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February 19, 2021

The rise of the dash

Lauren Oyler’s “The Case for Semicolons” in the NY Times Magazine is an entertaining defense of a punctuation mark that has, alas, been losing steam.

But I was struck by her use of em dashes in the articles, for I am an enthusiast of semicolons who over-uses em dashes, as do many of us. Em dashes as grammatical marks are matched only by parentheses in the permissiveness of their use, so I do not find them as satisfying as a well-placed semicolon.

I’ve been informally watching dashes eclipse semicolons and parentheses for decades now, but rest assured that no data has been harmed in this pursuit. I’d love to know if the rise in the use of dashes  — if there has been any such thing  — coincides with the influence of the Web. Are they more widely used (if indeed they are) because the rules are more lax? Because we write on the Web more like we speak? Because we’re writing more complex sentences? More poorly structured sentences? Because of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

Understanding your medication is crucial for safe and effective treatment. klonopin, a benzodiazepine, is typically prescribed for anxiety and seizure disorders.

Key points about taking klonopin:

• Usually taken orally, with or without food

• Available in tablet or disintegrating wafer form

• Dosage varies based on individual needs and medical condition

• Often prescribed 2-3 times daily or as directed by your doctor

Remember: Never adjust your dose without consulting your healthcare provider. klonopin can be habit-forming, so follow your prescription carefully.

I expect to go the grave with this question unanswered.

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Categories: culture Tagged with: culture • grammar • language • web Date: February 19th, 2021 dw

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September 4, 2019

Two bloggers meet again

I met Brad Turcotte, who goes by the professional name Brad Sucks, back in the Age of the Blogosphere. He was, and is, an indie musician who embodies the spirit of the open Web. He’s also an awesome song writer, singer, producer, and one man band.

Weirdly, we have been friends since way back when – Why weirdly? Take a look at the photo – although we’ve only met in person twice, including today. Brad was in town, so we had a long beer and a longer conversation. What a pleasure. And, frankly, a privilege.

You should listen to his music because it’s good. You should support him at Patreon because that’s one of the services that actually helps artists. We should all be working to enable creative people like Brad to flourish; he’s what the Web was made for.

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Categories: culture, free culture Tagged with: free culture • music • open web • web Date: September 4th, 2019 dw

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November 26, 2014

Welcome to the open Net!

I wanted to play Tim Berners-Lee’s 1999 interview with Terry Gross on WHYY’s Fresh Air. Here’s how that experience went:

  • I find a link to it on a SlashDot discussion page.

  • The link goes to a text page that has links to Real Audio files encoded either for 28.8 or ISBN.

  • I download the ISBN version.

  • It’s a RAM (Real Audio) file that my Mac (Yosemite) cannot play.

  • I look for an updated version on the Fresh Air site. It has no way of searching, so I click through the archives to get to the Sept. 16, 1999 page.

  • It’s a 404 page-not-found page.

  • I search for a way to play an old RAM file.

  • The top hit takes me to Real Audio’s cloud service, which offers me 2 gigabytes of free storage. I decline.

  • I pause for ten silent seconds in amazement that the Real Audio company still exists. Plus it owns the domain “real.com.”

  • I download a copy of RealPlayerSP from CNET, thus probably also downloading a copy of MacKeeper. Thanks, CNET!

  • I open the Real Player converter and Apple tells me I don’t have permission because I didn’t buy it through Apple’s TSA clearance center. Thanks, Apple!

  • I do the control-click thang to open it anyway. It gives me a warning about unsupported file formats that I don’t understand.

  • Set System Preferences > Security so that I am allowed to open any software I want. Apple tells me I am degrading the security of my system by not giving Apple a cut of every software purchase. Thanks, Apple!

  • I drag in the RAM file. It has no visible effect.

  • I use the converter’s upload menu, but this converter produced by Real doesn’t recognize Real Audio files. Thanks, Real Audio!

