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Feb 04 2012
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Technology and Web

Typographical Fixity

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Words in stone and on the wind

Nicholas Carr argues that the “advantage” (yes, those are air quotes) of the physically printed word vs the digital is that it has typographical fixity.

At the simplest and most fundamental level, typographical fixity means that when you have a page printed in ink, you’re able to trust that the page will maintain its integrity; when you pick it up tomorrow, or twenty years from now, its contents will be the same as what you see today. The printing press didn’t create this type of fixity – it was there with the scribal book, the scroll, and certainly the stone tablet – but it did extend it into the modern age.

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Sep 04 2011
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Technology and Web

Why RSS is Bad For You

Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

I agree with most of what Marco pointed out over at his blog where I originally found the Ars Technica article. It’s really easy to lose yourself with the unread count. You want to give every feed you subscribe to the attention they deserve. But you have to start getting into the habit of not feeling bad about marking all as read. Everything in excess can turn into a problem as Charlie Sheen would say. But I also believe that RSS solves more problems than the ones it creates. Mainly it solves the one problem of not having to visit the sites directly everyday to check if there’s something new.

For me there’s really no general rule on how to use RSS effectively and what it should and not be used for. It’s up to the individual to see if it works for them or if it’s just a huge time sink that makes them forget to pay the bills on time.

(Via Marco.org)

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Feb 08 2011
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Books, postaday2011

Reading in the Brain – Review [29]

I started reading this book on December 29 and finished it yesterday, February 7. That’s according to the ReadMore app, an app I’ve been using to track my reading. It took me 11.5 hours over 41 days and 16 reading sessions, with an average reading time of 44 minutes per session. The app does all this computation for you. What I’m learning about all this self-tracking is that I’m way slow with my reading. More than I liked to. On Goodreads I challenged myself to read 25 books this year but at that rate I’ll get around 10 books. But having this data lets me see what I need to do.

Lets get to the book.

Reading in the Brain is by the author and cognitive psychologist Stanislas Dehaene. I read his previous book, The Number Sense, and like that book, this one is a bit heavy on brain research and brain mapping. But once you get past the heavy region name dropping like the occipito lobe and the temporal lobe, you’ll see that this is a wonderful book about the amazing ability we humans are lucky to have: reading.

One the main thesis of the book is that it’s a “miracle” we can read. Dehaene postulates his theory of neuronal recycling of how the brain region we use today for reading was probably used for something different. In the short period of 2000 years or so since the invention of reading and writing, our brains have recycled and fine tuned neurons to recognize symbols as signifying speech sounds and meaning.

Dehaene takes you on a journey on how it all works. From how the eyes see words to were they go in your brain to be processed. He gives a brief history of writing. A big part of the book deals with dyslexia and “mirroring” errors when reading. This is important to understand reading in the brain because it reveals a great deal on what’s happening, particularly before we become fluent readers. One of Dehaene theories is that if it wasn’t for the brains’ plasticity, we would all be mild dyslexics and make mirror errors (confusing b with d) more frequently.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves reading and to parents and teachers.

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Jan 15 2011
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postaday2011, Writing

10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books [15]

10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books – Tim Carmody – Technology – The Atlantic

Tim Carmody on the many shifts literacy has gone through before and after the printing press.

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Jan 07 2011
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postaday2011

Tips for Reading Everyday [7]

Here’s a short list of the things that have helped me in increasing my reading habit. Some are obvious. Others are just psychological tricks. Hope this helps.

  • Find the time. Plan in advance a block of uninterrupted time for reading. And not just for books, but for articles and even blog posts.
  • Study the table of contents.
  • Don’t rush it.
  • Don’t read in bed with the tv on. [1]
  • Watch less television.
  • Use Goodreads. Goodreads has helped tremendously in motivation. You can track your reading progress, review, rate, organize, and follow other people.
  • Use Readmore. Readmore is a nice iPhone app that”s for tracking your reading. Unlike Goodreads, this app gives you time completion estimates every time you complete a reading session.

1. I was going to mention listening to music, but many people can do this and I feel weird because I can’t. At least not if I’m going to read something like Infinite Jest. The reason is that I subconsciously pay attention to music. To me there’s no such thing as ambient music. There’s only the natural silence of nature, then field recording, then avant garde, then Brian Eno, and then there’s music.

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Jan 06 2011
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Books, postaday2011, Writing

Reading to Write and Stimulating Your Letterbox [6]

I’m currently reading the book Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. I’m about one third through it. The book’s second chapter is devoted to a brain area that the author and other researchers call the Letterbox, or the left occipito temporal region if you want to get more technical. Most of the objects that appear on our visual field go to another area of the brain that does a good job of recognizing the stuff around us. But words and letters go to the Letterbox. This area knows that these are not just some squiggly lines and dots on a white page. It knows that they have a sound, and that that sound carries a meaning. Suffice to say that the book is very interesting and shows how amazing it is that we humans can read.

