mbf tod@y

Magazines 2.0

"When I was a kid, getting a new magazine in the mail was a great experience. I’d come home from school and there it would be, waiting for me to read. The Internet has changed that. I hardly ever have time to read magazines anymore, I simply spend too much time sitting in front of the computer reading the 21st century equivalent to magazines (and newspapers), blogs. Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Barnes & Noble, is attempting to bring the magazine back — in the digital world. BN.com (Barnes & Noble’s website) has teamed up with electronic publisher Zinio to sell subscriptions for more than 1,000 magazine titles. Subscriptions will be available both in digital and regular formats at prices up to ninety percent off the newsstand price. The digital version will be available to start reading just minutes after purchase." (MG Siegle, Venture Beat)

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The Cinematic Map of San Francisco

"Hundreds of movies have been filmed in San Francisco over the decades. The map below shows just a few of the major ones; in the coming weeks we'll be adding more." (Map mashup by Justin Beck, Matt Petty and the Datebook staff, The  San Francisco Chronicle)

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DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound!

"[My new] book is called Sound Unbound and it's a manifesto about sound art, digital media, and what I like to call contemporary composition. It has essays and interviews from people as diverse as Brian Eno, Pierre Boulez, Moby, Chuck D, Saul Williams, Jaron Lanier, Pauline Oliveros, Naeem Mohaiemen, and others. The audio companion to the book has super rare material from Sub Rosa Records, one of my favorite indie labels. I got rare material from Allen Ginsberg, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Iggy Pop, Jean Cocteau, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and lots other others. I guess you can think of the book as a kind of literary mashup." (DJ Spooky)

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MixTape 2.0

"Music compilations are more popular than ever, in part because of the ease of getting the songs you want to the people you care about. On your own or with sites such as Muxtape.com, you can click a mouse 20 or 30 times and create and share your audio files with whomever you want. But as the process gets easier, the gesture becomes emptier as well. Music compilations forwarded by e-mail are only slightly less personal than that Hillary Clinton joke you forwarded to 50 friends. ("Gee, thanks. You spent three minutes on me.") By the sheer effort that went into each one, every cassette mix tape was a big declaration - of love, friendship or even anger. A mix tape was an event." (Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle)

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Steven Poole's Fugitive Pieces

"When I write a blog post, the timescale is minutes or hours. Coffee goes into my mouth and is transmuted into excessive typing speed in my fingers. I make a couple of revisions, but since there is no constraint on length I don’t cut as much while revising. No one else sees it until I smack the “publish” button and start obsessively checking my traffic. If I’ve made any really embarrassing mistake, someone will point it out, with more or less hostility or sarcasm, in comments, and if I like I can update the original post with a revision, leaving the error in strikethrough, so that all future readers will instantly see the correction. To me, the point of a blog post is not to try to nail something perfectly, but to provoke an interesting discussion. It’s shooting from the hip." (Steven Poole)

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WetellStories: Mason+Felton

Matt Mason and Nicholas Felton's Hard Times. Impressive stuff.

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Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami

"For most of us who are not prominent bloggers, our inbox, thankfully, will never become quite so crowded, at least with nonspam messages. But it doesn’t take all that many to seem overwhelming — for me, the sight of two dozen messages awaiting individual responses makes me perspire. Eventually, someone will come up with software that greatly eases the burden of managing a high volume of e-mail. But in the meantime, we perhaps should look to the past and see what tips we might draw from prolific letter writers in the pre-electronic era who handled ridiculously large volumes of correspondence without being crushed." (Randall Stross, The New York Times)

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Italy Lags Behind Other EU countries in Internet Connectivity and Use

"In 2007, the Internet attracted nearly 40 million new regular users in the EU (now 250 million in total). In the last five years, ICT has had a big impact on public services, especially by bringing education and health online: more than 96% of European schools are now connected to the Internet; two thirds of them to broadband, up from almost zero in 2001. In the health sector, 57% of doctors now send or receive patients' data (17% in 2002) and 46% of them receiving results from laboratories electronically (11% in 2002). 77% of EU businesses had a broadband connection in 2007 (62% in 2005) and 77% use the Internet for dealing with banks (70% in 2005)." (i2020 Europa)

Italy, however, is one the least connected countries in the European Union. Take a look at the country profile document (PDF - Italy is on pp 31-32): "Italy presents a mixed picture on information society developments. Italy is amongst the leading countries in terms of quality and availability of e-Government services but still below EU average for fixed connectivity, digital skills of the population and use of Internet by households."  (i2020 Europa)

Read the press release

Read the complete report

"Più della metà della popolazione in Europa dispone di una connessione Internet e la usa regolarmente, ossia 250 milioni di europei - 40 milioni in più rispetto all'anno precedente - navigano con maturità sul Web. L'80% degli utenti europei ha una connessione a banda larga e il 60% dei servizi pubblici nella Ue è integralmente disponibile in Rete. Grazie alla rapida diffusione della banda larga in Europa, i due terzi delle scuole e la metà dei medici usano connessioni veloci. Sono queste le cifre presentate dalla Commissione in una relazione sui risultati ottenuti finora con l'iniziativa i2010 (a questo indirizzo trovate tutta la relazione con molte slide interessanti), che costituisce la strategia digitale dell'UE per la crescita e l'occupazione. E fin qui va tutto bene, anzi, ottimamente. Una nota dolorosa c'è però quando si parla dell'Italia: con il solo 34% di utenti regolari sul 100% della popolazione, il nostro Paese si colloca al quartultimo posto tra gli europei, davanti soltanto a Grecia, Bulgaria e Romania. Buona la diffusione di Internet nelle scuole, con il 79% degli istituti collegati (appena al di sopra della media Ue), mentre sul lato imprese la situazione è drammatica: solo il 43% è connesso contro il 77% medio nell'Unione." (Federico Cella, Corriere della Sera)

Leggi

Silence is Golden

"Taking a cue from France's national railway, which offers phone-free "zen zones" on high-speed trains, Austria's second-largest city this week began ordering public transit commuters to keep their phones on silent mode. The crackdown in the southern city of Graz has triggered a noisy debate between advocates of free speech and people who say they're simply fed up with having to listen to annoying ring tones and intrusive cell phone chatter. "I know I insulted the cell phone goddess a little," Graz Mayor Siegfried Nagl said. "But people need to know they don't have the right to be on the telephone permanently and constantly," he told Austrian television. "It's just not healthy to never be able to get any peace and quiet." (AP)

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ToShare 2008: video streams

All the conferences and panels of the fourth edition of Share Festival can be seen here. Among the participants: Bruce Sterling, Donald Norman, Stefano Boeri, Julian Bleecker, Montse Arbelo and Joseba Franco, Kees de Groot and Viola van Alphen, Gianni Corino, Motor, Anne Nigten, Luigi Pagliarini, Franco Torriani, PierLuigi Capucci, Pietro Terna, Owen Holland, Roberto Giolito, Massimo Banzi, TODO, Luca De Biase, Gino Bistagnino, Janez Jansa, Paolo Cirio, Antonio Caronia, Luis Bec, Nicole C. Karafyllis, Marcos Novak.

See'em here