NetNews Archives

Internet Use and Filtering Survey

2007-03-22T11:59:00.000-05:00

Recently, the reference staff was asked to share its opinions regarding internet use and filtering. Below are my responses:

1) In terms of our library, how many customer requests have we had for intervention in the case of someone viewing objectionable material via our computers on the public floor--how many in the past month have you handled? How many in the past year? Any general observations?

I do not recall any requests for staff intervention regarding objectionable internet content within the past month. Since we’ve introduced our new system for handling internet registration, patrons may be more circumspect in their internet viewing choices—they may think that (incorrectly) their usage may be tracked via their card numbers.

While I do remember instances of requested staff intervention occurring here in the past, I cannot positively place them within the past year. There have been rare instances of young patrons looking at sites they shouldn’t view, or of someone opening an inappropriate site and walking away from the computer, leaving objectionable material on the screen.

Before the institution of our new sign-up system, it was more frequent that patrons would complain about others (especially young people) playing games or chatting on the internet, or that others were spending too much time on the terminals.

In summary, I have not noticed a major problem with patrons using our internet terminals to view inappropriate material.

2) What are your general observations and yes, opinions, about Internet filtering in our library?

In general, I don’t think filtering is necessary at WNPL. There doesn’t seem to be much of a problem with inappropriate usage. I’m also concerned about filters offering patrons a false sense of security regarding their internet use. There is much material (for example, hate speech) that is available on the internet that is not blocked by filtering software.

Another consideration is what is meant by “inappropriate material”. In the class I teach at CLC, I share the results of a study of public library filtering in Indiana. Students are often surprised to learn that pornography isn’t the only kind of material that may be restricted. Some libraries restrict e-mail and/or chat; some even prevent catalog ordering on library computers. Filtering could also be used to block access to gambling sites or even to time-wasting online games. Filtering puts the library in the (I think inappropriate) position of being the “nanny” that decides for patrons what is good or bad for them.

Sometimes one hears of proposals to prevent access to MySpace, the popular social networking site, in order to protect teenagers from 1) misusing the site to harm others (“cyberbullying”) and 2) being stalked by online predators. I think teens are better served by being taught proper MySpace usage than eliminating access to it.

MySpace is only the best known of the social networking sites; if it is banned, another site would take its place. Also, preventing access to MySpace would give the network the fascination of the forbidden.

Social networking sites are here to stay, and they do provide their users with an outlet for self-expression. Patrons need to learn how to use such sites safely and responsibly. A better approach than restricting or banning access would be for the public library to offer online safety instruction for both parents and teens.

3) What have been your experiences in working at other libraries (if applicable) with or without Internet filtering?

The only library I have worked at that has used filters was the Lake Forest Library. This was several years ago, and filtering technology was not as advanced as it is today. At that time, the filtering software often crashed the computers or blocked inoffensive sites that patrons wanted to see.

Do Wikis Make Good Intranets?

2007-01-05T10:29:00.000-06:00

Even thought there are lots of different meetings at Internet Librarian Conference, there always seems to be just a few themes that emerge. At the Oct. 2006 conference, one of the major points was that libraries should use wiki software to manage their intranets. Why? Because "wikis" are cool, and because wiki software allows for "radical collaboration" and "radical trust" (two other themes of the conference). The organizers of IL, however, tend to go with assertion over argument. Is wiki software really the best way to revitalize an intranet?

Zoli Erdos thinks so, at least for "smaller, nimble, less hierchical businesses." In his blog post "Wikis are the Instant Intranet", he points out that most large corporate intranets offer "one-way" communication only--from the top to the bottom. Getting new content into the intranet is often a daunting experience. Wiki software eliminates the middleman and allows contributors to add content whenever necessary, without having to go through channels. Large organizations wouldn't want to have only a wiki as an intranet, but any organization, Erdos argues, can benefit by adding a wiki as "a lively collaborative addition" (parentheses in original) to a larger internal website. Erdos does, however warn against using the "geeky-funny" term wiki. He advises the more neutral term "editable Intranet".

