The blogging has been slow for 2-3 days now. Over the weekend I dealt with monster network problems at home (Bad hub! Weird network troubles! Still working on it!). Things have been busier than usual on the editing front. Just beginning to catch up…
Blog panel: Tuesday
I’ll be joining Rebecca Blood, Meg Hourihan, Dan Gillmor and J.D. Lasica on a panel about weblogs and journalism at the Berkeley Journalism School Tuesday evening at 6:30 PM. Info is here. It’s free and I expect we’ll have a spirited discussion.
Gone fishin’
Actually, I’ve never been fishing in my life. But I will be away from this blog until Tuesday Aug. 27.
Old CD-ROMs never die, they just become unreadable
The basement cleanup continues, and I have now made my way back to the corner where I have stashed a pile of cartons full of unopened review copies of CD-ROMs.
Back in the day — which means almost a decade ago — my career as a technology & culture pundit centered on these shiny little discs that, some portion of the punditariat (most of the time not including me), thought would become a wonderful new publishing medium. Of course it didn’t turn out that way; for about two years every media company under the sun opened an electronic publishing division and scrambled to join the CD-ROM revolution. Aside from a couple of companies — Voyager was the most prominent — most CD-ROM publishing was hopelessly inept, involving the “repurposing” of old catalogs of content rather than creative use of the technology’s limited but real potential. Then everyone realized that the public was simply not buying CD-ROMs, and the bottom dropped out. Though there are some parallels to the later Internet boom, at least the Web achieved a significant presence in large numbers of people’s lives. CD-ROMs just sat on the shelves — or in basement boxes.
What’s depressing to realize today is that most of these old discs are not only not terribly interesting but, today, actually inaccessible. The software they depend on to run is no longer part of computer operating systems, or is configured in such a way that it simply won’t work with today’s systems. Some stuff still works — a lot of the simple Microsoft reference titles manage to pop open delightfully archaic Windows 3.1-style dialogue boxes. But some of my favorite titles — like Rodney Alan Greenblat’s Dazzeloids, which I reviewed in Salon’s very first issue and hoped to introduce my kids to — simply won’t play; the software gets hung up looking for an older version of Quicktime. I don’t know whether, if you buy a new copy from the successor company to Voyager that’s still selling it, that will work better. I kind of doubt it — “back catalog” software rarely gets updated to deal with changes in technology.
August
This week Salon takes its annual summer break, known to the editorial staff as “dark week” — a week in which we update the site with fewer articles. It’s a chance during the dog days of August for those of us who basically work around-the-clock most of the year to catch our breaths and take a real vacation. I’m doing the same — though I’ll keep updating this blog, perhaps a little less regularly. Don’t worry, though; Salon will have a new cover story every day, the wires will continue to be updated, and of course the blogs will keep rolling.
If you stay tuned you can catch my cover story tomorrow — a double book review, of John Motavalli’s “Bamboozled at the Revolution” and David Weinberger’s “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” — that uses those books as a chance to look at the state of the Net in general. I’ve tried to write (at least) one such piece a year.