Blogs

Tags > writing

Four short links: 25 January 2013

How to Write a Good Bio (Scott Berkun) — something we all have to do, and rarely do well the first time. Excellent advice. Scumbag Steve’s Advice for Annoying Facebook Girl — Some people can’t distinguish the internet from real …

Mark Twain on influence

In 1905 Mark Twain wrestled with the sort of request that many readers here have undoubtedly encountered: a new writer with the most tenuous of connections (her uncle was briefly a neighbor in a Nevada mining town) asks Twain to …

The 7 key features of an online community

Here’s something about the user experience of online communities that you’ve probably never considered: everyone in an online community is having a unique, individualized experience, even though they’re all doing it together. Think about that for a second. Your activity …

Four short links: 10 November 2011

Steve Case and His Companies (The Atlantic) -- Maybe you see three random ideas. Case and his team saw three bets that paid off thanks to a new Web economy that promotes power in numbers and access over ownership. "Access over ownership" is a phrase that resonated. (via Walt Mossberg) Back to the Future -- teaching kids to program...

Four short links: 10 November 2011

Steve Case and His Companies (The Atlantic) -- Maybe you see three random ideas. Case and his team saw three bets that paid off thanks to a new Web economy that promotes power in numbers and access over ownership. "Access over ownership" is a phrase that resonated. (via Walt Mossberg) Back to the Future -- teaching kids to program...

How I automated my writing career

You scale content businesses by increasing the number of people who create the content ... or so conventional wisdom says. Learn how a former author is using software to simulate and expand human-quality writing.

How I automated my writing career

You scale content businesses by increasing the number of people who create the content ... or so conventional wisdom says. Learn how a former author is using software to simulate and expand human-quality writing.

How I automated my writing career

You scale content businesses by increasing the number of people who create the content ... or so conventional wisdom says. Learn how a former author is using software to simulate and expand human-quality writing.

Four short links: 3 February 2011

Curveship -- a new interactive fiction system that can tell the same story in many different ways. Check out the examples on the home page. Important because interactive fiction and the command-lines of our lives are inextricably intertwined. Egypt's Revolution: Coming to an Economy Near You (Umair Haque) -- more dystopic prediction, but this phrase rings true: The lesson:...

Four short links: 9 September 2010

CloudUSB -- a USB key containing your operating environment and your data + a protected folder so nobody can access you data, even if you lost the key + a backup program which keeps a copy of your data on an online disk, with double password protection. (via ferrouswheel on Twitter) FCC APIs -- for spectrum licenses, consumer broadband...

Four short links: 7 September 2010

GalaxyZoo for Climate Science? -- GalaxyZoo is the crowdsourced physics research. A group of climate scientists want the same, to help predict "weather events". See also the Guardian article. (via adw_tweets on Twitter) Crispian's Science Map -- gorgeous Underground-style map showing scientists and their contributions. (via arjenlentz on Twitter) Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier (Ted Dziuba) --...

Four short links: 25 August 2010

Why Narrative and Structure are Important (Ed Yong) -- Ed looks at how Atul Gawande's piece on death and dying, which is 12,000 words long, is an easy and fascinating read despite the length. Understanding Science (Berkeley) -- simple teaching materials to help students understand the process of science. (via BoingBoing comments) Sax: Symbolic Aggregate approXimation -- SAX is...

Four short links: 29 June 2010

The Diary of Samuel Pepys -- a remarkable mashup of historical information and literature in modern technology to make the Pepys diaries an experience rather than an object. It includes historical weather, glosses, maps, even an encyclopedia. (prompted by Jon Udell) The Tonido Plug Server -- one of many such wall-wart sized appliances. This caught my eye: CodeLathe, the...

Four short links: 16 April 2010

Buckets and Vessels (Aaron Straup Cope) -- amazing collection of projects and the cultural shifts they illustrate. Michal Migurski's Walking Papers, software designed to round-trip paper and digital edits to Open Street Map, has recently been used by professors at the University of California’s Berkeley’s School of Information to enable “a sort of psychogeographical dispute resolution between high school...

Writing Beyond Tech: Ruin Mist Graphic Novels

A follow up to my previous posts about writing outside of technology. This one focuses on my upcoming graphic novels set in the fantasy universe of Ruin Mist as I thought it might be fun to share my experiences with...

Writing Beyond Tech: Doamanse and the Magic Lands

A follow up to my previous posts about writing outside of technology. This one focuses on my fantasy novels set in Doamanse, the Magic Lands, which you can learn more about at http://www.themagiclands.com/. If you thought the floating mountains in...

Writing Beyond Tech: Results Unexpected

Last year Microsoft published my 100th book; it was a huge milestone in my professional writing career. When you give yourself to the craft of writing and have spent your life helping others and helping the communities you've lived in,...

Pew Research asks questions about the Internet in 2020

Pew Research conducts a "future of the Internet" survey every few years in which they throw outrageously open-ended and provocative questions at a chosen collection of observers in the areas of technology and society.

Writing Technical Documentation with Sphinx, Paver, and Cog

An open source tool chain for producing technical articles.

Now Do As You've Been Told!

This article is about my new collection of Korg Nano devices - or it was going to be until my hard drive died.

A Creativity Interview with Novelist Dana Reinhardt

For the last year or two I've been interviewing artists about their creative process. A new interview went up this week, with young-adult novelist Dana Reinhardt, and I thought I'd post an abridged version here, including questions about her writing routine, how she pushes through when she isn't not feeling particularly inspired, and why she doesn't use notebooks to capture her thoughts. If you'd like to read a little more, you can find the full interview right here.