Other writers on the topic warn to beware of the wiki hype. Back in 2005 Toby Ward wrote in his Intranet Blog:

[Let's] not confuse a social communications tool with a business ecosystem ... But a wiki is a tool, and only a tool. For professional communicators and business managers, it is but only one tool that should be considered in a larger mix of options.

(empahsis mine)

In 2006, Shiv Singh was even more specific about the pitfalls of thinking that wiki software opens up the fast track to intranet development. In "The Truth about Enterprise Wikis," he wrote:

The first [truth] is that not every knowledge worker wants to collaborate. Putting an edit button on a page doesn't mean your knowledge workers are going to jump at the opportunity to share their thoughts for free. Enterprise wikis succeed in companies that truly reward collaboration. There aren't many companies like that.

Secondly, enterprise wikis only work when people feel secure in editing someone else's work. . . . Before encouraging your knowledge workers to use a wiki, make sure you have a trusted, secure office culture first.

And, it could be added, the collaborative Internet model will only work when people feel secure in subjecting their own writing to someone else's editing.

Singh suggests (and I agree) that it is a good idea to start an intranet-wiki off as a team or department based project, rather than immediately setting it up as an organization-wide affair.

Social Computing and the Information Professional

2006-12-09T09:57:00.000-06:00

Despite the title, Elizabeth Lane Lawley's closing keynote presentation, entitled "Social Computing and the Information Professional," was really about her newfound interest in gaming, and how librarians can learn from gamers.

Games are a form of play with rules and structure. Usually, but not always, players have a goal to work towards, and often, the first person who reaches the goal "wins" the game.

Lawley said that people learn and remember best when they are are engaged by a game. Gaming is a powerful way of building emotional connection between people and/or between people and a place.

Not all games involve computers. Lawley gave the example of a "reverse scavenger hunt." In this game, players collect any 10 items they want. Then, they get the list of the functions these items are supposed to serve. The players must explain to the game's judges how a given item of the ten they gathered fulfills a purpose on the list. this involves a lot of "out of the box" thinking, improvosation and creative use of the items.

Other games played out in the real world include "Cruel 2B Kind" (in which member of one team "kill" members of opposing teams by, for example, giving out complements to all),and "Tombstone Hold 'Em" which involves playing "poker" in a graveyard using the tombstones as "cards".

Gaming has caught on in the academic world. Lawley thinks that current interest in gaming gives librarians an opportunity to think about the role of gaming in informal learning.

How can libraries take advantage of the power of gaming? I don't think she really answered this question. Libraries can sponsor games such as those mentioned above, or come up with their own library-based games to create a bond between users and the library.

What's Hot In Social Software

2006-12-08T11:02:00.000-06:00

Library commentator Steven Cohen offered this A-Z look at social software trends. He did not use every letter. I will leave out a few items he mentioned that are not really noteworthy, but involve his family or personal concerns:

A is for Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development tool that allows for the development of social software.
B is for Beta (as in beta testing) and for Browster an Internet Explorer plugin that creates an instant preview window for web sites.
D is for Digg: This social technology-focused news site features "stories [that] are chosen by community members rather than editors" via vote.
E is for Econsultant: A big online list of links for web developers.
F is for Flickr: Very popular photo sharing site.
G is for Gmail: Google's e-mail service. Also offers a chat component.
H is for Hype: All these "social web" sites subject to a great deal of hype. They won't survive without a viable business plan.
I is for Image Editors: A number of options are available for digital camera owners who want to edit their pictures. Resiz (sic) is free software that resizes your pictures before you upload them.. Other options include Pixenate (http://pxn8.com/), ResizeR (http://www.resiz-lord-lance.com), and SnipShop (I was unable to find this on the web).
L is for Library Thing: Allows users to catalog their home collections and find out if others out there own the same books.
M is for Meebo. Web based chat service.
and Media Convert, which "convert(s) sound, text and video files).
N is for Netvibes: Provides pre-defined blog feeds.
O is for OCLC.
P is for Pandora: Allows you to create your own music station and Parevideo, a metasearch engine for online videos.
R is for RSS.
S is for Snapper. Firefox extension that "allows users to designate an area of a web page for a focused snapshot, cutting out the additional work needed for cropping unnecessary information." Slideshare ""a place to share slideshows".
X is for Xanga: Another social networking site
Y is for YouTube: Video sharing site.
Z is for Zoho: a "virtual office" site with online word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software.

