My Books

current Facebook use in Norway

Minnesota-based Viking Magazine is doing a short piece about Facebook’s popularity in Norway, and emailed to ask if I could answer some brief questions – of course I can. And so I had to go re-check how many Norwegians are currently on […]

WikipediaVision

Like Jess, I find watching this map where wikipedia edits rather fascinating. Look how these edits pop up almost as fast as they happen. This is the same principle as the World as a Blog map*, of course, both visualisations being splendid […]

fabulous guides to classical music

We’re going to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play Tchaikovsky’s fourth symphony tonight, and I’ve been having a splendid hour or so exploring the symphony through the San Francisco Symphony’s interactive guide to the work, part of their Keeping Score: MTT on […]

gloria steinem: sexism in politics is stronger than racism

The New Hampshire primaries were held today, and of course, who would make the best president is a frequent topic of discussion here in Chicago. I like both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Probably just as well I don’t have the vote […]

new hypertext thriller: shadow unit

Mark Bernstein links to Shadow Unit, a new, hypertextual (and predominately textual) online serial fiction about a group of FBI agents that attempt to deal with “anomalous crimes”. Although the video shown to Esther Falkner, one of our heroines, is sneakily not […]

hot and cold flashes

It was ten or eleven degrees centigrade below zero (14°F) a few days ago, but today it’s +16°C (61°F) and feels like spring. Apparently this will change very soon. I’d been warned about Chicago’s brutally cold winters, but hadn’t realised the city […]

the facebook diaries

The true story is an apparently somewhat nasty revenge story by a woman scorned (and she happens to be a soap opera star and he happens to be a famous composer), but the semi-fictionalised blog she wrote about her revenge, in the […]