Comments on: How the Web Works for Readers: Thin Connections Lead to Rich Connections

By: John

John — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:43:38 +0000

Looks like we’re getting another tsunami of e-book enthusiasm in 2010, everyone proclaiming it the year of the e-book.

I’m trying to be open-minded about it all, even getting a Kindle for Christmas.

But I can’t shake the thought that print books are the better technology for reading anything of length or substance. Snippets, okay on the web. Essay, maybe on a Kindle. But a whole book, I mean a real book? One with challenging ideas?

Am I just old school here? Maybe all the tidbits and scraps of information can substitute for a deep read …

Nah. Have tags ever replaced categories? Not.

By: John

John — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:58:45 +0000

Placeholder comment. When I get to it, I need to add a point somewhere about ’status’ information on the web, and identity issues related to it. I haven’t found the right place for the point, so I’ll just leave it as a comment here. More of me using this blog like a wiki …

I watch status bars in progress. I wait for a page to load, for an email to be scanned, for a download to finish. Perhaps I click away to the next thing, pretending to multi-task. There really is no such thing as multi-tasking, only rapid alternations of uni-tasking, each alternation costing attention that could have been spent on the first task. But the web makes us wait. If the world opened a million copies of a book at once, we would all be reading. If we opened a million copies of a web page at once, the website would crash. So we wait. Watching status bars feels good. It’s a fix. Status seems like progress. Check out my blog stats. Web counters are the mirror of Snow White, telling us who is the greatest of them all. It is MacLuhan’s narcissistic trap, a fantasy of self as famous.

By: barbara

barbara — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:27:57 +0000

I do the same thing…Google reader takes me quickly through the mass of topics to the things I am interested in, which then slows me down and lets me have more of a quality read. That sometimes (too often) takes me to deeper ideas, more concrete things (like books and articles) and then I have a stack of books and articles which takes me into the deep places hidden in my soul (or just to something that is fun and interesting).

The problem is time. If we could stop time, or speed up the experience we get from reading, without causing the experience to be degraded…then would be we supermen.

By: Wendell

Wendell — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:54:29 +0000

“I do a quick scan of the titles. If anything catches my eye, I look further”

Me, too. And then I think about the value of titles. Should they be catchy? Explanatory? Summary Conclusions? How many characters are effective (some lists cut off after about 30)?

I’m thinking this is journalism 101 stuff: how to write a headline and lead (“lede”?).

Then I look at the state of today’s newspapers and think, we’d better do something a little different – LOL.