Online Tutorials

2006-12-08T10:54:00.000-06:00

Well-known web expert Greg Notess lead this evaluation of various online tutorials. He is writing a book on the topic, and it seemed like he was using the audience for generating ideas for his writing.

TILT (Texas Information Literacy Tutorial) is an award-winning web site that is often held up as a prime example of a tutorial. It features well-chosen graphics and sounds, a clear explanation of objectives, it loads quickly, a easy-to-follow navigation structure, and good explanations of library jargon. Libraries in Texas and elsewhere adapt TILT for their own use subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the TILT Open Publication License.

Introduction to Wikis

2006-12-08T10:35:00.000-06:00

A wiki is an editable web site that allows users to collaboratively contribute articles, updates and changes. Most wikis have a system to record changes to that at any time, the text can be reverted back to a previous version. It is also possible to track who has done what.

Wikis are collaborative spaces. They are great places for brainstorming, drafting policies, note taking at meeting (everyone can take the notes!), and user empowerment.

The most famous example of a wiki is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that has over 1 million articles in English and thousands in other languages. Wikipedia is a "fun" research it should not be used as a primary tool, but it can lead the user to other, more authoritative resources.

Media Wiki is one wiki tool that must be installed on a server. PB Wiki is a very user friendly wiki tool that does not require installation and is much like a word processor to use. Other wiki tools are Twiki, JotSpot, and Social Text. Wikimatrix.org is a web site that allows for side-by-side comparison of wiki tools.

Many libraries are using Wiki software to create and manage their staff Intranets. The great thing about the Intranet is that it doesn't have to match the library's outside "branding" efforts. Wiki software allows all staff to make changes ("radical decentralization"), so the responsibility doesn't fall on one or just a few people. Staff generated Wiki Intranets are also more heavily used than more traditional Intranets because staff have a greater sense of ownship of them.

Keynote: Web Presence for Internet Librarian

2006-12-08T10:10:00.000-06:00

Web designer Shari Thurow offered her recommendations for creating superior web sites that are "search engine friendly".

Most of her "five basic rules for web design" are nothing new, but they do bear repeating:

Web sites should be easy to read
Web sites should be easy to navigate
Web sites should be easy to find via search engines
Web sites should have consistent design. This enhances the user's trust in the reliability of the web site
Web sits should be quick to download (30 seconds or less on a 56K modem).

To be "search engine friendly" web sites should be:

Each page on a web site should have a unique title tag
The most important text should be at the top of the web page

Thurow recommends having at least two forms of navigation on your web site. One is for your target audience and one is for the search engine. The two often complement each other.

Thurow also said that Flash animation should be avoided, because search engines cannot index it and it takes a long time to load. She also does not recommend using jax (which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Shari Thurow says that people are willing to "click" up to 25 times to find what they want on a web site as long as they feel they are making progress and will eventually be rewarded by finding what they want to find.

Syndication Tools

2006-12-08T09:50:00.000-06:00

Paul Pival and Meredith Farkas presented "The RSS and JavaScript" Cookbook: Rip, Mix, Burn" to introduce librarians to some of the new tools that have become available to help them make the most out of RSS technology:

Feed2JS is a free service that allows the user to fill out a form to create customized JavaScript code that syndicates content from a blog (i.e. have updated blog content automatically appear on a separate website). This script is available on several web sites. It's easy to find if you Google Feed2JS.

Grazr is another free service (a "widget") for browsing and displaying various types of feeds (RSS, RDF and Atom formats). It can also display feed in OPML format (Outline Processing Markup Language), which is used to combine multiple feeds.

KickRSS and RSSmix and Feedblendr allow you to track several feeds and display them as a single feed on a web site.

R-Mail lets you receive RSS feeds as e-mail.

RSSCalendar lets users quickly setup online calendars that can be syndicated as RSS feeds. Interesting.

