So… apparently they’re making a print volume of Wikipedia now?

I’m actually kind of torn on how I should feel about this. On the one hand, this almost completely contradicts everything that makes Wikipedia what it is: a triumph of collective intelligence–a living, very searchable document. You can’t put something like that into a book. You can’t put hypertext into print, nor can the general population collaboratively edit the printed word (unless they’re publishing it on Kindle). It is a useful document precisely because it isn’t printed.

On the other hand, a printed version would be great for archival purposes. I’ve wondered what a hypothetical alien archaeologist would say about our generation; we’re leaving increasingly fewer traces of individualism. Even my own hypothetical grandchildren may or may not get to see photographs from years of my life; it simply depends on the state of technology. Maybe .jpgs will no longer be valid file extensions in fifty years. Guess what: there went the last three years of my life, if I never got them printed. So an archive strikes me as an incredibly useful tool for future historians.

Regardless, though, who do they actually expect to *use* this?

Lore Sjöberg has just summed up the entirety of social networking in a column about Twitter:

“The internet is to human interaction as Pringles are to potatoes.”

If I ever go back to school after I finish my Master’s, it will be for programming. I’m getting sick of taking hours trying to figure out what any trained programmer could do in minutes. Case in point: I now have a favicon. It took me minutes to make and probably about a dozen attempts to actually get functioning–and since it only worked after clearing my cache and I have it uploaded in two places with several lines of code copy-pasted in, I’m not even sure what’s actually making it function. But this site’s starting to look like something now; and, in the end, there’s nothing like that feeling of “Problem: Solved!”