Does this mean that when I’m back in Paris next summer, I can buy an Orange SIM card for the iPhone I’ll have by then and use it natively?

Or perhaps that I could buy an unlocked iPhone there, and then buy a SIM card here for whatever service I want once I get home?

Because that would rock.

I’m headed here later today, for this. I’m certain to see him, and him, and no doubt a bunch of other folks, too. Look me up if you’re there.

Apparently this is the week when everything I’ve done for the last four months hits the metaphorical stands: today, the newest issue of Vectors was released; I served as peer-reviewer on a project called “ThoughtMesh” by Jon Ippolito and Craig Dietrich. (My response has also been published.) ThoughtMesh is a dynamic tag-based system of interlinking multiple online scholarly publications, and thus provides an interesting complement to CommentPress, so it’s nice that my article and this peer-review so closely coincide.

The other thing I’ve been meaning to post about: my friend Bill Tipper has for the last several months been overseeing the rebirth of editorial content at Barnes & Noble online, in the form of the new Barnes & Noble Review, an editorially-independent book review of the sort that has of late been disappearing from most major newspapers.

This is particularly exciting to me for two reasons: first, because my last job during grad school was as a reviewer for the early Barnes & Noble website, before the competition they were facing from Amazon led them to eschew the editorial in favor of the marketing; I’ve felt for years that they’d made the wrong choice, that readers might be led to make purchases through B&N rather than Amazon if they focused on original content rather than neutral, database-driven volume.

And second, because I’ve got a review up there today, of Daniel Solove’s The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. It’s awfully nice to get back to a bit of mainstream book-reviewing; I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it.

Late last spring, I attended “New Structures, New Texts,” a very exciting one-day meeting of folks from various academic publishing units, both press-affiliated and library-affiliated, who are all engaged in attempting to think through the problems and opportunities that the digital poses for scholarly communication. After that meeting, I began work on an article inspired in part by our discussions there, and in part by the Institute for the Future of the Book’s release of CommentPress, a WordPress-based publishing structure for finely commentable texts. I published the article in CommentPress as a draft and revised it based on the discussion there.

I’m happy to announce that the article is now being published simultaneously by the Journal of Electronic Publishing and by MediaCommons. The latter version is in CommentPress, and is thus open for comments and discussion.

I’m particularly interested in beginning a discussion in the “general comments” area of the article about the look-and-feel of the document; CommentPress is one of the primary technologies that MediaCommons currently has at its disposal, and it would be great for us to spend some time thinking about how the technology might work for us, what possibilities we can imagine for it, and what kinds of future development we’d like to see.

That would be this hint on how to force Apple Mail.app to display messages in plain-text. Even those annoying messages from the assistant who insists on using an image as background for the message. And forcing plain-text also forces re-wrapping of HTML messages with lines that are too long for Mail’s window.

The only drawback is that there are certain messages that I don’t mind getting in HTML, but it seems to be an all-or-nothing thing. What I’d really like is a set of well-crafted rules: if mail is from person X, then force plain-text. Unfortunately, Mail allows for the “if” part of the statement, but not the “then”; you can flag, or mark as read, or move to a folder, or delete messages that qualify under some if-statement, but you can’t force plain-text upon them, alas…

As hinted yesterday, I spent part of last week working on a response to some reviews of The Anxiety of Obsolescence. Those reviews (five of them!), and my response, are now up at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, where mine is one of three books-of-the-month. (And I’m happy to find that I’m in good company; the other two books under review this month are by Alex Galloway and Lori Kendall, both of whose work I admire greatly.)

Pop by, take a look, and if you have responses, I’d love to hear them!