My Space and Facebook: Tools of "Ubiquitous Librarianship"

2006-12-02T15:25:00.000-06:00

My Space and Facebook are two very popular, if controversial, social networking sites. My Space caters to the teen market, and Facebook, until recently, was only available to college students. Users set up their own web spaces, complete with personal profiles, blogs, music, videos and more. My Space, in particular, is hard to use, loaded with bugs, and does not offer users a particularly good experience, but despite the drawbacks of the current tools, social networking is here to stay. Some libraries are taking the intiative to reach out to the My Space and Facebook generations on their own turf.

The Thomas Ford Memorial Library (in Western Springs, Illinois) and the Denver Public Library have both established My Space pages. They're kind of ugly if you ask me (the Thomas Ford Memorial Library's in particular), but the kids seem to like them, judging by the comments in the comment section, at least. It was suggested that libraries should have their teen advisory boards design the library's My Space page because there's nothing more pathetic than an older person trying to write and act like a 15-year-old.

My Own Cafe is a My Space type site that is sponsored by the Southeastern Massachusetts Library System. On it teens can discuss books, movies, colleges or anything else that concerns them.

Likewise, libraries can establish pages on Facebook to reach college students. Libraries can use Facebook to post online "flyers" advertising libray services, and to take acquistions suggestions from students where they hang out.

It is also worth noting that among the younger generation, instant messaging has replaced e-mail as the communication method of choice.

The My Space and Facebook web services may be fads that will fade away as soon as they are replaced with something better. However, the principle that librarians should keep in mind is the idea of "ubiquitious librarianship," a user-centered approach to service that meets customers at their point of need. Karen Schniender's blog post "The User is Not Broken" is a frequently-cited source for ideas regarding ubiquitious librarianship.

Fun with Flickr

2006-12-02T15:22:00.000-06:00

Most people have at least a passing familiarity with Flickr, the website for storing and sharing photographs. But not everyone is aware that there's a whole group of Flickr-based tools that take the fun of photo-sharing to a whole new level:

FD's Flickr Toys:There's lots of fun to be had as you take your own or Flickr photographs and turn them into movie posters, motivational messages, or tributes to Andy Warhol.
Westmont (Illinois) Public Library has done something very interesting with its Flickr account. Staff take photos of new books lined up face-out. Each picture of a book cover is linked to the library's catalog--just click on the picture of the book you want, and you are brought to the library's catalog to check the status or place a hold. What a great idea!
The Nancy Pearl Pool: What do you do with your Nancy Pearl action figure? At my house, we call her "Avocado Head" and she's married to our Leonardo Da Vinci. Others find more creative activities. The Nancy Pearl Flickr Pool takes pictures of Nancy Pearl dolls in unusual situations and shares them with the world. Just another example of how Flickr creates community.
Colr Pickr: Specify a color and Colr Pickr will find Flickr photos that have the color as the dominant hue.
Retrivr: If you thought Colr Pickr is cool, try Retrivr. This tool allows you to draw a sketch of the picture you want to find, and then retrieves similar Flickr photos.
Flickr Leech: Programmable Web says this is "a handy data mining tool for Flickr. Search on interestingness, user, and other attributes."
Flicker Graph : This tool shows you relationships (as in "degrees of separation") among Flickr users.
Clockr: This Flash application uses random numbers taken from Flickr photographs to display the current time.
Spell with Flickr: Uses letter images from Flickr to spell what you've typed in, for that ever-popular ransome note effect.

