    Topic: 8123

    Nice explanation of how to create style sheet constants using php (with accompanying script) offered by Tyler Hall. (link)

    Published: 12-01 2005
    Title: Is blogging a new form of journalism?
    Topic: 8123

    There is an interesting article at Wired that suggests that because so many of us now carry sophisticated communications tools with us, cell phones with cameras and video recorders, some of the best coverage of dramatic events comes from "amateurs" rather than professional journalists, untrained people who just happen to be on the scene of some news-worthy event. I've heard this argument or similar arguments before, but I can't remember where. (link) 

    Published: 11-29 2005
    Title: Disingenuous blogging
    Topic: 8123

    Interesting article over at Wired that discusses "Blogging with a wooden toungue". (link)

     



    Published: 11-28 2005
    Title: CSS templates
    Topic: 8123

    http://www.intensivstation.ch/en/templates/

    Published: 11-22 2005
    Title: 24/7 Books
    Topic: 8123

    Web Engineering: Principles and TechniquesWeb Engineering: Principles and Techniques
    by Woojong Suh (ed) 
    Idea Group Publishing © 2005 (300 pages)
    ISBN:1591404320
    Crucial for both researchers and practitioners,
    this useful text covers a wide range of topics vital to
    strengthening professional insights and capabilities within the field.

    Published: 11-18 2005
    Title: color matching
    Topic: 8123

    Here's a link to handy tool for coordinating colors. I found it over at digg.com

    http://stylephreak.frogrun.com/cm.php

     



    Published: 10-31 2005
    Title: Zappen on digital rhetoric
    Topic: 8123

    from LEA Online (link)
     
    Abstract
    Technical Communication Quarterly
    2005, Vol. 14, No. 3, Pages 319-325

    Digital Rhetoric: Toward an Integrated Theory

    James P. Zappen (vita)
    Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute


    This article surveys the literature on digital rhetoric, which encompasses a wide range of issues, including novel strategies of self-expression and collaboration, the characteristics, affordances, and constraints of the new digital media, and the formation of identities and communities in digital spaces. It notes the current disparate nature of the field and calls for an integrated theory of digital rhetoric that charts new directions for rhetorical studies in general and the rhetoric of science and technology in particular.



    Published: 10-03 2005
    Title: Outline
    Topic: 8123

    content, structure, markup, layout, meaning

    • content > words
    • structure > relationships among the words -- collecting, seperating
    • markup > labeling system for the structure
    • layout > visual representation of markup -- proximity, contrast
    • meaning > effect of words on a person's beliefs, actions.


    Published: 09-30 2005
    Title: Typetester
    Topic: 8123

    http://typetester.maratz.com/

    http://www.emilychang.com/go/ehub/ also, list of Web 2.0 links



    Published: 09-30 2005
    Title: User Interace book
    Topic: 8123

    Developer to Designer: GUI Design for the Busy Developer
    by Mike Gunderloy 

    Sybex © 2005

    Available from Books 24/ 7



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