Michael Walker was acting strangely. The 23-year-old Seattle soundman had just been re-introduced to Sara Merker, a college student a couple years older than he was, and the first thing he said was, "Can I take a picture of you for my blog?"

This was the second time Merker had really talked with Walker. The first time was a very brief interaction at a party about a year before. Now Merker was at a bar to meet Nick, a mutual friend, and Walker had tagged along. "I was like, why is this guy being weird to me?" said Merker. "I thought he was kidding. So I said, yeah, sure, let's [...]

Yowza! In a stunning triumph for open access and the free dissemination of works in the public domain, JSTOR announced this morning that all its out-of-copyright journal articles have been made freely available worldwide.

We encourage broad use of the Early Journal Content, including the ability to reuse it for non-commercial purposes. We ask that you acknowledge JSTOR as the source of the content and provide a link back to our site. Please also be considerate of other users and do not use robots or other devices to systematically download these works as this may be disruptive to our systems.

We also have Aaron Swartz to thank for [...]

There are only two answers, and neither of them are good. Either "Help a Reporter"—a lazyweb service that broadcasts "reporter requests" for sources—is a terrible piece of performance art, or there are a lot of people lazily writing total garbage stories. OH WAIT: there's a third option: someone's messing with the system, man. Hilarious! It starts subtle…

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URGHARO: moyemail@cox.net needs to speak to a camel expert.less than a minute ago via web [...]

"Learners are doers, not recipients."—Walter J. Ong, "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past"

It's high time people stopped kvetching about Wikipedia, which has long been the best encyclopedia available in English, and started figuring out what it portends instead. For one thing, Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as "doers, not recipients." If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.

It's been over five years since the landmark study in Nature that showed "few differences in accuracy" between Wikipedia and the [...]

Interested in The Daily but still not sure it's worth buying an iPad for? Check out The Daily: Indexed and The Daily Daily and the inevitable other bunch of Tumblrs that follow in their wake.

"Everyday, about 50,000 new men are trying to get naked. What we're doing is selling the naked men to a couple of websites–it's an investment for us." —Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy discusses his website's new funding strategy: "When users flag someone enough times for indecent behavior (by clicking a button), the offender is automatically transferred to a partner site. Thanks to deals with adult dating services like FriendFinder.com, Chatroulette is earning cash hand over fist from the referral traffic."

10) Vodka.com : $3 million, 2006.

"Between 2009 and 2010 I spent a disastrous amount of time playing Mario Kart Wii. I’d come home at night, grab dinner and then sit obsessively for several hours clutching a little white plastic steering wheel. I’m not proud of this, but it’s necessary back story to explain why, one weekend as I was driving to New Jersey and some Jersey driver was swerving and lane-straddling in front of me on the George Washington Bridge, I instinctively reached down on the steering wheel for the button that, in Mario Kart, would send a red shell flying out in front of me to flip this asshole’s car off the road." [...]

There are only 16,777,216 colors that can be represented on the web (under our current system). The Tumblr that celebrates them, Pretty Colors, has posted 1077 of those colors since January. That means this Tumblr can only exist (if it continues posting at the same rate) for another 10,433 years before it runs out of colors. If my math is right. Which it may not be. But it'll have run out of "pretty" colors long before then, most likely. How many of the colors that can exist online can also be considered pretty, even with an open mind? I'd give that Tumblr about another 3000 years. I look forward [...]

Since the July 19th indictment of Aaron Swartz for surreptitiously whooshing nearly five million JSTOR documents onto a laptop concealed in an MIT network closet, there's been a lot of codswallop written about JSTOR, about Aaron Swartz and about the public's right to access documents in the public domain. A 24-year-old computer prodigy and political activist, Swartz has been caricatured as either a hero or a villain; likewise JSTOR. The U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen M. Ortiz, who brought the charges against Swartz: she might be a bit of a villain, okay. Information wants to be free, it's been said. But whether this means free of charge or merely [...]

This should be required reading for anyone who is about to post an image macro to the Internet. I mean, it wouldn't change anything, but it would at least make people stop and think for a second before they went ahead and cheezburgered. And maybe in that second they would lose their wifi connection or get distracted or something. It's worth a shot.

When I was a kid, like eleven, I used to get those tubes of lip balm that smelled so strongly of lime or strawberry or pina colada and keep them in my desk in my room and basically huff them when I was supposed to be doing my homework. God, they smelled so good!

I have never understood how critics, outside of the few tenured at operations with their heads above water, manage to make a living. I say this as someone who, for several years, more or less got by writing about music. The primary audience for criticism seems to be other critics, or at least consumers with, for lack of a better word, "critical" sensibilities. But maybe I'm denying the awesome, fundamental power of the written word. Criticism—and in this, I would include any form of review or preview—passes judgment so that others might be free, or at least spared any inconvenience.

Naturally, this is an essay about Twitter.

"As expected, cats are more popular on the internet than Jesus."

Ifttt is pretty close to being the greatest thing in the world. Go explore the preset recipes or make your own.

Wikipedia has an article on almost every subject—including, it turns out, one on how to write "the perfect Wikipedia article." The guidelines run through a list of the attributes such an article would have—e.g., "[i]s precise and explicit," "[i]s well-documented," "[i]s engaging"—before ending on a cautionary note: The perfect Wikipedia article is, by virtue of the collaborative editing process that creates it, "not attainable": "Editing may bring an article closer to perfection, but ultimately, perfection means different things to different editors." And as editors pursue perfection, they also must keep in mind another essential quality of a good Wikipedia entry: neutrality. That is, no matter [...]

Remember when Wired was telling us the "web" was dead or whatever? (When, in terms of volume delivered, it grew seven-fold between 2005 and 2010.) Well, frightening new development! Half of North America's web use (or "internet use"; we're being bad with terminology) is "real time entertainment." What's that mean? It means Netflix is 30% of all downstream traffic. (For comparison, YouTube is only 10%.) Now, don't panic: video is "bigger" than text, duh, so just because all internet traffic for pulling websites to you nifty computer is only 18% of total use, well, remember that websites are "smaller." But soon you will be getting your websites [...]

Deep Silver, the publishers-to-be of the videogame "Dead Island," claimed yesterday that they hadn't yet sold film rights to their as-of-yet unfinished and unreleased product, in development since basically forever, despite reports to the contrary. Here's a working theory about this unusual event (the "Dead Island" trailer: has like 2.5 million views, from the last five days): "My theory: Deep Silver knew Dead Island was in video game purgatory and they needed something to gauge the interest in it to determine if they should shelve it or issue yet another release date. So they came up with this bit of cinematic genius, something that would go viral [...]

Tweeting is easy; blogging is hard. [Via]

Sad news for fans of found pen1s poetry: "E-mail spam has plunged by more than half since Christmas Day when the world's largest criminal spamming operation inexplicably shut down." But! Experts "fear that top spamming groups might be shifting to sneakier, more lucrative online scams." So there's that. [Via]