Digital Life Aggregator Tools (i.e. Mashups)

2006-12-02T12:54:00.000-06:00

The following mashups were mentioned as useful adjuncts to one's digital life:

Frappr! Maps: Due to the popularity of Flickr, we have to put up with a lot of similarly named digital tools. Says its co-founder, "Frappr! Maps are like a triple mash-up of an online guest book, a hit log and a map -- three services that, combined, create a fun and visually appealing environment that will keep Web site visitors coming back for more..." Put another way, "Frappr! Maps give Web site owners and visitors an easy and unique way to visualize and interact with each other. Visitors can add their name, photo and message directly on a Web page embedded with Frappr! Maps, and the Web site owner gets real-time stats on where visitors are coming from and how often they visit."
Bashr This mashup "bashes together Wikipedia, flickr and del.icio.us" so you get encyclopedia-style text, pictures, and links all together.
Weather Bonk: According to the Programmable Web, this mashup provides "live weather, forecasts, webcams, and more on a Google Map."
LivePlasma: This French mashup combines Amazon recommendations to show relationships between bands, artists, and movies.
Chicago Crime.org: Mashes together a public database of reported crimes in Chicago with Google maps for a neighborhood by neighborhood look at city crime.
Book Burro: The second-place winner in OCLC's WorldCat mashup contest, this Firefox extension senses when you are looking at a web page for a book (for example at amazon.com), then makes available a small box on your screen that will tell you if the book is avaiable at local bookstores or--get this--at your local library. Some configuration required.

For even more mashups, see The Programmable Web

More on Mash Ups and "Radical Trust"

2006-12-02T11:51:00.000-06:00

"Mashing Up the Library" and "Mashup Mindset" were two presentations that discussed the creation of library-related, web-based mashups. A mashup is "is a website or web application that uses content from one or more sources to create a completely new service." Mashups "make data work harder" and often reveal new underlying patterns that were not previously noticeable.

The most common mashups today are geographical, meaning that they involve maps and/or zip code data. For example, one can use the Google maps API (Application Program Interface; it is one component of a mashup. 90% of current mashups use Google Maps) and the apartments for rent data from Craigslist to creat a dynamic rental map. At this time, most mashups are simple and of limited value, but fun.

As mashup technology matures, some foresee that libraries will become the place for users to create mashups, changing the library from a place to receive information into a place to synthesize and maybe even contribute information.

This is part of the whole "Library 2.0" ideal. A slide that appeared often at the conference was a picture of Albert Einstein writing the following on a blackboard:

Library 2.0 = (books and stuff + people + "radical trust") x participation.

On the concept of "radical trust", librarian Darlene Fichter writes:

We can only build emergent systems if we have radical trust. With an emergent system, we build something without setting in stone what it will be or trying to control all that it will be. We allow and encourage participants to shape and sculpt and be co-creators of the system. We don't have a million customers/users/patrons ... we have a million participants and co-creators.

Radical trust is about trusting the community. We know that abuse can happen, but we trust (radically) that the community and participation will work. In the real world, we know that vandalism happens but we still put art and sculpture up in our parks. As an online community we come up with safeguards or mechanisms that help keep open contribution and participation working.

"Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure & Choices for Libraries"

2006-12-02T10:56:00.000-06:00

This keynote speech opened the conference on Oct. 24. Speaker Clifford Lynch (the Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)) discussed the "impact of digitization on science and the humanities". In the scientific world, the rise of "e-science" has meant changes in the use and reuse of data.

In the humanities, there is still debate concerning the legitimacy of digital research (I supposed this means, for example, reading scanned copies of an author's personal papers, as opposed to visiting an archive and examining the originals). In the past, lack of data has been a problem for researchers in the humanities (i.e. paper letters are easily destroyed, but e-mail often lives on), but in the future, researchers may face a glut of data.

According to Lynch, the future of libraries may depend on whether they align themselves with science or the humanities. The library world's relationship to science has always been more distant than its relationship to the humanities. Scientists who use online journals on the web are often unaware that these subscription databases are provided by the library.

Librarianship may give rise to a new position, the "data scientist" who helps researchers do "data mining". Right now the "data scientist" is a "largely mythological" figure. Lynch predicts that in the future, data scientists will work not only in libraries, but in the settings where research actually occurs, such as laboratories, schools and museums.

"Data curation", the safe storage of data, is also a concern. For example, a great deal of data from federal projects was lost as the result of Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, there were no backups.

Lynch also forsees an internet-enabled renewal of interest in local history and amateur science.

