Dylan Tweney

Small Pieces Loosely Joined, by David Weinberger (Perseus, 2002) Something about David Weinberger’s writing style really makes me want to use the word “avuncular.” I’m not sure why — his writing is not particularly uncle-like — but there is something about his friendly, down-to-earth, thoughtful-cha

Back in the late 1990s, a software salesman could look you in the eye and say with a straight face that his company’s enterprise system would cost you $1 million. Mercifully, those days are over, as my latest column for Business 2.0 reports.

Mrs. Bridge. by Evan S. Connell, Jr. (1959). I picked up this novel in the library on a whim, because it was near Joseph Conrad, and because it’s told entirely in short, disconnected episodes (anywhere from a paragraph or two up to three or four pages at the longest). It’s a fast read. But it’s […]

Prices for big corporate systems have come back down from the stratosphere, but that doesn’t mean you need to buy. Back in the late 1990s, a software salesman could look you in the eye and say with a straight face that his company’s enterprise system would cost you $1 million. Mercifully, those days

Bob Cringely has a sensible strategy for how to roll back the DMCA and its egregious limitations on technology and fair use: civil disobedience. “Everyone who hates the DMCA has to illegally copy a movie or a song, and then tell both the Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office exactly what they did.

Scientists have empirically established the world’s funniest joke.

The New Scientist interviews Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, about software and product design: “You don’t do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. … The person who’s done it best is Steve Jobs, and he’s well-known for being a tyrant.” Norman al

Tom Matrullo points out that Google News completes the commodification of the news business. It lumps every news organization’s article about a particular news story under a single umbrella, giving you the basic story while cutting through all the brand differentiation that those news organizations

Photographer drives across the country, taking one 35mm picture every mile. Very nifty Flash app lets you see the map of his journey and view the pictures as you go: Taken On The Road: American Mile Markers

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Assn., writes on c|net about the new “copyspeak”. Why copyrights aren’t “property” — “Real property is subject to ownership taxes. Real property lasts forever and can be owned forever. A copyright can be owned only for a limited period of time. Indeed, t

As much as Google rocks,there is one area where it really sucks: Searching weblogs. That’s because it’s not particularly intelligent about separating or summarizing weblog entries, making it a pretty blunt tool for finding specific information on a blog.

David Weinberger has a very eloquent, pointed comment on the most recent academic plagiarism scandal. I love the disclaimer at the end. One comment, however: When you use the term “intellectual property,” you’ve already lost the argument. That term, by likening copyrights and patents to real propert