Web Browsers Shouldn't Have Features

Kay: Go to a blog, go to any Wiki, and find one that's WYSIWYG like Microsoft Word is. Word was done in 1984. HyperCard was 1989. Find me Web pages that are even as good as HyperCard. The Web was done after that, but it was done by people who had no imagination. They were just trying to satisfy an immediate need. There's nothing wrong with that, except that when you have something like the Industrial Revolution squared, you wind up setting de facto standards — in this case, really bad de fa...

 The Deletionist

The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called “the Worl” within the World Wide Web. [...] The Deletionist takes the form of a JavaScript bookmarklet that automatically creates erasures from any Web pages the reader visits. A similar method has been used in Ji Lee's Wordless Web, which removes all text from Web pages, as well as applets that turn web...

 Internet-Literate Student Skills

An understanding of what the Internet is. "I found it on the Internet" is not an accurate statement. You found it on a computer connected to the World Wide Web. Ways to formulate queries. Typing "childhood obesity" into a search engine is not the best way to discover what health problems are associated with being overweight. Students need to know about Boolean searches, adding prefixes such as SITE and FILETYPE, and more. For example, "site:.edu childhood obesity" will yield search results fr...

 MySpace Destroyed History

MySpace, in a rush to relaunch and rebrand itself, made inaccessible the blogs of all of its users. There could be no movement to preserve this record of the past, as it happened so suddenly. Millions of contributions, critical records of events of a decade or so ago, lost in the blink of an eye. It’s similar to the destruction of something like Penn station: a website that was run by user-generated content, that was a central hub of Internet traffic, and that meant something to multiple mi...