• Are Newspapers Doomed? (Do We Care?): Newspapers & the Net Forum
  “The tensions created by the new economics of production and consumption are visible today in many media, from music to movies. Nowhere, though, have they been so clearly on display, and so unsettling, as in the newspaper business. Long a mainstay of culture, print journalism is going through a wrenching transformation, and its future is in doubt.”

[Conducting a little test here, giving the del.icio.us daily blog posting function a try.]

(tags: media internet_clippings)

Just a few links to articles on various topics that I found over the past week:

From Dawud Miracle, writing on Lorelle on WordPress, a WordPress tip that will completely change the way I approach updating my blog. In Write Today, Post Tomorrow: Using Post Timestamp, Dawud explains how the “post timestamp” function in WordPress works, and — this is what I didn’t know — that future dating an article causes WordPress to hold the article in a queue and publish it at the specified date and time. Of course, I couldn’t resist trying it, so this article (written at 10:45 AM) is scheduled to appear at 1:00 PM, when I’ll be about 10 miles from here. 

From Hrafn Thorri Thorisson’s fascinating Think Artificial site (a new addition to my blogroll), a great tutorial on RSS, How to Make the Most of RSS Feeds (Redux). While you’re there, take some time to browse his site, and don’t miss his articles on “artificial creativity” — especially An Overview of Artificial Creativity, Artificial Creativity,  and Artificial Creativity and Common Sense in Storytelling.

From the Market-Based Management Institute team weblog, a short introduction to cognitive biases, specifically one kind of bias called anchoring. The article prompted me to learn a little more about cognitive biases by reading (or at least, starting to read) the  Cognitive bias and List of cognitive biases articles on Wikipedia. 

From Civil War Memory, a nice tribute to Luciano Pavarotti, who, sadly, passed away last week. Notice the quotation from Pavarotti at the end of the article, a nice way to sum up the meaning of one person’s life. For more on the great tenor, go here.

From one of my favorite sites, Steven Poole’s Unspeak, a typically sharp and appropriate deconstruction of yet another article assailing blogging as the end of civilization, Its remoteness from the cash nexus.

From if:book, a fine discussion of the state of e-book technology and the publishing industry,  e-book developments at amazon, google (and rambly thoughts thereon) and a short discussion (with some excellent comments) on the place of blogs in academics, the place of blogs in the academy.

Finally, on a lighter and slightly gasping note, a breathtaking (and I don’t mean that as a cliche) photograph of  Salzburg, Austria from Daily Dose of Imagery.

Happy Sunday!

UPDATE: Okay, so imagine my surprise to discover that future timestamps don’t exactly work in my version of WordPress. (Question to self: When are you going to upgrade? Yahoo! isn’t ever really going to do it for you, are they???) So after some digging around, I discovered that a plugin called WP-cron is required to use this feature in WordPress 2.0.  I’ve installed the plug-in and will conduct some experiments later on. I expect it will work fine enough.

I’m not disappointed, though, that it turned out this way. I’ve had a problem all along with Yahoo! as my web host (Question to self: When are you going to switch hosts?), where Yahoo! kicks out all comment moderation e-mails with an error message (”From address not in member domain. Message not sent.”). Part of the WP-cron plugin solves that problem: includes a feature to e-mail me when there are unmoderated comments on the site, sending them from my admin e-mail address rather than the comment-writer’s domain, so Yahoo! processes them normally. It’s already worked a couple of times today.  Cool.

Like most of the RSS readers, Newsgator Online has a clippings function, where you can save copies of blog articles and other readings from around the Internet, for future savoring. For a while now, I’ve been clipping things I wanted to write about “lateron” — but in most cases I never got around to doing the work. So, of the fifty or so I’ve accumulated, here’s a set of something-for-everyone links (with free remarks!):

– From the excellent technology site Ars Technica, an exhaustive review of the iPhone — a gadget I’m fascinated by (isn’t everybody?), but I don’t own and don’t plan to buy any time soon, mainly because of the price. There are too many other things I could do with $500 to $600.

– From Popular Photography and Imaging, a review of a new Sony Zeiss lens, something I’d much rather spend my money on than the iPhone (no offense intended against the iPhone cult!). New lenses… mmmmmmmmmm….

– Via Jesse Walker’s article Cartography for the Masses on Reason’s Hit and Run, a link to Google Maps is Changing the Way We See the World on Wired. This article begs for a whole lot more attention from me than this short mention, believe me; I hope to get around to giving it a slow, careful reading … and writing more about it.

– From Scott Yarborough at StorySouth, a discussion of the state of the short-story market and how that market has been affected by other media, including the Internet and electronic publishing. It reminds me of that gnawing sensation in the back of my mind: the question of whether or not I’ll put some fiction writing on this site. When I know the answer, I’ll tell you. Articles like this one, however, make me feel like I should.

– A few articles about the emergence of a blogger’s “code of conduct” — a subject that I thought I would be interested in then completely forgot about. But I might decide to look at these and the articles they link to again: Bloggers React to the Blogger’s Code of Conduct, You are your own code of conduct, and Bloggers Get Civilized?

– From Fusion View, a thoughtful reminder that the virtualization of our lives and our cultures comes at a price.

– From Ben Casnocha, an article and a review — The Expected Value of Being a Fox vs. Hedgehog and Book Review: One Person/Multiple Careers — that introduced me to the idea of “slash careers” and to Marci Alboher’s blog. The timing of Casnocha’s articles and discovering Alboher’s blog was very useful to me; I had right around the same time been working toward my own conclusion that all these different things I’m interested in (namely: writing, history, photography, and technology) don’t have to be treated as mutually exclusive from a career perspective, and that I’ll figure out ways to integrate them all into who I am and what I do. I’ll come back to this topic later; it’s one of the most fascinating technological/cultural (slash!) developments of our time that people are exploring multiple career paths. The things that have made this possible are culturally, technically, and socially very complex, and the potential effects are yet-to-be-understood and enormous.

– From Performancing.com, a Blog Reboot Session with some excellent suggestions. Since I just added Google’s AdSense to this site, I need to take a closer look. But I’m not so sure about the idea of including ads on every post. While I can understand how that would improve ad traffic, I’ve always thought it was visually unappealing and distracting — equally so when the ads are captured by an RSS reader. But I’ll think about it.

– From The Austrian Economists, When Global Cooling Was Upon Us… complete with the image of 1975 Newsweek article announcing the impending disaster. Good to know we survived that one….

Phew! That was exhausting! But that does it, that empties out the clippings file (except for three more that I’ve stuffed in my back pocket). I feel SO CAUGHT UP now! Or should I say … “for now” ….