But the reason I’m bringing up this Letterbox concept is the importance of reading, specially for people that want to write everyday or every week. Reading is like food for a writer and just like food, you have to be careful with what you eat. You shouldn’t eat too much junk food and you should have a balanced diet. I’m giving this advice as much to myself as to anyone reading out there. I surely could read more fiction. I’m a non-fiction junkie.

Reading everyday also helps with the concern most people are having about writing every day. (Check out the comments in this Mashable post that talks about the Post a Day/Week WordPress project) On a day to day basis our lives are pretty banal and trivial. Even celebrities have “talking about the weather” days. It’s true. Everything is not inherently interesting in life, but we can make anything interesting if we try. The different voices, stories, emotions, colors, perspectives, characters, genres, worlds, and even smells that you get from reading are surely going to stimulate your Letterbox.

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Dec 15 2010
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Technology and Web

The Kids are Not Allright

Is it Just Us, Or are Kids Getting Really Stupid?

The world of Idiocracy is closer than you imagine.

We live in interesting times. In the past decade, the number of college grads who can interpret a food label has fallen from 40 percent to 30 percent. An American child is six times more likely to know who won American Idol than the name of the Speaker of the House. Reading and writing scores both fell on the 2008 SATs. Not long ago, a high-school teacher in California handed out an assignment that required students to use a ruler — and discovered not a single one of them knew how.

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Nov 09 2010
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Technology and Web

The Undesigned Web

The Undesigned Web – Dylan Tweney – Technology – The Atlantic

How web design is in a “third wave” of design were the user has much more control of how things look, with tools like Instapaper and Readability leading the way.

Design reigned supreme in the 20th century, when it was an integral part of the way artists, publishers, governments and political parties communicated to the first mass audiences.

Message and presentation were inextricably intertwined, with the latter lending power, impact and even meaning to the former. Not for nothing was Marshall McLuhan able to say, with gnomic brevity but not a little insight, “the medium is the message.”

(via @timcarmody)

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Oct 07 2010
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Technology and Web

You Had me at Tilt Scrolling

IMG_0127.PNGI have been a slow convert to Instapaper. My “read later” tools before the conversion have been a combination of starring RSS feeds on Google Reader and bookmarking on Delicious. And I still do these things, but for the true purpose of reading later, particularly long form content, there’s no better tool than Instapaper.

As I mentioned, it has been a slow process. I created an account on the web page like a year ago. I think I used it for a couple of days. That was before owning an iPhone. After I got the iPhone I downloaded the free app version. Same thing. Used it for a while sporadically, but it didn’t stick. But at one point I said, all right, let’s check out the paid version. This might sound silly, but the thing that did for me was tilt scrolling.

I’m not saying that tilt scrolling is what makes the app amazing, it does, but it’s what made me realize that this is for reading. It’s not for aggregating to the hive, worrying about correct tags and whatnots. It’s not about “liking” things and marking as favorite. As soon as I started saving to read later those long New Yorker articles, and finding myself truly immersed and focused while reading, that’s when it all clicked. I’m surprised at how fast I’m reading what at first seems like intimidating TLDR articles.

And while Instapaper doesn’t have a “social” aspect to it, you can subscribe to someones favorite folder. (Mine’s JayCruz if you’re so inclined.)

If you love reading articles, but find it a hassle and a distraction trying to read them on their sites, I’m sure you’ll love Instapaper.

*I’m aware that there’s also Read it Later, but I’ve never used it.

Other great stuff on Instapaper

Instapaper. Reinventing Long Form Reading

Taking Time to Read on the Web: Instapaper Gets Ready for the Big Show

Instapaper is a Mac Gem

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Sep 20 2010
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Technology and Web

Question for Instapaper Users and iPhone Owners

While listening to the latest podcast of The Talk Show I think it was John Gruber who mentioned that he saves more stuff from the iPhone to read later on the Instapaper web app, than the other way around. I find this curious because I’ve been doing it the other way most of the time, which is saving stuff from the web to read later on the iPhone. The times I do go to the web app, is to go through my “Watch Later” folder. Of course, if I had an iPad or a Kindle, there’s no doubt I’ll prefer using those to read long form content. But I find it way more easy and read faster on the iPhone. Tilt scrolling is a beautiful thing.

Which do you do most? Save from the iPhone to read later on the web? Or save from the web to read later on the iPhone?

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