The "Shrill Discourse of Demands"

2006-11-17T11:33:00.000-06:00

British politician Matthew Taylor has taken the "net-head" culture of task over its propensity to abuse politicians and make unreasonable demands of government. Bloggers in particular, he says, are responsible citizens regarding "all politicians as corrupt or "mendacious" by the media, which he described as 'a conspiracy to maintain the population in a perpetual state of self-righteous rage'".
Read more here.

Gadgets, Gadgets, Gadgets

2006-11-04T15:34:00.000-06:00

The "Gadgets" presentation at Internet Librarian is something of an annual tradition. Here are the items the presenters found new and noteworthy for 2006:

Aerocool Infinite Drive: Connects where your old 5.25 in. floppy drive used to be; this offers the ability to read 25 different memory card formats, 2 USB ports, and headphone and microphone jacks. $61.
IBM speech-to-speech transmission program: This program was created for the U.S. military to provide real-time translation for hundreds of languages. Nowword yet on when it will be available for the public.
Cell phone jammers: Interfere with the reception of cell phone calls. These are not legal in the U.S., but are available in the U.K. and Japan. $260.
Aimulet LA Bamboo Audio Device: According to Treehugger.com: From Japan, a batteryless, light-activated handheld audio communication device with an outer shell made from molded bamboo. The device itself is designed to be held to your ear, like a cell phone. When you stand over special LED emitters in the ground, Aimulet LA receives the light signals via an array of spherical micro solar cells set into the bottom of the handset. It translates the signals into audio messages that are transmitted through a tiny speaker in the device." No price yet.
Glow in the Duck: This is a rubber bathtub ducky that changes colors when it gets in water $12.95
USB Datalink Transfer Cable: Allows you to transfer data between two computers. $19.95
Printdreams Portable Printer: Hold it like a mouse, and it prints where you designate. $200.
Flowbee Hair Cutting Machine: Attach this to your vacuum cleaner for a haircut in minutes. The clippings go right into the vacuum cleaner. I am not making this up. $59.95
Palm Treo 700p 700w 680: These PDA models "combines a smarter phone with wireless email and messaging, built-in web browser, and rich media capabilities — all at blazing fast broadband-like speeds." (no price given)
LCD Scrolling Badge: Employees can be walking advertisements by wearing these badges that hold up to 10 scrolling messages. $40.
Omnidirectional Camera Smart Wheelchair: This wheelchair of the future offers lots of control because because it uses camera images to detects potential hazards that arise while in motion and decelerates or stops accordingly.
Ttraveling LCD projector: will weigh less than 4lbs and offer "native XGA".
Microsoft Zune: Microsoft's answer to the iPod will make its debut for the holiday season and cost about $250. Walking stereo speakers to go with it will set you back $26.99.
iTTUSB: Convert your old 33 1/3's to CDs or MP3 by using this special turntable/USB device. $119. This is what my husband Bob is getting for Christmas!
Kurzweil National Federation of the Blind Reader: A compact, handheld device that scans and reads materials to people with visual impairments, from books to address labels to ATM receipts and more. $3,495.
Museo Silver Rag Paper: Very high-end paper for printing out digital photographs $52.00 for 25 sheets.
Tandberg Video Conferencing: This Norwegian company offers a product that will allow you to hold a videoconference on your desktop computer. The company recently won a 21st Century Best Practices Award from the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) for "leadership in the field of distance learning."
Mop Slippers. Mop your floors as you walk. $9.95.
Cell Sticks: The next generation in rechargable batteries.
Samsung 10-megapixel Cell Phone: Take really sharp photographs with your cell phone. This phone has the highest picture resolution ever and even exceeds the resolution of mid-end digital cameras.
TV phone: Samsung is developing cell phone that can receive TV signals. So far, Samsung plans to sell this item in Korea, but has no immediate plans to make it available in the U.S.
USB oil burner: For instant aromatherapy at home or at work, plug in a $19 oil burner into a USB port on your computer. Those who have tried it say it is very soothing.
MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is partnering with the U.S. army to develop technologies that will allow soldiers to literally leap tall buildings in a single bound and instantly seal off battle wounds, among other projects. It may be a long time before this technology is available on the open market.
USB heated gloves: Warm these special gloves using a computer USB port before you venture out into the cold. Only $22.95.
Laptops without hard drives. Laptops that depend on flash-based storage to carry computer programs as well as documents are the wave of the future.
Slingbox: According to Wikipedia, Slingbox is "a TV streaming device that enables consumers to remotely view their cable, satellite, or personal video recorder (PVR) programming from an Internet-enabled computer with a broadband Internet connection." At the conference I spoke to someone who said she had been watching TV on her laptop; perhaps this is what she used.
Sanrio Actroid: The Japanese company that makes Hello Kitty also makes robots. The Actroid is a female-looking robot (a "fembot") that can be rented for $3500 for five days.
iPod jacket: For $750, one can buy a jacket with an iPod integrated into it. It is not machine washable.
Electrolux screen fridge: This very high-end ($9000) kitchen appliance is designed to be the center of your home. It has wireless touch screen that can connect with TV or the internet so that you can read e-mail or check the online weather report as you make your shopping list. Reportedly, this has been test-marketed in Europe but hasn't really caught on yet.
Nokia open cell phone: A cell phone that folds like a traditional Japanese fan. These are available yet, due to problems with developing a functional display screen that will fold like a traditional Japanese fan.

