A Country Without Libraries

How many book lovers among the young has the Internet produced? Far fewer, I suspect, than the millions libraries have turned out over the last hundred years. Their slow disappearance is a tragedy, not just for those impoverished towns and cities, but for everyone everywhere terrified at the thought of a country without libraries.

Japanese invent a box that can simulate a kiss over the Internet

The kissing device responds directly to a person’s tongue. On one end, a person rotates the “straw” in one direction and the “straw” on the other end will rotate in the same direction. The result is a powerful tactile response that feels like you’re giving or receiving a kiss.

Disconnectedness by Jennifer Ilett

Tech Support Care Package

Every December, millions of tech-savvy young people descend on their homes only to arrive to a long list of tech support issues that their parents need help with. A few of us at Google thought there had to be a better way that would save us all a few hours each December…

The result of our brainstorm was TeachParentsTech.org, a site that allows you to select any number of simple tech support videos to send to mom, dad or uncle Vinnie. The site is not perfect and hardly covers all the tech support questions you may be asked, but hopefully it’s a start!

I need an Italian version of this.

"Men standing in opposite hemispheres will converse and deride each other and embrace each other, and understand each other’s language."

Leonardo da Vinci predicting the Internet Tumblr in the 15th century

Online Predators by Asaf Hanuka

[About the danger of sexual predators using the Internet as a mask while hunting for victims.]

bjornstar:

You know what really bothers me about this? It’s that tumblr users are now treated like second class internet citizens. Like these big corporate websites are the “real” content creators. We users used to be #1 on Tumblr and that’s why it has grown so much. This was a place we could simply share what we like and find other people who were interested in the same things. This new source attribute is just making things more complicated and less usable.

If I see something nice on a website, I will reblog it and I will link to the original site so that people can go and see more things like it. This in no way implies that I want to slap some giant corporation’s logo on my site.

I wanted to reblog this image, but I won’t because I don’t want to promote the New York Times. I would much rather direct my friends to ummhello’s site because that’s where I saw this image and there’s a lot of great content there.

And that’s what bothers me, that I don’t have a choice in the matter. Tumblr has decided that my dashboard and my site would be much better with corporate logos splashed all over them. So now I’m left with a decision. Do I stop using Tumblr because I don’t want to see corporate logos running up and down my dashboard? Or do I make yet another extension to hide all this extra crap they keep piling on?

For now, I think I’ll just make another extension. It’s easy enough to fix their dashboard for them. Stay tuned.

(via cream-and-stars)

Riders on the Storm →

[Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal.]

Guilty.

José Saramago, Litblogger

[If a brilliant and prominent novelist — a Nobel laureate, say — were to record his thoughts and observations in a blog, might it amount to literature?

The question is prompted by the arrival of José Saramago’s latest effort, “The Notebook,” which collects a series of blog posts that Saramago, the Portuguese Nobelist, wrote from September 2008 to August 2009 at the urging of his wife and friends.]

[Photo by Vives-Rubio]

What makes a successful online date photo? by David McCandless

Seriously, ladies? Muscles and animals?

"I didn’t know that there are so many idiots, until I began using Internet."

Stanisław Lem (1921-2006)

Untitled by Alessandro Gatto