If you read one thing today …

Be sure it’s one of these:

1. Firstly, you can’t go past Wired’s large call: The. Web. Is Dead.

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.

2. Then: ‘The Web Is Dead?’ asked Tim O’Reilly. ‘Well, let’s debate that.’

While there’s no question that both Facebook and the mobile app ecosystem provide clear challenges to “the web,” the idea that the browser front end was ever the key to the web’s dominance is so, well, 1995, from the days when Netscape thought that the “webtop” would displace the desktop. But the competitive action has always been on the internet as transport, with data-driven services as the back end.

3. Because I included the first two, I must also include ‘The tragic death of practically everything.’

Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson is catching flack for the magazine’s current cover story, which declares that the Web is dead. I’m not sure what the controversy is. For years, once-vibrant technologies, products, and companies have been dropping like teenagers in a Freddy Krueger movie. Thank heavens that tech journalists have done such a good job of documenting the carnage as it happened. Without their diligent reporting, we might not be aware that the industry is pretty much an unrelenting bloodbath.

4. On a completely different note: ‘Are ebooks good for poetry?’ asked Siobhan Phillips at Colombia University Press.

Last month, an AP story about digital publication briefly focused poetry-lovers’ general despair at the future on a specific new problem.

Billy Collins had recently seen his work on a Kindle e-reader, and he didn’t like what he saw. The device broke up lines of his poems, altering stanzaic integrity at whim and changing the shape of the verse. Charting other instances of digital manipulation and other writers’ worries, the article concluded that poetry, as “the most precise and precious of literary forms, is also so far the least adaptable to the growing e-book market.” One more example, it seems, of how the digital age is leaving behind an antiquated habit of verse-reading, and one more way in which poetry needs to be defended from the onslaught of a twenty-first-century marketplace.

Or is it? Those are not the only lesson to take from the problem of Kindle presentation. Somewhere between the mangled lines of e-reader poetry, I would argue, lies a demonstration of how digital reading is moving ahead to places where verse has already been, and of how poetry scholarship could profitably contribute to theories of twenty-first century media.

5. Finally, a BBC archive that will take some time to exhaust: ‘In their own words: interviews with remarkable modern British writers.’ The first interview is with Virginia Woolf in 1937, ‘Words fail me’.

Bonus Friday afternoon satire: the trailer for ‘Twitter: The Movie’: