The internet is really a vast sea of information, where each URL, each blog post, each highlight, is a lonely island in the ocean. I’m most interested in how we can improve the way we create and document connections among disparate bits of information, such as news pieces, long-form articles, blog posts, comments, photographs, highlights, and tweets. I’m most interested in how all these things taken together, with annotation, can create new meaning, and start new conversations. No good tools exist for this yet. We have text files, Evernote files, Simplenote files, but those are inaccessible to others, hidden away in the ether an on our hard drives. We can collect these items on blogs, though our current tools make it difficult to annotate in a meaningful, semantic, public way. Comment threading is just a start, but not suited to this larger purpose. I see this as the an important challenge the internet needs to solve.
Welcoming, gracious, and above all, personal: please-reply@readmill.com
I’ve been enjoying Readmill for a few months now. I was fortunate to get an invitation to Readmill when it was still in beta. The application is beautiful and has since become my reading application of choice. I’ve shared some feedback with Readmill via Twitter, some love, and some suggestions. They’ve always been prompt, gracious, and above all personal in responding. Today I received an email to thank me for being part of the beta release of the application. The email was lovely. What delighted me, was seeing the reply-to address:
please-reply@readmill.com
Never in my online life have I seen such a lovely invitation to customers to keep offering feedback. No anonymous “no-reply@” or off-putting “do-not-reply@.” Instead, customers see a welcoming and wonderful opposite. Please reply. Gracious and personal. When I wrote back to express how delighted I was to see it, I received a personal reply from David Kjelkerud who promptly credited Orson Kent for the idea.
Readmill opened to all recently. If you haven’t yet, you must sign up. I hope you love it as much as I do.
Reading is something you do
If you’re reading something, even a one-sitting short story or article, you’re making a commitment. You’re making a lot more of a commitment because reading is in fact extremely interactive from a neurological point of view. Your brain lights up a lot. Whereas [listening to] music is more like something that happens to you, reading is something you do.
–Margaret Atwood on Twitter, the internet, and literacy
The joy of Readmill
The last 60 or so books I’ve bought, I’ve bought them via Kindle for iPad. Erin recently introduced me to Readmill, which offers a reading app and a way to share highlighted passages online. People can follow one another, see what they’re reading, see which parts of a book someone found most interesting, puzzling, moving, or troubling by their highlights and comments on the text. Readmill posts your highlights and notes to your profile if you choose.
Readmill continues to improve with each iteration. The last update included an in-app dictionary, something that I find indispensable. Readmill doesn’t yet have the ability to re-read a book. You can re-read it, but the book is considered “finished.” I find re-reading far more pleasurable than the first read. On Erin’s recommendation I read The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Fantastic stuff! Read it twice. Am now reading Grossman’s sequel, The Magician King.
Some of my favorite random passages from The Magicians:
Use magic in anger, and you will harm yourself much more quickly than you will harm your adversary. There are certain spells . . . if you lose control of them, they will change you. Consume you. Transform you into something not human, a niffin, a spirit of raw, uncontrolled magical energy.
Alice was still watching him. Behind her the mosaic was a swirl of green tentacles and whitecaps and floating fragments. He slid down the stone bench to her end and kissed her and bit her lower lip until she gasped.
He felt his intoxication already turning into a hangover, that queasy neurological alchemy that usually happens during sleep. His abdomen was overfull, swollen with tainted viscera. People he’d betrayed came wandering out from the place in his mind where they usually stayed.
Space was full of angry little particles.
So instead he kept his little particle of shame and filth inside, where it could fester and turn septic.
Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.
Learn more about Readmill.
Daniel Tammet on Perception, Language, and Meaning
Daniel Tammet‘s TED talk A Different Way of Knowing is a fascinating look at how humans perceive language and meaning.
Perceptions are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. Esthetic judgements rather than abstract reasoning guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.
Highly recommended: Daniel’s book, Born on a Blue Day.
My interview with Ken Tangen on What’s it Like?
Ken Tangen is an amazing teacher whose site What’s it Like showcases interviews with people in various occupations as a way to help his students to choose a career. I was fortunate enough to have the chance to spend an hour with Ken and make a small contribution to his fantastic project.
On Interface Design is Copywriting
In his post, Interface Design is Copywriting, Joshua Porter says:
I humbly submit that there is no single element more important to your interface than the copywriting. There is nothing that makes or breaks a positive experience more than the simple set of words that you choose to communicate with. In a world in which we have to simplify as much as possible, nothing matters more than the small vocabulary you end up with in your final work.
Amen to that.
