I’m fiddling with the blog again. I’ve added a new feature: links from my Furl archive. (And when I added them, it screwed up my header and I wish I could fix it…)
You all know about Furl, right? I’ve been using it for years as a place in the ether to store articles of interest. It is really useful for blogging, but I find that I archive way more articles than I can ever blog about. Still, some of the items are worth sharing even without commentary.

I’ll archive as usual, and will hold on to stories for a few days to see if I have the time or inclination to write about them; if not, I’ll add them to the sidebar (scroll down to the bottom the right sidebar; there are three items there right now).

[updated to clarify the source of the quote below]

Reason’s Jesse Walker joins the Set Books Free (TM) club by calling for libraries to open their stacks.

And he also links to a fine defense of the web as “the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture,” by Steven Johnson, who happens to have written one of my favorite books of the last 30 years, the daring Everything Bad Is Good for You, which I wrote about here and which I’ve been meaning to write more about…except blogging leads you places you never thought you’d go…and there are only 24 hours in every day…and so so many things to fit in…

Inexplicably, I haven’t come upon Johnson’s blog until now. (Never too late to add him to my blogroll, and I will definitely be delving into the archives.) In one of his posts today, Johnson responds to a letter in the New York Times Magazine that was written in response to Kevin Kelly’s “What Will Happen to Books?” (which I wrote about here and here and here and here and here).***

Look, there’s a legitimate objection to Kelly’s vision if it means that people simply stop reading books in a linear fashion and start exclusively reading remixed, annotated snippets, primarily because there are limits to the complexity of the ideas and experiences that one can convey in a snippet. But Kevin is enough of a student of technology and media to know that the old forms and conventions rarely end up getting eliminated by the new: we’re still listening to the radio and watching movies despite the rise of television, still watching television despite the rise of the web, and still reading books despite all the media innovations of the twentieth century. What Kelly is saying — I think — is not that people will stop reading three-hundred page books from start to finish, but that they’ll be able to augment that reading experience with all sorts of powerful new connnections and commentaries and, yes, “encounters.”

Which is what Jeff Jarvis has been saying too.

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***I haven’t had time to read that letter to the Times, because I’ve been away in rural America, where I like to go to unwind but where I am mostly unplugged. Not necessarily by choice. The area is so ill-served by the telecommunications industry that I have only dial-up. There is only one telephone provider. There is only one utility that provides electricity (a co-op). There is no cable service. And no access to ABC, CBS, or NBC via satellite (Dish Network). And very spotty cell phone service (Verizon only). And it’s a 10-mile drive to buy the dead-tree (national newspaper, my foot!) New York Times (if I get up at the crack of dawn and manage to snatch one of the three copies). This pastoral paradise (it is that, really) is 150 miles from New York City.
Back to more regular blogging in a couple of days.