The Best of Technology Writing 2006

March 2, 2007 6:00 AM

The Best of Technology Writing 2006. 24 articles from Salon, New Yorker, NYT, Discover, etc..free book from digitalculturebooks and UofMichigan Press, also on Amazon.
posted by stbalbach (4 comments total)

Well the criteria do not seem to include good writing.

Adam L. Penenberg's piece in Slate "The Right Price for Digital Music" takes a very good and thought provoking idea and expresses it with prose that reads like a tenth grader's homework assignment. The punctuation is awful,

The solution: a real-time commodities market that combines aspects of Apple’s iTunes, Nasdaq, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Priceline, and eBay.

Here’s how it would work: Songs would be priced strictly on demand.

"Songs," I believe, should be lower case, but at least consistent with the previous sentence.

He uses the colon so much that he places a hyphen where a colon should be,

The same is true in reverse—the fewer people who buy a song, the lower the price goes.

or where parentheses might be used.

And enthusiasts of low-selling genres would rejoice, since songs with limited appeal—John Coltrane Quartet pieces from the early 1960s, for example—would be priced far below 99¢.

Interesting idea though.
posted by three blind mice at 6:59 AM on March 2, 2007

And... very curiously... he doesn't even mention Amie Street.
posted by Luciferous at 2:47 PM on March 2, 2007

"All songs on Amie Street start FREE and can rise to 98 cents. We’re about discovery, not raiding your wallet. The price of a song depends on how much the community likes it (how many times it’s bought on Amie Street)."
posted by Luciferous at 2:48 PM on March 2, 2007

"Songs," I believe, should be lower case, but at least consistent with the previous sentence.

Wrong and wrong. If the phrase after the colon works on its own as a sentence, the first word after the colon should be capitalized. If it doesn't, it shouldn't. In the first sentence you quoted, the phrase after the colon does not stand on its own as a sentence. In the second, it does. The author has used the proper case in each, um, case.
posted by parrot_person at 4:11 PM on March 2, 2007