If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault. We're twenty years in to this world wide web thing. Today, I myself celebrate twelve years of writing this blog. And yet those of us who love this medium, who've had our lives changed by the possibility of publishing our words to the world without having to ask permission, are constantly charged with defending this wonderful, expressive medium in a way that creators in every other discipline seldom find themselves obligated to do. Some of this is because the medium is new, of course. But in large part, it's because so many of the most visible, prominent, and popular places on the web are full of unkindness and hateful behavior.
The examples are already part of pop culture mythology: We can post a harmless video of a child's birthday party and be treated to profoundly racist non-sequiturs in the comments. We can read about a minor local traffic accident on a newspaper's website and see vicious personal attacks on the parties involved. But that's just the web, right? Just a start. The Week in 3D Printing: Jan 1st to Jan 6th. Yes, we are bringing back a great feature from the past! A weekly overview of what’s going on in the world of 3D printing. The year has just started so it’s been a bit of a calm week, but this was also quite expected. Here’s an overview of 2012’s first week… Shapeways + Minecraft = the birth of Mineways As mentioned on their blog, Shapeways now also provides you the ability to print out your Minecraft creations. 3D Systems completes the acquisition of Z Corp and Vidar 3D Systems announced that it has completed the acquisition of Z Corporation (“Z Corp”) and Vidar Systems (“Vidar”) for $135.5 million.
Supercool 3D Printing in Ice Ok, so we know that this article was from the 27th of December 2011, but we have decided (because it’s such great news), to add it into this week in 3D printing. It will be in the January version of Wired Magazine. Makerbot makes us curious for next week’s CES On Makerbot’s twitter account you can read “Very excited for our BIG announcement at CES next week!” Robert's blog » Reality Check On 3D Printing. Last week I came across two blog posts in which the authors highlight their frustrations with the current state of 3D printing instead going into how great 3D printing is. The first one is from Robert Mitchell called 3D Printing is awaiting its Ipad moment. He basically argues that 3D printing is a nice technology but is still lacking traction because of technical and content constraints of the current generation of (consumer) 3D printers. The second post is from Anil Dash and is called 3D Printing, Teleporters and wishes. Anil writes about more or less same issues as Robert.
Those two posts flagged my interest because Gartner put 3D printing at the mere top of the hype cycle a few months ago. So what did we gain last 2 years? Regardless of the incapabilities of 3D printing today I am still confident that we can overcome them over time. If I go over this list I see all four of them are happening today.