Scholarist

Box.net is offering 50 gigs of free online storage for life to individuals registering or signing in using the iPhone/iPad app. File upload limits are 100 mb.

Vibe is a secure and anonymous Twitter alternative prefered by the Occupy Wallstreet protesters:

Currently available in the Apple App Store, Vibe is similar to Twitter in several ways. It encourages short messages shared with your network, replies back and forth, and it’s made to be mobile.

However, it is also an anonymous network, with each message sent without a username or identification.

Users send out a message on Vibe, and select whether to “whisper” it, meaning to send it to only a small geographical area surrounding them, or “shout” to the entire network.

It’s the geographical and anonymous nature of Vibe that Beta Beat says is so attractive to protesters at the #OccupyWallstreet protests happening right now in the heart of New York city.

I have a functioning Jekyll installation running on SDF, finally, and it’ll do the trick–Jekyll is pretty, easy to maintain (despite my learning curve, caused by self-inflicted denseness), and seamlessly integrates with git.

It seems to me that Jekyll by it’s nature is more suited for longer, well-worked-over pieces that you’d want to save in a repository of markdown files. It’s seems like overkill for casual blogging, linking, and general Snark DIY.

Something like WordPress fits that style of shoot-first internet writing. Posts are swallowed up into a database but the upside is that you can write quickly, on the move. There’s much to be said for that, as well.

For example, it’s right difficult to post on the move to Jekyll without an iPhone ssh client. I’ve used such a client, of course, but I was dissatisfied with the experience because of the small iPhone screen and the keyboard. I’d probably never use Jekyll away from a laptop.

• Mobile posting
  

September 30 2011

It seems that the heart of American literature, or at least all that’s good in American literature, is in Thoreau’s Journals. Thoreau wrote these to a high standard, and the sentences and paragraphs in his journal as as good as anything in Walden. There is no doubt about the quality of the Journals or of the labor that went into them.

What the Journals give up is Thoreau’s ongoing self-invention. Through the daily entries, Thoreau documents his development as a writer and a thinker. Since he had few models, and had testy relations with those, at best, he made up much of it as he went along. It was a hard road, and it took him years to shake off the nonsense he learned at Harvard (at least until 1850 or thereabouts).

There’s nothing more American than this, or at least nothing more positively American. Canby says that in the 1830s a man could do anything he wanted except make a living as a artist or writer. Thoreau figured out a way to do just that, and documented the steps he took, one day at a time, for 25 years.

The Journals are a detailed exploration of a mind, and in this sense have the same aspirations as Montaigne’s Essais. They aren’t constructed as the Essais are, though, in that Thoreau doesn’t build them up into bigger pieces, revising and fitting them together (except when he draws extracts for a piece meant for publication, like Walden or Walking). Instead, the Journals are writing-in-process, daily writing, much like Pepys’ famous diary, though without the nitty-gritty of daily life. Like Pepys, Thoreau couldn’t help but write everyday.

If I had to say what Thoreau’s great accomplishment was, it would be creating a new form combining the Essais and the Diary. And what a form it is.

I started out driving the 96 Neon in a state of meditative panic, glad that the car didn’t disintegrate on contact with the on-ramp, but knowing, just knowing, that something bad was about to happen. I always picture breakdowns as a catastropic event, with flames and exploding pistons bursting through the hood. I was hopeful my son and I wouldn’t be hurt to badly to steer the crippled jalopy to the shoulder where we could call Triple A and wait and wait.

After an hour of this it was clear that the car is in decent shape fir it’s age and nothing was wrong besides a nasty pull to the right when braking. By the end of the drive (six hours road time) I was cocky enough to wonder why we were getting rid of it.

I would say that LiveJournal and WordPress have “writerly” cultures, while Tumblr and FaceBorg have image cultures.

Twitter is writerly too, believe it or not

Aaron Swartz, free culture activist and co-founder of Reddit, was indicted for illegally downloading four million articles, book reviews, and papers from JSTOR after breaking into the MIT computer network. He faces 35 years in prison if indicted. Theft is bad, and all that, but I was just on JSTOR and all the articles are still there.