A Man and His Owl

An owl for a pet? And you thought cats were trouble. We have an interesting book review that gives us a good taste of that story.

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When the Internet Was New

Leon Neyfakh singles out 1994 as a turning point for the Internet: “The number of websites grew from 623 at the beginning of the year, according to one study, to more than 10,000 at the end.” He presents an oral history of the period when just “clicking around on things was wildly entertaining, because it was so novel”.

-- Andrew Sullivan's Dish

We also have an interesting note on the positive and negative side of what came to be called dot-communism by some people.

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[Michelle Johnson of Boston.com noted] The thing that shocked me the most was how quickly young people moved away from print. I would not have bet anybody that [it would happen] as fast as it did…. I felt a little blindsided…. The term “cannibalize” did come up. I remember people saying we’d cannibalize the print product by giving away stories online. And at the time I was squarely in the camp of, “the Web wants to be free.” It was just the culture back then: You can’t charge people for stuff online. Had I taken the longer view, I would have seen that we were training a generation to expect great stuff for free and that that was going to hurt us. But back then I would have thrown my body on the tracks and said we’d be crazy to charge for this.

-- Leon Neyfakh, "Dawn of the Web: an oral history" at Boston Globe.com

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Mini-Ratso

I was too optimistic in thinking that I shook off mini-Ratso. I caught him at the plate tonight.

This might not be too bad. I’ll have to let the cats go hungry, but I want to start getting them back inside for the days anyway, as temperatures are now expected to soar above 95 degrees.