  • I download and install the Real Audio Cloud app. When I open it, it immediately scours my disk looking for video files. I didn’t ask it to do that and I don’t know what it’s doing with that info. A quick check shows that it too can’t play a RAM file. I uninstall it as quickly as I can.

  • I download VLC, my favorite audio player. (It’s a new Mac and I’m still loading it with my preferred software.)

  • Apple lets me open it, but only after warning me that I shouldn’t trust it because it comes from [dum dum dum] The Internet. The scary scary Internet. Come to the warm, white plastic bosom of the App Store, it murmurs.

  • I drag the file in to VLC. It fails, but it does me the favor of tellling me why: It’s unable to connect to WHYY’s Real Audio server. Yup, this isn’t a media file, but a tiny file that sets up a connection between my computer and a server WHYY abandoned years ago. I should have remembered that that’s how Real worked. Actually, no, I shouldn’t have had to remember that. I’m just embarrassed that I did not. Also, I should have checked the size of the original Fresh Air file that I downloaded.

  • A search for “Time Berners-Lee Fresh Air 1999” immediately turns up an NPR page that says the audio is no longer available.

    It’s no longer available because in 1999 Real Audio solved a problem for media companies: install a RA server and it’ll handle the messy details of sending audio to RA players across the Net. It seemed like a reasonable approach. But it was proprietary and so it failed, taking Fresh Air’s archives with it. Could and should have Fresh Air converted its files before it pulled the plug on the Real Audio server? Yeah, probably, but who knows what the contractual and technical situation was.

    By not following the example set by Tim Berners-Lee — open protocols, open standards, open hearts — this bit of history has been lost. In this case, it was an interview about TBL’s invention, thus confirming that irony remains the strongest force in the universe.

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    Categories: future, net neutrality, open access Tagged with: future • interoperability • open • platforms • protocols • web Date: November 26th, 2014 dw

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  • August 9, 2014

    Tim Berners-Lee’s amazingly astute 1992 article on this crazy Web thing he started

    Dan Brickley points to this incredibly prescient article by Tim Berners-Lee from 1992. The World Wide Web he gets the bulk of the credit for inventing was thriving at CERN where he worked. Scientists were linking to one another’s articles without making anyone type in a squirrely Internet address. Why, over a thousand articles were hyperlinked.

    And on this slim basis, Tim outlines the fundamental challenges we’re now living through. Much of the world has yet to catch up with insights he derived from the slightest of experience.

    May the rest of us have even a sliver of his genius and a heaping plateful of his generosity.

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    Categories: free culture, infohistory, internet, net neutrality Tagged with: history • web Date: August 9th, 2014 dw

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    March 15, 2014

    It’s the 25th anniversary of the Web, not the Internet. It’s important to remember the difference.

    I just posted at Medium.com about why it’s important to remember the difference between the Net and the Web. Here’s the beginning:

    A note to NPR and other media that have been reporting on “the 25th anniversary of the Internet”: NO, IT’S NOT. It’s the 25th anniversary of the Web. The Internet is way older than that. And the difference matters.

    The Internet is a set of protocols?—?agreements?—?about how information will be sliced up, sent over whatever media the inter-networked networks use, and reassembled when it gets there. The World Wide Web uses the Internet to move information around. The Internet by itself doesn’t know or care about Web pages, browsers, or the hyperlinks we’ve come to love. Rather, the Internet enables things like the World Wide Web, email, Skype, and much much more to be specified and made real. By analogy, the Internet is like an operating system, and the Web, Skype, and email are like applications that run on top of it.

    This is not a technical quibble. The difference between the Internet and the Web matters more than ever for at least two reasons.

    Continued at Medium.com…

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    Categories: net neutrality, policy Tagged with: internet • web Date: March 15th, 2014 dw

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    May 1, 2011

    A big question

    Why did the world shatter at the touch of a hyperlink?

