Bots and automated characters are going to be the first kind of digital media we explore in this Autumn’s classes. Obviously we’ll look at Eliza and read some of what her creator, Weizenbaum, wrote about her in the sixties. My daughter’s lent […]

I’m stitching working minutes together this week: there’ll be fifteen minutes while Aurora pretends to be a baby tiger, half an hour while she plays with her LeapPad, an hour while she plays with lego, forty-two minutes while she’s outside, before it […]

Have you come across the Halfbakery? They collect, critique and vote on half-baked ideas, fictitious inventions. The Film Noir Home, for instance: A very ‘wired’ home which knows what you’re doing and uses voice synthesis to announce, in the first person, what […]

Emails can be blocked, phone numbers deleted, photos burned, but my fingers keep typing in the URL of his blog before my mind has time to stop them. I need a software equivalent of that horrible-tasting stuff they smear on your fingernails […]

Tinka has embarked on a project to identify and then bend, twist, mutilate and undo the various paratexts of blogging. She’s started with the blogger’s bio, the “about me” section you’ll often find in the upper left corner of a blog. Hers […]

Hons, do go look at Judy Horacek’s August cartoons and scroll down to the bottom, that one about naming the nameless dread. Not a bad idea, huh?

Virtual Storytelling is the name of a conference in Toulouse this Novemeber. I’ve only had a quick look at the list of presentations so I can’t swear to its being relevant, but it’s in France! I don’t think I’ve got any travel […]

Friendster‘s been gaining a lot of fictional characters lately, and of course they’re all friends and all write testimonials for each other. I’ve asked Conan the Barbarian and Hermione Granger to be my friendsters. Kind of regret I didn’t ask Snape, but […]

She falls in love with Pierre on her eighth day in Paris. They meet in caf?©s and in his garret apartment: he is the most romantic lover she has known, her most patient French tutor. But with each conversation, each night of […]

I like this definition of Eloise Oyzon’s: Blogs are a first person narrative in real time. and further: The story is focused upon the protagonist, it may be extremely personal/personable or the story may be of a larger scope – ie. technological […]