Simple Fullscreen Text Editors for Students, Bloggers, Journalists and Writers

Do you ever catch yourself changing the typeface, line spacing or the color of the text instead of actually writing? You might want to try one of these: Q10 — Finish that first draft. Now. (Windows only, no frameworks required); JDarkRoom — A simple full-screen text editor. (requires Java 1.4 or greater); Dark Room — Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. (requires .NET Framework 2.0).

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Time Magazine’s Blind Love for the Apple

What do you think is the Invention Of the Year according to the Time Magazine and it’s Best inventions team that has been arguing about the nominees and speaking to the actual inventors since the early September?

It is a mobile phone with which you can make calls, write messages, add phone numbers in a contacts list, listen to music and watch videos, access the web and view the street maps. I am not kidding.

The list was chosen by a team of experts lead by Lev Grossman. In this video he explains the process of choosing The Best Inventions Of the Year. Just a note: at the very beginning you can clearly see how the Macintosh computer and the iPhone has made his work much more organized. I kid, I kid. Read more »

Usage of the Term ‘Web 2.0’

Note: In the previous article I suggested that some writers should avoid using the term ‘web 2.0’, and thus probably wrongly implied that they don’t know what web is. The following is an explanation of what I actually meant.

If definition means “the act of defining or making definite, distinct, or clear” then the definition of ‘web 2.0’ provided by Tim O’Reilly is neither distinct nor clear. He tries to put way too many things under a single umbrella, under one next version—the 2.0—while many of these things are in a continuous development with varying speed and can not be defined by ‘versions’.

On the first page of the article he formulates the “sense of web 2.0” by giving a few examples of how web 2.0 is different from Web 1.0, like, “publishing –> participation”, “content management systems –> wikis” and “Britannica Online –> Wikipedia”.

If these are the chosen examples to illustrate the principles of web 2.0, then the arrow used between them means something different in each of the examples, which however contradicts to the use of an equal type linguistic/symbolic link among all examples. As none of the known symbols of logic are used (like ⇒ or ∈), then lets try figure out what the author meant. Read more »

Finally Some Critical Writing About the Web

After writing the previous article ‘What is Wrong with the Tech Journalism’ and thinking more about the portrayal of the Web by off/online journalists, I have finally found a few great articles that try to critically assess the otherwise hyped “user–generated content” and “social networking”:

• The User-Generated Content Myth by Scott Karp where he perfectly explains that an average creator of a useful web content is not an average citizen.
• The Fakebook Generation by Alice Mathias who excellently describes the reasons for the popularity of social networking sites and what they actually mean to people using them.
• Facebook Is NOT For Business also by Scott Karp where he explains why the popular view of Facebook (or any other website of kind) being useful for business and during the business is false.

More Views About the Web and Journalism

Continuing the debate over the importance of professional journalism and the rising popularity of individual publishing, there are number of different viewpoints presented in the following blog posts:

• Let’s have a real debate about Web 2.0 by Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson,
• Still going: more of the NUJ debate by Shane Richmond,
• Is the Web as weak as its weakest link? by David Weinberger,
• The NUJ and me: a considered response by Roy Greenslade,
• Hands up those who think Web 2.0 is rubbish! by Sian Claire Owen.

While I may disagree to some of the views expressed in the above articles, I still think that most of the authors would be better of without using the term Web 2.0, to make their point clearer.

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Now It’s Your Turn Journalist

This article was inspired by an email conversation with Donnacha DeLong, and is a reply to the following articles:

• Shane Richmond, The NUJ’s blinkered approach to online
• Jeff Jarvis, The new collective
• Roy Greenslade, Why I’m saying farewell to the NUJ

I disagree with the idea that personal publishing on the web is a threat to journalism, and I also don’t think the increasing popularity of individual publishing could undermine the professional standards of journalism (in its broadest sense). However, the idea of personal publishing replacing the concept of media is totally absurd, indeed. Read more »

What is Wrong with the Tech Journalism

The problem is with the journalists who write about the web, with their understanding of the subject and literacy of the web in general. The final drop of encouragement for writing this essay was an article by Jonathan Richards in Times Online titled Web 3.0 and beyond: the next 20 years of the internet.

Web is not a software that is developed and released in versions. Actually, the “versioning” of the web is the worst thing that could happen to the hype of the internet. In the particular article, the author was informed by “Mr Spivack, the founder of Radar Networks, a leading Web 3.0 company” that the cycle of the web development is ten years.

Think of “Mr Einstein, the founder of General theory of relativity, a leading Physics 2.0 theory” saying that the cycle of physics development is 30 (or any other number) years until the Physics 3.0 which concentrates on strings and membranes in an eleven dimension environments. Can you see the absurdity of such statements? Read more »