    Newspapers, encyclopedias, record companies, telephones, politics, education, analytics, scientifics, genetics, libraries, mass media, high culture, television, classrooms, assholism, channels, columns, stations, tours, travel, marketing, picketing, knitting, hectoring, picturing, gossiping, friendship redefined, attention redefined, leadership redefined, defamation redefined, curating, editing, publishing, correcting, crowds, mobs, shopping, bar-hopping, catalogs, sing-alongs, fact-checking, being together, being apart, staying together, moving on. Social forms and major institutions, many set in the Earth on stone foundations, fell down at the flick of a hyperlink.

    How could that have happened?

    Every discipline has its answer: economics, business, media, anthropology, sociology, religion, linguistics. You name it, and they have a theory. Of course they do because the collapse of institutions is a big deal, so the biggest deal frameworks have to provide some hypothesis.

    We need all those explanations, and we need them all at once. All I’d add is that part of the explanation is that we knew all along that atoms were never up to the job. We knew that the world doesn’t boil down to even the best of newspapers, that it doesn’t fit into 65,000 articles in a printed encyclopedia, that there was more disagreement than the old channels let through. (What they called noise, we called the the world.) We knew that the crap pushed through the radio wasn’t really all that we cared about, or that we all cared about the same things within three tv channels of difference. The old institutions were the best fictions we could come up with given that atoms are way too big.

    The old institutions were more fragile than we let ourselves believe. They were fragile because they made the world small. A bigger truth burst them. The world is more like a messy, inconsistent, ever-changing web than like a curated set of careful writings. Truth burst the world made of atoms.

    Yes, there is infinite space on the Web for lies. Nevertheless, the Web’s architecture is a better reflection of our human architecture. We embraced as if it were always true, and as if we had known it all along, because it is and we did.

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    Categories: culture Tagged with: web Date: May 1st, 2011 dw

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    January 29, 2008

    Course begins

    I’m too nervous to be able to blog about the course I’m co-teaching with John Palfrey, beyond saying that we had our first session yesterday, and there’s a course blog open to the students as posters and to anyone as a reader. (We didn’t have time yesterday to tell the students the URL, so none have posted there yet.) Well, I will say a couple more things: The title of the course is “The Web Difference,” and it’s about whether and how the Web is different, and what that means for law and policy. Also, JP is an awesome teacher. OMG.

    What the heck. Yesterday, after going through preliminaries and intros, JP led the class for half an hour in a discussion of a case in which awful things were said on a discussion board, yet the discussion board owner was not held liable. If those things had been said in a newspaper, the paper could have been sued. What’s the difference in the two situations and why might the law be different in them? I led a similarly-themed discussion, far more awkwardly, about whether friendship on the Web is “real” and how it differs from real world friendship. [Tags: web john_palfrey webdiff harvard ]

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    Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: education • harvard • philosophy • policy • web • webdiff Date: January 29th, 2008 dw

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    October 11, 2007

    Explain cookies, win $5,000

    Berkman and StopBadware.org, sponsored by Google, are having a contest. Create a YouTube that explains cookies and win yourself $5,000. And before you waste your time getting out the flour and the cookie cutters, be sure to read the rules. [Tags: cookies videos contests youtubes berkman stopbadware.org ]

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    Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: digital rights • web Date: October 11th, 2007 dw

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    September 17, 2007

    Asks Jimmy Wales a question

    As part of One Web Day Matthew Burton is holding an Ask-Jimmy-Wales-a-Question event. To participate, go here. The event will be live in NYC on Saturday. If you’re in town, here’s the info. [Tags: onewebday ]

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    Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: web Date: September 17th, 2007 dw

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    One Web Day at the Berkman Center

    On Tuesday at 12:30, the Berkman Center wil celebrate One Web Day [video | rocketboom] by devoting its weekly lunch discussion to The Net in Ten. Four Fellows will each give a five minute presentation on the future of the Net, and then there will be open discussion. You can sign up for the lunch here. [Tags: onewebday future ]

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    Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: digital rights • web Date: September 17th, 2007 dw

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