Audrey Watters

It's been over a year since I logged into World of Warcraft. Perhaps 2 years since I played EQ2. But lately, I've felt the urge to pick up an MMO again. Sorry, but Angry Birds just does not cut it. I mean, don't get me wrong. Angry Birds is fun....

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- now 70 years old -- contended the language we learn and speak impacts our conceptualization, our understanding of the world. And 30 years ago, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued that the "metaphors we live by" do a similar thing, shaping our perceptions, our expectations. 9...

You should have known when I decided to write about Russian Formalism and theoretical computer science -- that it was a sign there were things that I was furiously trying not to talk about. I mean, it's August, right? This is the month that reminds me that things fall apart....

The author of Morphology of a Folktale,Vladimir Propp was a 20th century folklorist who analyzed Russian folktales and argued that these stories could all be reduced to their simplest narrative components -- to the "31 functions" that are the building blocks of storytelling. Folktales needn't contain all 31, but they...

I wrote several popular posts this week, including my most successful post ever. It was my first Digg front page, and best of all, it was on the subject of education technology: "4 Tools for Teaching Kids to Code." I also had a great talk with NorthScale this week and...

I don't think you can tell it by looking at the content published to this blog this week, but I wrote a ton over the past seven days, much of it I'm damn proud of: Techmeme'd Scholars Build Blog-to-eBook Tool in One Week Venture Capital Human Capital Report Examines Who...

I realized as I went to write this, that I'd never been to Gawker before. I feel really slimy for having done so, because I just don't like that sort of, well, gawking. I don't care what Lindsay Lohan wore in court. I don't care that Reese Witherspoon went to...

Yes, this is my opinion. The post is flagged as "Op-Ed," the universal-journo-sign that, indeed, the author is posting her stance, her analysis, her argument. I posted this first to my blog. Then, upon Richard's suggestion, reposted it to ReadWriteWeb. This is my experience at OSCON, and it's just a...

My friend and fellow Wyomingite Dan DePaolo has designed two really awesome logos for this and for my other blog, Hack Education. You can check out more of his work here. Why does the gargoyle matter? Yeah, that's why.

My greatest triumph this week was my post "Cassandra: Predicting the Future of NoSQL." It took me a long time to write, in part because it took me a long time to grok WTF is NoSQL. And so I'm pretty proud I was able to pull together a blog post...