Epistemographer

With the announcement of the iPad yesterday devoting a substantial portion of the time to a demo of what books and reading will look like, I’m wondering about the business model for books in the iTunes Store, and whether there will be an opening for circulating (particularly public) libraries or not.

The two categories that I’m thinking a lot about are amateur identity and commons-based peer production. Both have enjoyed increasing cultural prominence over the past several years, and their emergence has been very much framed in revolutionary rhetoric.
I’ll begin with a simple declaration: I want to very much separate the categories of “amateur” and “commons-based [...]

originally published in a slightly-abridged fashion earlier this year in Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE, Vol. 27, No. 2. (2005), pp. 96-96

Earlier this year, O’Reilly Publishing introduced a new quarterly publication called Make. Addressing his readers, editor and publisher Dale Dougherty wrote, “More than mere consumers of technology, we are makers, adapting technology […]

Fascinating case that lays bare some of the fundamental assumptions (and internal contradictions) of an open source community:
* “Matt Mullenweg”:http://photomatt.net creates “Wordpress”:http://wordpress.org
* Wordpress gets “popular”:http://www.daveschalkboard.com/index.php/archives/2005/03/13/how-popular-is-wordpress/ and grows an “open source”:http://wordpress.org/about/ “community”:http://wordpress.org/development/
* Matt makes a decision to spend some of Wordpress’ “whuffie”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie, “gets”:http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/03/30/wordpres.shtml “caught”:http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/04/01/wordpres.shtml, “responds”:http://photomatt.net/2005/04/01/a-response/
Takehome questions – how much agency does the founder of an open [...]

As you might have already seen, Jason Kottke’s decided to make a go of blogging as his primary form of income. It’s definitely not going “pro” exactly, but it’s something different than what he’s been doing, and his choice actually ties in with some ideas about amateurs and professionals that I’ve been fleshing out lately [...]

I’ve spent the past few weeks working on and off with others at the Center on a grant application to the IMLS. We’re proposing to build a package of interfaces and extensions to Firefox that will in essence stick our Scrapbook and Scribe programs into the browser itself (where more and more research is done).

With [...]

So, I just got a G-mail account: epistemographer@gmail.com. How, you ask, did I manage such a thing? Well-connected friends? Winning a contest?
Nope. I went to Gmailswap.com and offered to mail someone a fresh NYC bagel for a Gmail invite. Literally within two minutes, I’d recieved a response, and tomorrow morning, a plain (and an onion, [...]

So, I’m apparently a bit behind the curve here (or maybe I just ought to stop reading political blogs compulsively and add some more techie ones to my daily circuit)…seems that the eagerly-anticipated Movable Type 3.0 is out, at least in a Developer version. Meanwhile, all hell has broken loose over the licensing structure (just [...]

filed under “Things on which to follow up once I’ve finished my dissertation”:
Dangermouse, the Jay-Z Construction Set and the Videogame Content Creation Model
I would hope that, in the near future, artists and publishers will see the value of releasing not only polished works, but the bits and parts used to create a work, including those [...]

Just downloaded a new RSS reader (FeedDemon) as well as a Movable Type publishing tool (Zempt). We’ll see if these tools are an actual improvement over my old everything-through-the-browser routine…