Jason Scott's Weblog
While I’m a person who despises intrusive and unwarranted advertising in previously clean and ad-free spaces (a concept best typified by urinal ads), that doesn’t necessarily mean I hate every single last aspect of marketing. Just most of it. Specifically, when a company or entity designs a product or service and, instead of just shoving […]
I could tell by the phone number on my caller ID (217) that I probably didn’t know who this was. 217, that’s Illinois. Probably one of the usual telemarketing calls that want to offer me telecommunication services or reams of copy paper for my (non-existent) business. All of my domains basically point to the same […]
The following is an interview conducted over e-mail with me by APC Magazine, a technology-based website and print magazine in Australia. Since this website gets a few hundred people a week and the print magazine gets many tens of thousands, I see no issue with posting it here as well. If you live in Australia, […]
I wrote this article a little more than a year ago, after entering into an argument with someone trying to get me to sell his product on my site, wherein he told me I was being obtuse and out of touch after I refused. I’ve reprinted it here because you are technically a different/new audience, […]
Some time after textfiles.com started to gain popularity, I found more and more examples of files that post-dated the BBS era, but which were pretty much in the same “spirit” as the files on the site. The problem with just dropping them into the mix was that I was encountering issues where files about “How […]
Hello, and, in some cases, welcome back. This is the official beginning of my own dedicated weblog, covering everything from essays I write about subjects I need to work out, to information about advances across my historical websites, to the occasional BBS Documentary gossip and discussion. While a number of locations have existed for this […]
Advances in technology, software or hardware or whatever, come from a lot of locations. More importantly, the version of the advance that becomes the most well known is both lauded as that person or group’s accomplishment, and criticized as a lightweight rehash of a previous technology that existed before it. This happens over and over; […]
It’s hard not to browse over the attendee list for Foo Camp and not feel sad that I couldn’t dip in and out of crowds of those folks. Some of them I heavily disagree with, some of them I worship from afar, but there’s no question that a goulash of them in a non-commercialized space […]
BoingBoing, as a print magazine, was a part of a universe of small-press publications, hatched in apartments and off-hours and tons of sneaking around being able to afford the next issue. There were lots of names for this sort of creation, but the closest is “the zine movement“, which essentially came into a golden period […]
People occasionally ask why I don’t run my own blog or my own BBS or message bases on textfiles.com. My answer, in a basic sense, is I don’t have the time to run things correctly, as I think it should be. To ask me what my definition of “should be” is gets to the heart […]