The Literary World System
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What are you doing? I mean, right now. You're reading a book review. A review of a book that, as it happens, is almost certain to become quite famous among intellectuals around the world over the next few ...
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Consider the New World of Information - stuff that, unlike the paper days of the past, doesn't always physically exist. You've got notes, scrawlings and snippets, Web graphics, photos and sounds. Stuff needs to be cut, pasted, highlighted, annotated, crossed out, dragged away. And, as Ross Perot used to say (or maybe it was Dana Carvey impersonating him), don't forget the graphs and charts.
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This week we look at text nodes, node lists, forms and the level 0 DOM, DOM hyperspace and markers. The W3C DOM defines a few methods for getting and changing texts, but the core string methods and properties are more useful and versatile. By Peter-Paul Koch. 1120
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Arts & entertainment: Guardian Books poll into era-defining books finds that paranoia, propaganda and a state of perpetual war are the defining characteristics of the last century.
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Following in the steps of J.K. Rowling, China Mi&#233;ville creates an alternate-universe London that both kids and adults will want to explore. By Adam Rogers from Wired magazine.
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Its formula for success: Writing about complicated scientific subjects in a way that makes them accessible to the average, educated reader.
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A new experiment sends a simple idea racing around the web, and tracks its progress. All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again. By Robert Lemos.
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.
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PC World editors from around the globe report on how people in their countries connect to the Internet.
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I was looking at what my friend Stephen Lewis wrote in HakPakSak a few days ago &#151; specifically "...newspapersâ roles as public trusts and cornerstones of our informational infrastructure &#151; i.e. sources of solid information and independent commentary essential to informed citizenry, democratic government, effective public policy, and well-functioning economies".. What this brought up for me is the notion that human beings are themselves infrastructural; especially when they are constuctive contributors to the structure we call civilization. read more
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Chinese publishers discover that online novel sales help move physical books off the shelves. And for a growing number of authors and readers, epic tales on the web are a thriving art form.
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Key: F-Fiction; NF-Nonfiction; H-Hardcover; P-Paperback
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I noted yesterday that there seems to be some media fanfare surrounding Amazon's launch of a digital book tablet. It occurred to me that the markets surrounding media such as books, music and movies bear more than a passing resemblance to financial markets, and as such, perhaps they were amenable to a similar method of analysis. Being the owner of a sizable collection of paper books, this led me to consider the drawbacks one faces when Digital Rights Management restrictions are put in place.
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The honour carries a cash prize of 25,000 euros (some $32,000). The awards panel described the book as "a work in which a long history of literary creation and critical and theoretical reflection unfolds with ...
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Every other Sunday, in the fields and playgrounds of suburban Baltimore, a medieval fantasy world materializes. That world is the subject of âDarkon.â
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ROME, Sep 13 (IPS) - It might be taken for granted in Europe that the  imparting of  knowledge through books is available to all,  regardless of their  social status. But in reality, however, it  is a different story.
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The real question raised by Vernor Vinge's new novel, Rainbows End, is whether controlling our digital fantasies is a way of controlling the world. In Table of Malcontents.