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It’s time to say goodbye to a national treasure, The World’s Most Isolated Phone Booth. Popularized over the internet several years ago, the booth is a sort of latter-day World’s Largest Ball of Twine. In the 1960s, The National Park Service installed the phone booth in the heart of the Mojave Desert for use by nearby miners, but the booth remained, miles from civilization, long after the digs had ceased. The internet proved to be the undoing of this steel-and-plastic monument to old communication. The desert curiosity became so popular online and its telephone number so well-known that many netizens began calling the booth periodically just to see if anyone would answer. In the end, the booth was attracting so much attention and so many visitors that the Park Service decided the booth was having a negative impact on its desert habitat. Last week Pacific Bell and the Park Service had it removed.
Online gender-switching
just good clean fun
There is a whole lot of gender-bending
going on in the world of web-based role-playing games and other
interactive online activities, according to a recent study. The report,
issued by a team of researchers from the University of Washington and
Australia’s Curtin University of Technology, finds that 40 percent of
the 400 users surveyed reported taking on an online character of the
opposite sex. The report also determined that such sex-switching is
generally benign. Some experts had warned that web users were creating
self-contained, opposite-gender personae that actually had people leading
double lives. But the report shows that most of the cyber-sex changes are
temporary and done simply in the spirit of curiosity. Perhaps most
surprising is that the study found no significant link between
gender-bending and the user’s actual sex or age. The only real
correlation researchers discovered is that people spending more time
online tend to pull the old switcheroo more often. Hey, it’s cheaper
than surgery.
New TW imprint for
e-books only
Time Warner Books has announced that it
will create what it calls the world’s first all-digital, completely
independent online book publishing imprint. Set to launch in the middle of
next year, iPublish.com will have its own marketing and editorial staff.
The new division will comprise three "channels": iRead will
house the works themselves; iWrite will be the platform for new
submissions; and iLearn will be a sort of discussion forum where authors
and publishing experts will interact with the public. Time Warner Trade
Publishing CEO Laurence Kirschbaum told reporters that in addition to
attracting new authors and proven veterans to the imprint, iPublish will
also explore new strategies for production and distribution of internet
books, an industry now in its infancy. With the resources of America
Online now at its fingertips, Time Warner’s iPublish is expected to exert
a great deal of influence over the direction of e-book publishing for
years to come.
Spielberg lectures
British film class, virtually
Fifty students who will soon graduate from Liverpool John Moores
University’s School of Media are today receiving a private webcast
lecture from none other than Steven Spielberg. Students were given the
chance to submit questions to the Oscar-winning director in advance of the
virtual class. Spielberg has become a major supporter of the internet as a
platform for emerging film talent and low-budget movies. Spielberg’s own
studio, DreamWorks, is behind a not yet launched web site called POP.com,
which plans to show short films and cartoons online. Spielberg will be
giving the lecture from an undisclosed location, believed to be in the
south of England. School officials are understandably excited, and believe
this sort of webcast lecture will open up a new world of so-called
"cyber-seminars" for educational purposes.
