Two items related to the current issue of Cites & Insights, Spring 2010 (vol. 10 no. 5)–and specifically to the Zeitgeist piece that makes up most of the issue:
The note
Yes, I was aware of the Wired essay-and-sidebars on “How tablets will change the world,” written by that wholly objective Apple observer Steven “The Perfect Thing/Insanely Great” Levy and 13 of the “brightest tech minds” such as Martha Stewart, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan (!) and the Fake Steve Jobs.
I deliberately chose not to include it because applying the proper mix of fisking and commenting needed would have made an already-long essay, with too much of Wired‘s hyperbole, even longer. (Why do I still get Wired in print? Because I got a free-for-airline-miles-I-wouldn’t-use-anyway subscription…and then, when I used similar useless miles for something from Conde Nast I actually wanted, the magazine immediately went under…and they extended the Wired subscription.)
The question
This is the first substantial article I’ve written where I did not print out the first page of each piece of source material I planned to use, rereading the entire article or post in the process, to organize and annotate before working on the article. Instead, I worked directly from the delicious page(s), which meant building the article in somewhat nonlinear fashion.
If this essay seems more scattered and less coherent than usual, maybe this was a bad idea, although it does save a lot of paper. (Until last summer, I printed out entire articles. In this case, that would have used more than a ream of paper…but I rarely have this much source material.)
It’s hard for me to judge sometimes, noting that I very nearly scrapped Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0” before publishing it.
Comments? Thoughts>
