The No Starch Press Blog

Finally! Download the instructions here.

And see it done:

Clay Shirky is a smart guy, and I usually take any chance I can get to watch him pontificate. He did a great segment on Bloggingheads.tv, a wonderfully lo-fi talking-head show (and a site well worth exploring on your own).

The remarkable thing about Wikipedia–and I think the thing that people don’t often understand–is that it isn’t amateurs producing it, except in the sense of “people are doing it for love.” In many cases, there’s deep domain expertise reflected in the Wikipedia articles. Which people have a hard time believing because if no one’s being paid for it or ordered by their boss…why would they do it? The answer is, the people writing the articles love the subject.

P.S. Something extra cool about Bloggingheads.tv–you can pass your own parameters to the URL, and slice and dice dialogues into more manageable pieces, like I did above. Now if you could only embed their Flash player…

Here’s a teaser for our forthcoming how-to video, “Fold your own papercraft Mac!”

My New Mac – Teaser from Tyler Ortman on Vimeo.

Can’t wait for the final edit? Try it yourself with the directions here.

Here are two very different videos, both excellent, both exploring the fundamental changes that mainstream computing has effected in society.

First up, Growing Up Online, a Frontline documentary about teenagers’ lives on social networks. It’s quite moving at times–and it cuts through the pervasive climate of parental fear, while addressing the very real changes so many of us see in the behavior of teenagers and youth. A must-see for skittish parents and older teens.

It’s accessible here in several parts (just click the “Watch” link on right after clicking through):

Next up, Steal This Film II. A polemical expansion of the original Steal This Film concept. It’s worth watching if only for the interviews with notable (and articulate) supporters of file-sharing, historians, media theorists, and legal buffs. And yeah, it gets a little weird at times. But what did you expect from an anonymous production team billing themselves as the League of Noble Peers?

[XVID torrent link.]