Joey Mornin

June 13, 2009 · by Joey Mornin

One of the big drawbacks of the Kindle 2 is that it doesn’t have a native PDF reader. Instead, you have to convert them to an e-book format with a program like Calibre or Stanza.

I like my Kindle, but I mainly use it for reading articles, newspapers, blogs, and the like. Luckily, some clever coders have figured out how to make the Kindle display PDF without conversion. Here are the steps.

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June 11, 2009 · by Joey Mornin

Uh-oh. A couple days ago, my soon-to-be alma mater, Reed, was featured in a New York Times article. The title was not good: “Reed College, in Need, Closes Door to Needy Students.”

The gist is that Reed’s endowment has taken a big hit in the last year. This loss has caused the college–which has never been entirely need-blind–to exclude an extra 100 students who couldn’t pay full tuition.

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June 11, 2009 · by Joey Mornin

There you have it, grown-ups: books aren’t dying, and those damn kids with their Amazon e-book readers still like to read on real paper (even if it’s been decades since any publisher used actual movable type).

I’ve spent a week with my new Kindle 2. I’ve read an actual book on it (the Cluetrain Manifesto), and I even enjoyed it!

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June 9, 2009 · by Joey Mornin

[Liveblog of Lewis Hyde's talk at the Berkman Center. Apologies for incoherence and misunderstanding!]

The ownership of art and ideas: why they should be owned by the commons. That’s the subject of Lewis Hyde’s new book (currently, in spiral notebook form).

The commons: language that comes out of medieval Europe, now translated into modern settings. Commons is a kind of property, not something in opposition to property. (So what then is property?)

Property, actually, is a problematic term, and the crowd laughs when Lewis asks for a definition. Exclusive use seems to be important. (More complication: there’s such a thing as “public property.”) A nineteenth-century dictionary defines property as the “right of action.” If I have a cup of tea, for instance, I can choose to drink it, or to throw it at you–or to exclude certain rights of action.
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June 2, 2009 · by Joey Mornin

I just moved to beautiful Cambridge, MA to start work as a research assistant at the Berkman Center!

My blog needed renovation, so I’ve redesigned it and cleared out the old, impulsive, wordy posts. My summer resolution is to write interesting things that won’t make me cringe when I read them a month later.

More on what I’m doing soon.

Let me know what you think about the new design; I built during the road trip from Seattle to Boston. I finished it at exit 368 on I-90 in South Dakota, outside the town of Canistota. If I clean it up to release it as a WordPress theme, I think I’ll call it that.

March 25, 2009 · by Joey Mornin

Inspired by the Bernd and Hilla Becher industrial typologies.

November 13, 2008 · by Joey Mornin

Tom Watson’s new book, CauseWired, makes a point that’s beginning to be widely recognized, but it’s worth making again in book form: the tools of the connected age are realigning the way social change happens.

This change touches all areas of socially conscious activity—nonprofit organizing, volunteering, philanthropy, and maybe most dramatically, small-donor fundraising. This shift is easy to sense, but tricky to pin down in concrete terms.

This book isn’t a handbook for nonprofits or foundations (despite the forward by Jean Case of the Case Foundation). It’s not a recipe book. But it gives a clear look at how the landscape is quickly changing, and how we’ll all have to adapt to cope with this new ecosystem. I think Tom is quite right to make the case that we’re seeing a real paradigm shift; with the Internet and a new set of Web 2.0 tools, our arsenal for social change is starting to look quite a bit different.
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October 14, 2008 · by Joey Mornin

Born Digital is the product of several years of research from John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, two law professors, web luminaries, and digital immigrants.

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