It will be interesting to see which of these up-and-coming gadgets become standard-issue in a few years, and which will die on the vine.

Internet Librarian - Second Life

2006-11-04T15:31:00.000-06:00

In the name of "going to where the users are," presenters at the Internet Librarian conference frequently mentioned the virtual world called Second Life. Users "play" in the Second Life environment, but it is not quite accurate to say that SL is a game, since there is no real goal. Rather, Second Life is an online world where people represented by cartoon-like figures called "avatars") can do many of the same things people do in real life, including shopping, gambling and having illicit encounters. Second Life even has its own form of currency (called Linden Dollars, after Linden, the company that created and runs Second Life). You can spend your real-life currency to buy Linden Dollars, then use Linden Dollars to buy items or even develop virtual "real estate".

Since its inception in April 2006, Second Life has grown from 180,000 participants to over a million. People from all over the world participate, and many describe it as "addicting." As it is described, SL sounds like a chance to take part in risky behaviors without consequences. Not only can one's avatar do things many wouldn't dare to do in real life, users can change their identities and avatars at will. So, their behaviors never catch up with them.

Users do have to have a high end computer system or else they are likely to be very frustrated, and their are fees for registration and participation.

Presenters encouraged librarians to volunteer to staff Info Island, a library-like space in the Second Life milieu. The Alliance Library System (which serves Southern and Western Illinois) has really gotten involved in Second Life. In a press release, they detail the many activities they plan to celebrate the official grand opening of Info Island; all of these events will take place in the virtual world. Librarians who are active in SL say that it gives them an opportunity to implement Library 2.0 concepts and to think through the role of the library in the both the virtual setting and the real world.

Mashups

2006-11-04T10:41:00.000-06:00

I attended a presentation with the intriguing title "What is a Mash-Up and Why Would I Want One?". In the web world, a mashup "is a website or web application that uses content from one or more sources to create a completely new service." (the term "mashup" derives from the recording industry, where a "mashup" is the combination of a vocal track with the instrumental track from another song).

Mashups rely on open APIs (which stands for "application program interface; according to Webopedia this is "a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks. A programmer puts the blocks together."). Mashups are still in their infancy, but as IBM says about its new Enterprise Mashup, "Today's playground is tomorrow's highrise."

Mashups are an essential part of Web 2.0 ("technologies that allow data to become independent of the person who produced it or the site it originated on. It deals with how information can be broken up into units that flow freely from one site to another, often in ways the producer did not foresee or intend," according to Robin Good of the Master New Media web site).

One example of a mashup is Amazon Light 4.0, which combines Amazon.com's data with Yahoo News and Google News (so you can find news articles that are relevant to books). You can even use Amazon Light 4.0 to find out if a local library has a given book (many libraries are included, including some rather obscure ones, but WNPL is not. It is unclear how a library gets included).

Many current mashups combine Google Maps with something else. Housing Maps is an example; it allows you to combine apartment rental information from Craig's List with Google Maps to find out where the apartments you are interested in are in relation to each other.

