Mark Bernstein:- Another terrific segment at Tinderbox Weekend Boston (and yes, registration for London May 8-9 is now open) was Steve Winnick’s introduction to Summary Judgment. Winnick is a litigator with a diverse practice that he describes as “everything except truly specialized areas like bankruptcy”, and he’s been looking for a comprehensive case management tool for ages. Tinderbox lets him build a framework for developing, resolving, and billing, for organizing the workflow of his practice.

Mark Bernstein:- An interesting day spent at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It’s a big museum that’s taken an interesting gamble: many of its galleries are organized thematically rather than chronologically, so you can find contemporary painting next to Picasso and Rembrandt next to Lucian Freud.

Mark Bernstein:- Fine production of the seldom-produced Odets play, Paradise Lost, at the American Repertory. The Playgoer has a terrific discussion, well worth reading, that recapitulates the play, the director, and the critical reaction this production has received. It is indeed a very big play; we don’t see these very often anymore.

Mark Bernstein:- At Tinderbox Weekend Boston, Mark Anderson explored the construction and exploration of particularly complex links networks in Tinderbox. Here, for example. is an excerpt from McChrystal’s Afghanistan Counter-Insurgency Planning document. Here’s a detail of one section:

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- On Thursday BusinessWeek reported Facebook is seeking new financing for its data center operation growth in 2009. Facebook continues to add new members and their associated content at an extremely fast pace, with most new growth coming from international markets. Facebook needs to expand its abilities to serve these markets by bolstering current infrastructure offerings and cutting latency to its members through new international points of presence. In this post I will take a deeper look...

Emily Chang - eHub:- Social Media Dashboard For Small Businesses: monitor your company, follow competitors, connect with customers and fans. URL: uberVU

Mark Bernstein:- Coudal’s Steve Delahoyde puts together a wonderful critique of the Rovian attack ad in the form of a home-made video on behalf of Rework .

Mark Bernstein:- In yet another fascinating Tinderbox Weekend talk, Tom Lowe and Gordon Christie addressed the shortcomings of legal education. They argue that the case system of legal education, while not without strengths, leaves students ill-equipped for the actual practice of law; in particular, Prof. Christie observed the importance (and scarcity) of innovative and critical thinking before it’s time to file an appeal.

Mark Bernstein:- Harvard’s alumni folks set up a two-part lecture series on Don Giovanni by Thomas Forrest Kelly, whose book on First Nights I really enjoyed (back in 2004: thanks Tinderbox) and whose First Nights At The Opera I had overlooked. He’s a famously fine lecturer and this was...

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Mark Bernstein:- By the way, you can get the Tinderbox Weekend CD for just $35 from Eastgate. There’s a lot of new stuff, and plenty everything’s been brought up-to-date for Tinderbox 5.

Emily Chang - eHub:- An open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.URL: PhoneGap

Mark Bernstein:- Terrific Tinderbox Weekend! We were really packed into the historic old farmhouse that’s Eastgate world headquarters and it rained, day and night, without pause. But the talks were terrific, and the breaks and meals were fascinating.

Mark Bernstein:- Michael Druzinsky’s Roslyn Place, a short work for clarinet, horn, marimba,harp, viola, and cello, will premier on Saturday, March 20, in a Chicago performance by the Oistrach Symphony Orchestra. Highly recommended.

Emily Chang - eHub:- A social way to attach digital content to real world objects using barcodes. URL: Stickybits

Mark Bernstein:- I've just been to two really good conferences on hypertext and new media (Florida and Mexico).

Mark Bernstein:- Will Slocombe guest edits a big issue of Genre with lots of exciting new papers.

Mark Bernstein:- Felix Dencker explores Tinderbox for visual display of character points of view. 

Mark Bernstein:- Mike Taylor: Whatever Happened To Programming?

Mark Bernstein:- Steve Waddell describes a variety of interesting network visualizations for understanding policy and its environment – links among NGO’s and financial regulators, say, or social networks in South African business.

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Mark Bernstein:- HADOPI is the French authority charged with prosecuting illegal downloads and other intellectual property infringements. Unfortunately, is appears that their new logo was designed using an illegally downloaded font.

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- Google will roll out a change to its search results pages later this week designed to better capture outbound clicks. Google search result pages will link to a gateway URL before delivering the visitor to his final destination. These gateway URLs will replace search result URLs exposed via the Referer HTTP header. Google announced the new gateway page on its Google Analytics blog, giving webmasters a few days to prepare for the change.

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- Micro-blogging service Twitter will celebrate its third birthday in March and may have a revenue model to support the company over the long-term. Last month Twitter CEO Evan Williams told Kevin Maney of Porfolio.com the company will kick off new revenue streams by March 2009 to avoid raising another round of venture capital funding. Twitter's deeply...

Mark Bernstein:- As you walk approach Teotihuacan, you run a gauntlet of booths that sell silly “Mexican” souvenirs. As you walk through the ruins, you are continually approached by people selling toys and trinkets. No one sells, or gives away, a guidebook or a map, not even the little (but often fairly good) “self-guided tours” that the U. S. Park Service hands out. The outdoor signage is trilingual but mediocre. The new museum signage is good but sparse, the old museum signage is even sparser and, since I was able to read it, is likely written in rather elementary Spanish. There are said to be tour guides, but where? And how good? There seems to be a bookstore, but it was small, oddly situated, and closed for inventory.

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Emily Chang - eHub:- A New York-centric apartment matchmaking site between renters, brokers, and landlords. Renters can create a profile, get a free credit check, and write and read reviews of brokers. Brokers have the ability to view renters’ credit scores and income, and contact renters directly. Note: You do have to provide some personal information, such as your [...]

