Skip to content

Category Archives: Random Thoughts

  • FAS Virtual Worlds Almanac: A Semantic Structured Wiki

    Friday, September 5, 2008

    As some of you might know, I work part-time at the Federation of American Scientists. Most of what I do has involved the creation of a wiki for virtual worlds, and I am proud to say that it is ready for the world. It is not simply a wiki, but a structured semantic [...]

    Filed in Random Thoughts | Comments (0)

  • WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive

    Tuesday, August 26, 2008

    As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links.  I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites.  I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can [...]

    Filed in Random Thoughts | Comments (2)

  • Virtual Worlds in 1996: The More Things Change…

    Wednesday, August 13, 2008

    I came across this 1996 review published in Entertainment Weekly of The Palace, Worldsaway, and Worlds Chat. These were the first graphical chat programs, a genre which became virtual worlds a half-decade later. The entire article is fascinating from a historical perspective, but the last paragraph in particular shows us how some things [...]

    Filed in Random Thoughts | Comments (0)

  • Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner

    Saturday, August 9, 2008

    An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive.

    Filed in Random Thoughts, Reviews and Responses | Comments (2)

  • Google Search for “Phenomenology of Spirit” Suggests “Nebraska State Flower”

    Saturday, August 2, 2008

    As you may know, Google often thinks it knows what you are looking for better than you do.  It will suggest different search queries and display them underneath the top three results for your original query.  So I did a simple Google search for “Phenomenology of Spirit,” an 1807 book written by German philosopher G.W.F. [...]

    Filed in Random Thoughts | Comments (2)

  • How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Attribution-ShareAlike

    Thursday, July 24, 2008

    Content on my website and my Flickr account has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license for a while.  I was pretty proud of myself.  But then I got to thinking: why don’t I choose Attribution-ShareAlike?  Obviously, it was product of two kneejerk reactions: I don’t want someone else to make money off my [...]

    Filed in Random Thoughts | Comments (2)

  • User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation

    Sunday, June 15, 2008

    I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad?

    Filed in Random Thoughts | Comments (0)

  • Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams

    Sunday, June 8, 2008

    Brian Williams talked about how this year’s primary season has shown that even in the age of the Internet, we still have a longing for real communities. I take issue with his use of “virtual community” and claim that most political communities are virtual.

    Filed in Random Thoughts | Comments (0)

  • Memetic Inkblots

    Tuesday, June 3, 2008

    I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them.

    Filed in Random Thoughts | Comments (0)

  • Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?

    Friday, May 23, 2008

    Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them?

    Filed in Random Thoughts | Comments (0)