Dancing Monkey Mania

Some very useful content here!

This is a subject that deserves some thought. For the most part, online conferences (and online strands of face-to-face) seem to be perceived as (and often subtly created as) alternative to the "real thing" that are inferior but better-than-nothing. Reminds me of the way distance education and online learning (mostly) used to be seen the same way in comparison to their face-to-face counterparts…

You have to be a poetry geek, perhaps, but a few of these made me laugh out loud. The exchange between Whitman and Pound is priceless.

Some great videos here… thanks @jstein

Audio interviews with scores of writers of all kinds, including many speculative fictioneers and discussions of writing, writers and the writing process.

All of "The Prose Poem" vol. 8 is available online in the Providence Digital Commons… wish the rest were!

Interesting piece discussing _Beauty_ and _The Art Instinct_, both of which take on the fascinating subject of evolutionary aesthetics…

"Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it – on knowing how to look at it."

Great collection of some of the more unfortunate handicrafts for sale on Etsy…

Rethinking the human-computer interface and GUI

"In that regard, the furor over Obama's complete inaction on gay issues vividly illustrates the same elements that shape political controversies in virtually every other area — from war to civil liberties to health care and beyond: "

What does it mean to be 'digitally literate'?

Though Twitter may be guilty for promoting (or at least encouraging) a short attention span, forced brevity is not entirely a bad thing. Humans have been perfecting the art of keeping it short since the beginning of literature. I, for one, am starting to see Twitter as a modern day epigram generator.