What was first, the genre or the medium? Role playing games (the computer variety) are quite old, but Super Columbine Massacre RPG cast them in a different light, both as games and as medium. Looking around I found the following tools for creating electronic stories with relative ease.
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Tools for electronic storytelling
by hectorcuevas on July 10, 2011 in Electronic publishing, List of, Software
Google shows Bing Toolbar rules Search
by hectorcuevas on February 2, 2011 in Internet
This is pathetic: not only Google has to resort to unpaid spokespersons to transmit their message, they spend their time proving the Bing Toolbar works better than expected.
Bing doesn’t care what spam-riddled page links to what attention-starved web magazine -it cares about your journey on your own personal web. And indexes that to provide better search results.
So why the fuss? Google’s mad because Bing indexed them as if they were any other site in the web.
The problems of monetizing with online advertising
by hectorcuevas on July 19, 2010 in Usability and Design
Ads are a common way to monetize a website, but there are some fundamental problems with this approach, especially if you rely on search engines to send people to your site only to have them whisked to another, via a contextually published ad.
If people aren’t meant to stay on your site, why should they arrive in the first place?
Pitfalls awaiting Diaspora
by hectorcuevas on May 30, 2010 in Usability and Design
These are some of the pitfalls awaiting Facebook contenders:
Technology:
Don’t think it’s all about technology. In the Internet, it’s not really about technology, even if it’s something fancy like real-time communication with your friends.
Patents. These days it’s hard to tell the difference between technology and patents. Feel free to say I put them in the wrong category, but ignore them at your own peril.
Diaspora, Facebook, and closed societies
by hectorcuevas on May 29, 2010 in Social networking
Everyone wants to kill Facebook for privacy exposure (again). But this time it seems the problem has reached the mainstream, complete with a Time cover. The Diaspora project got lots of publicity from this, but I’m afraid they won’t fare much better than the others (don’t feel bad if you didn’t know there were others).
Open source contenders should avoid thinking Facebook is just a piece of software (or that just having a working piece of software is enough); they should also refudiate the myth of the “global village”.
“Anathem” tries half-heartedly too hard
by hectorcuevas on April 8, 2010 in Books
“Anathem” is a 2008 science-fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. You can read the hype and find a link to read the first 160-or-so pages of the book at http://www.nealstephenson.com/anathem/. This post is based on reading those pages and additional material around the book (interviews with Stephenson and the like).
While reviewing a less than half-read book is risky business, I think it’s warranted for two reasons: I actually pulled myself to read that much, so I have to make something for it, and I can’t help thinking the people who praise it so much do it because they haven’t read a good book (look for my list at the end).
Anathem’s only success is to confirm spectacularly xkcd’s Fiction Rule of Thumb: The probability a book is good approaches zero as the number of words made up by the author increases.
Review of the Belkin Flip KVM Switch with audio support (USB)
by hectorcuevas on January 15, 2010 in Hardware
Review of the Belkin Flip USB KVM Switch from an owner. KVM switches are a hardware solution allowing you to share a monitor, mouse and keyboard between two computers. Some (like this one) also share speakers.
Personal blog of Hector Cuevas about Information, Privacy and Technology.
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© 2009-2011 Héctor Cuevas. All rights reserved.
