Brandymore Castle

"The idea that something that appeared in print is automatically worth paying for is nonsense." says Mark Coatney in Evaluating Time Magazine's New Online Pay Wall This is an example of thinking from the traditional publishing world, where if something made it into print or was "published" it meant the content with through a lengthy process of adding value and checking quality, through the editorial, fact-checking and proofreading process. This was thought in the olden days to mean something. Yes, it did, but not always. That editors and fact-checkers were available or that they had a hand in content did not necessarily mean puff-pieces, fabricated stories, falsehoods, mistakes, typos never made it into that published content polished to shine like your grandmother's counter tops. Publishing was a measure of trust and quality from the pre-network world. The network has a new set of criteria and indicators of trust and quality. I find that often writers who ...

Veteran users of Digg are upset with changes to the site aimed at reducing their influence. They have begun gaming the "voting" system Angry Digg users flood home page with Reddit links What is interesting about this is: When I first encountered and thought about sites using voting systems to surface desirable information, I understood that all algorithms for voting can be gamed. That to deter gaming, very sophisticated and arcane algorithms were required. That these discourage contribution because contributors never know where their work will rank nor why it ranks low or high (this is similar to authors puzzling over Amazon's ranking system). I was surprised when sites based on user voting systems began to succeed by simplifying their voting to the thumbs up/down basic counts or other simple and easily gamed voting systems. I believe that when users are satisfied with outcome of their vote, which for Digg means, contributors get their links or comments surfaced and reade...

When I was about five years old I began having experiences of things that stuck in my mind. I would see something, encounter something, and I would freeze for a moment. When I think of it now, I realize this was "noticing" the whatever-it-was, but very intensely, compared to other things, for a moment. I noticed the freshly washed sheets my grandmother had hung on the clothesline to dry, billowing in the breeze. I saw this from my vantage point sitting in the sandbox. It was memorable for some reason I did not consciously think about then. I was never bored riding in the car on family trips because I was constantly entertained by noticing all the details of everything along the road, there were always things that raised interesting questions in my mind, drew out my curiosity, such as the light on the window in a shop in a strip mall, or the neon lights at night, the stars reflected in the window, the hum of the tires on the highway. On one of my first trips to the beach, I ra...