Emily Chang - eHub:- Manage, present, review and annotate web design mockups. URL: Onotate

Emily Chang - eHub:- An ereader application that you don’t have to install or download. Read public domain ePub books on your computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet. Upload your own collection of ePub books, or discover new ones. Bookmark your reading spot, change the text size, and download your books at any time. URL: Ibis Reader

Emily Chang - eHub:- A site that provides a visual exploration of Google’s suggestion feature. Type in a word or phrase, and then follow it to the answer. URL: What do you suggest?

Mark Bernstein:- Today was the wrap-up day for the First International Congress on Web Studies, hosted by the Tecnológico de Monterrey and capably chaired by Prof. Everardo Reyes-Garcia. This was an intriguing conference of unexpected design; if the Future Of Digital Studies had its feet planted firmly in the literary, this congress on Web Studies was centered in the art world and heavily flavored by its intriguing exhibition. And if the Florida conference was largely American in flavor, this event had very strong ties to the active (but often separate) Francophone hypertext world.

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- The emerging HTML5 specification lifts video playback out of the generic

Emily Chang - eHub:- A social mapping platform for Australia, presently. Lets help fix that. Here’s how they describe themselves CityTag is designed to help you find the best info about town, local to where you are – on the spot! via URL: CityTag

Emily Chang - eHub:- A start page maker where you set four of your favorite websites as the homepage. Users simply pick four favorites and set it as the start page in their browsers. URL: Fav4

Mark Bernstein:- Aaron Swartz offers candid tips for reading more books. Some are straightforward: always have a bunch of interesting books on hand so there will always be something you want to read. Other tips are effective but unusual:

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- Yahoo! announced support for enhanced search results last week based on Facebook Share and RDFa markup. Website owners can add a few meta tags to their pages to boost click-throughs from a more visual Yahoo! Search result and ease the process of sharing a link on Facebook at the same time. In this...

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Mark Bernstein:- Book designer and chronicler of the Japanese art world Craig Mod offers some thoughtful speculation on book design in the age of electronic books. We won’t abandon physical books, but we’ll concentrate on well crafted codexes and let electronic books handle the disposable tomes.

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- In the world of cloud computing every action has a cost. Every HTTP request fires off a chain of actions, each uniquely measured on a variety of billable meters. Gone are the days of idle or unused resources on our local servers. Cloud computing charges by the sip (when sips are available) aligning business goals of resource efficiency and its cost. The cloud computing world shares many similarities with the plug-in and go world of electricity, including the need to run green for the sake of resources and cost savings. What can the world of green energy teach us about the future of cloud computing? How can we measure computing resources in the cloud for efficiency, replacement costs, and cost savings? I shared a few ideas on green clouds at last week's

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- Cloud computing is changing the way we provision hardware and software for on-demand capacity fulfillment. Lately I have been thinking about the ways on-demand servers, storage, and CDNs are changing the way we develop web applications and make business decisions. Gone are the days of idle CPUs, empty memory, or unused drive space. The cloud charges us for what we use as we use it (assuming capacity is available). In this post I will provide an overview of the cloud hosting landscape with a particular focus on cloud utilization by web companies. I will walk through a managed infrastructure stack and examine a few major business targets.

Emily Chang - eHub:- An open-source library of AJAX-powered JavaServer Faces (JSF) components, an Ajax framework and a client-side validation framework. URL: OpenFaces

Mark Bernstein:- Jeremy Yuille has an interesting post about using Tinderbox to introduce new subjects.

Emily Chang - eHub:- Web-based business financial management. Automated data entry from banks and credit cards, graphical projections, bank-level security. URL: Indinero

Mark Bernstein:- In her remarks for Future Of Digital Studies yesterday, Janet Murray proposed that we should try to avoid mystification of the digital, and that in our digital works we should not savor confusion.

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- This week Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network's reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai. The new large blob storage system, named Haystack, is a custom-built file system solution for the over 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month (500 GB per day!). Jason Sobel, a former NetApp

Mark Bernstein:- Amid bunch of very interesting lectures at Future of Digital Studies, I’m particularly intrigued by yesterday’s talk on “Digital Literature and the Modernist Problem” from David J. Bolter (Georgia Tech) Maria Engberg ( Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden). They distinguish two concerns of the avant-garde — formal, and political — and tease these out in a subtle and (I think) useful way. It's already shifting my understand, for example, about essentialist skeptics like Laura Miller and Sven Birkerts and (in his Golden Age lecture) Robert Coover. A sign of a good talk is that it convinces you on subjects the speaker’s didn’t directly discuss.

Mark Bernstein:- One of my concluding points here at The Future Of Digital Studies was that, from time to time, the critic needs to plunge into the mess of the work. This means broad reading, if only to provide experience to inform the work at hand. (This is another reason I'm skeptical of Joe Tabbi’s intriguing proposal to rest new media criticism in the hands of large numbers of undergraduates and to rely on the wisdom of crowds: will undergraduates have sufficient breadth?) And it means enjoying the work, not merely examining it; I think at times we all forget why we do what we do. But sometimes the critic also needs to pick up the construction tools and make things, even if those things aren't very good and won’t ever be seen by anyone else. I’m a very bad weekend painter,...

Niall Kennedy's Weblog:- Google App Engine released hosted platform version 1.1.9 earlier this week with big boosts in capacity and compatibility. The new App Engine supports standard HTTP libraries, larger files, triples the response deadline, and removes limitations on CPU-intensive processes. Standard HTTP libraries App Engine now supports Python's...

Emily Chang - eHub:- HQueue is the very first downloadable Hulu Queue Viewer Apple app for $0.99. URL: HQueue

Mark Bernstein:- Janet Reid, Literary Agent, comes across my 2001 Singapore Lecture. Unusually good comments.