shouting loudly

The news broke yesterday that NBC will be canceling 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, and Community. (…On the bright side, I suppose I’ll be more productive next year when there’s nothing interesting to watch on television.) As a media consumer, I was shocked.  Everyone who watches Community knew the show was in ratings trouble.  But [...]

Today’s comic from xkcd is titled “Ablogalypse.”  Randall Munroe shares his work under a Creative Commons License, so I’m reposting it below*: Three things about this chart: 1. Notice that mentions of “blog” haven’t declined much.  People are still blogging.  People are still talking about blogging.  But people are also finding new uses for tumblr sites, and [...]

One of the runaway highlights of this year’s Personal Democracy Forum was Jim Gilliam’s talk “The Internet Is My Religion.” I’ve known Jim for a few years, but never known his full story.  The talk is moving and powerful and thought-provoking.  Click the link above and watch it. Kudos to Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej [...]

Via Facebook today, I had yet another cause to discuss how I use (and why I love) my Kindle. This isn’t a Gizmodo-style tech lust blog by a long shot, but other folks—especially other academics—often want to know if this device can improve their lives. The short answer is: Maybe. For me,

This is brilliant on so many levels.

[This is more of a holiday-cheer post than my usual academic blog entries.  'Tis the season...] In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins’s excellent work on the various effects of digital media on media production/culture, “convergence” takes on multiple meanings.  Part of what makes it such a good book is that all of these meanings are true. [...]

Just a quick, 24-hours-overdue thanks to the folks at the Newsweek Dev Team for hosting me last night at their third News/Geek event. I had a rollicking good time, the questions were awesome, and the post-talk celebration was even better. If you want the Powerpoint, it’s here in all its 12.2 MB glory. Further discussion [...]

It is with a joyous heart that I welcome our latest co-conspirator contributor, Paul Falzone. Like the rest of us, he has a big “Penn” stamp on his arse, having earned his PhD from Annenberg in 2008. He started in 2003 (same year as Jason and me), and it quickly became apparent that he was [...]

The MTA is so zealous in their enforcement of trademark and copyright that, at least according to one blogger, they’ve already censored me. That was news to me, but it wouldn’t have surprised anybody if it were true. Here’s what is: On July 25, I uploaded this design to CafePress: CafePress took down the design [...]

Do you want to know how Wikipedia was able to become such an incredible success? Who the people behind its success are? The best book to learn about the history and the culture of Wikipedia is Andrew Lih’s new book “The Wikipedia Revolution“, launched last week. He was at Harvard last night to give a [...]