Even if a monk was a big reader, it seems like a job as a medieval monastic might have been a trade-off: These guys probably had a fairly decent standard of living (despite the chastity vow), and they certainly had a chance to read every scroll in the library. However, the work was mentally taxing, as indicated by these notes added to the margins of transcribed material. Probably better to be a royal blacksmith.

"Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach, and your sides."

"St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing."

"While I wrote I froze: and what I could not write by the beams of day I finished by candlelight."

"As the sick man desireth health even so doth the transcriber desire the end of his volume."

"Now I've written the whole thing; for Christ's sake give me a drink."

This colophonic compilation was featured in the best book I have read recently: Evolution of the Book, by Frederick Kilgour.

Art/Mo/Sphere, the iSchool Tangible User Interface final project of Ashley Kayler, Laura Paajanen and myself, was accepted to the Maker Faire this year! Since the original Art/Mo/Sphere is a little run down, we are going to rebuild it, and release it as Art/Mo/Sphere 2.0. Like the second Death Star, this time our Virtual Bubbles will be fully operational. ;-)

What is Twitter really good for? After the latest wave of media-fueled adoption, will we have some lasting, essential and unique implementations of Twitter feeds? Really, what can Twitter do that other communications systems can't?

One absolute slam dunk use of Twitter is for businesses that feature a daily specialty to communicate their flavor of the day via tweet. A prime example is, of course, woot.com's 250,000+ follower Twitter feed. Woot.com sells only one item each day, everyday, and following the service through woot seems to be an efficient method to keep up with the daily offer. Berkeley's Cheeseboard collective offers a single type of Pizza each day, and iSchool alum Kevin Lim has created a robotic Twitter feed that scrapes the collective's website and posts the results to Twitter. Why doesn't Cheeseboard take the time to provide its own tweets? Another potential business that could benefit from Twitter is Berkeley's own Yogurt Park. In seconds, using a cell phone, Yogurt Park could tweet its ever-changing list of yogurt flavors to Twitter. Not only would customers be happy to know what options are available to them, but simply being reminded each day, everyday, that the service exists would be great advertising for a small business.

Article 33 of the Magna Carta states, "All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast." Before I write anymore about that, let me tell you about something else.

About 1,000 years ago, English fishermen, or perhaps a disruptive technologist who was not a fisherman, figured out a way to catch fish that probably beat out every other way. It works like this: You make an artificial reef in a V shape out of rocks, with the point of the V facing toward the direction that the tide flows out. The reef is about as high as the surface of the water during low tide. At the point of the V, you make a little gap so that some water can escape. When the tide comes in, fish hang out around the reef, and well... they hang out. But when the tide rolls out, the fish get caught in the V. They try to squeeze through the gap to escape, but you can stick a net there. If you make the gap really small, the fish all get stuck near the exit point and you can just scoop them up with a bucket as they crowd around.

These V things were called fish-weirs, and they were so good at trapping fish, that the local fish populations started to drop. Thus, the English Barons who drafted the Magna Carta decided to ban them from everywhere, except ones in the Ocean.

I grew up in the United States, and the only thing we ever learn about the Magna Carta is that it was a document that limited the power of the English King, eventually paving the way for English Common Law, and other familiar non-Monarchal things. They never told us that the Barons who wrote the thing also wanted to ban fish traps, or that there "shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russett, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges." Anyway, the whole point of this post was to mention that someone found an ancient fish trap by using Google Earth.

The UC I School's Hyunwoo Park has just launched a cool, easy to use prediction market system called "Stoqle." Stoqle's motto is "We may not be as good as investment gurus. But, we can beat mediocre wall street analysts." After playing with several predicition market applications, most recently CNN's Political Market, I think that a unique feature of Park's system is that it is simple and instantaneous, with little concern about authentication. One of the barriers to entries of most prediction markets is that they seem to be regulated as carefully as regular stock markets. Can Park's system be used for more ephemeral market predicition, say for quick polls about which movies will be the most popular this weekend? Perhaps we can do a study to see if Park's system can predict future events as accurately as more tightly regulated predicition markets.

"Hark! A Vagrant" is... well, it's mostly the historically-flavored rambling sketches of Katie Moira, a Canadian eh?

Paul Graham, co-founder of VC firm Y-Combinator (funders of the iSchool spinoff PopCuts) recently wrote, "after decades of running an IV drip right into their audience, people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive. They thought they'd be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another."

Ok, so he's right - it's obvious that Internet technology provides added improvements to the television experience. It's easier for users to find the content they really want, anytime they want. There's more choice online, and much of it is free.

I agree that viewers enjoy interacting around broadcast media - but how are they interacting? I wonder how much of the interaction comes from users sending each other messages about what they watched. I think online social networks provide a forum for users to talk about what they like, and computer technologies mediate that communication well. However, I think that users who interact this way are mostly using the networks as a kind of "recommendation system." Basically, if there is a good program on old-school television or radio, users will suggest to others to watch it directly, or recommend things passively using "weak tie" networks like Twitter. Thus, I feel that it's not the social networking technology that is changing the broadcast game directly, but rather, it's simply exposing the lack of creativity and intelligence that has plagued network media for so many years.

It's an interesting, not groundbreaking article. Choice quote: "Now would be a good time to start any company that competes with TV networks."

Where are the Flirtations in this video for the soul music gem "Nothing But A Heartache?" It's called Tintern Abbey, in Wales. The abbey was abandoned in the 1500's. Lord Tennyson, Wordsworth, and I bet many other poets were inspired to write solemn odes to ancient, lost love.

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

- Lord Tennyson

What's a codex? Well, find a book. Pick it up. You are holding a codex. "Codex" describes the style of book that we are most accustomed to in the modern world - one with separate bound pages surrounded by a cover.

I just started reading The Evolution of the Book, by the late Frederick Kilgour. Kilgour was an American rock star librarian who was interested in computerizing book catalogues to aid information access. The Evolution of the Book includes a timeline of book formats. Kilgour mentioned that the papyrus scroll was around for about 2100 years before the codex was invented. Apparently, as the codex increased in popularity over time (over a loooong period of time), not all works on papyrus scroll were copied over to the new book format, and many volumes of... who knows? where lost.

Kilgour calls the invention of the Electronic Book the "Seventh Punctuation" of book technology. So, while we begin the transition to electronic book formats, let's make sure that we copy over all the information in the codices this time.

Wikipedia says: "Concrete TV, is a public access show in New York City aired on Channel 67 (public access), combining violence, sex, pornography, new video, old video in a video collage art form set to music." It's great.