Meebo allows you to "instant message from anywhere" by logging onto AOL, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, Jabber (used by services including Google Talk) but eliminating the need for an instant-messaging client on the user's computer. This might be a tool to consider for instant messaging at the reference desk.

At this point, I think I'd rather use others' mashups than think up my own, but this does sound like a trend to watch.

Technological Competencies

2006-11-04T10:25:00.000-06:00

Everyone in the organization--from the part-time shelvers to the full-time managers-- benefits from technological conpetence. Usually, a competence-based approach to tech training involves creating a list of desired skills ("competencies") on which employees can either rate themselves or have another (a peer or supervisor) rate them.

Important benefits of taking a competency-based approach to technological training for all staff members include:

More accurate job descriptions
More accurate performance evaluations
Reveal the need for additional staff training
Addresses feelings of inequality among staff members
Helps staff adjust to and handle change

Various styles of checklists were discussed. At Warren-Newport, we have created such checklists. I think the difference here is the emphasis on extending the competency-based approach to all staff members, even those who do not routinely deal with technology in their jobs. It is an important tenet of "Library 2.0" that all staff must be technologically empowered, or, to put it another way, if the patrons are likely to ask about a particular technology, all staff must know about it.

Internet Librarian part. 2 -- Online Outreach

2006-11-03T11:44:00.000-06:00

Sarah Houghton aka "The Librarian in Black" (literally, every time I saw her, she was wearing all black)offered the following twenty tips for library online outreach (I believe that she was the one who said that it's the height of arrogance for librarians to expect patrons to actually walk through their doors. Or, something like that). I've marked the suggestions I found especially intriguing with an asterisk (*):

Make sure that the library's web site is findable in the major search engines, and the minor ones, too.
*Make sure the that the library's web site is listed in the major online library directories, such as Libdex, and Libraries411.
Make sure the library's web site is represented in WikiMapia, a new wiki whose goal it is "to describe the entire earth".
*Make sure that there is an article about the library in Wikipedia. If you don't like what it says, edit it.
*List library programs and events on event sites like upcoming.org, artsopolis, and Craigslist Chicago
Make sure local government, school and community websites link to the library's web site.
Monitor local blogs and tech interest group message board for postings about the library.
*Set up a library profile in MySpace and FaceBook.
Offer reference service via instant messaging.
*If the library offers free WiFi (as WNPL does), make sure that it is listed in online directories of free WiFi services.
Monitor local "social review" sites (like Yelp in the San Francisco area) to find out what people are saying about the library (and, to communicate with users through them).
Make sure that the library is listed in geographic search engines like Geody.
Make sure that the library's holdings in WorldCat are up-to-date.
Make sure that the library is finable through Google Local.
Involve staff in virtual worlds such as Second Life.
Make the library newsletter available via e-mail and/or RSS feed.
List library staff as experts in expert finding tools
Make your web site's audio and video content findable (I'm not sure what I meant by this in my notes)
Start a library blog
Subcribe to RSS feeds

Internet Librarian 2006 pt 1. Library 2.0

2006-10-31T13:28:00.000-06:00

I attended the Internet Librarian 2006 Conference in Monterey, California. It was great, and I learned a lot.

I attended:

Mon. Oct. 23

Opening Keynote "Grabbing Attention" by J.L. Jance (noted mystery writer)
Public Library 2.0: Emerging Technologies and Changing Roles
Cultivating Tech Savvy Library Staff: Competencies and Tips
Reaching Patrons: Online Outreach for PLs
The Second Life Library 2.0: Going to Where the Users Are
Gadgets, Gadgets

Tues. Oct. 24

Opening Keynote: "Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure and Choices for Libraries" by Clifford Lynch
What is a Mashup and Why Would I Want One?
Mashup Mindset: Designing Compelling Content
Flickr and Libraries
MySpace and Facebook
The RSS and JavaScript Cook Book: Creating One Stop

Thurs. Oct. 25

Opening Keynote: Web Presence for Internet Librarians by Shari Thurow
Wikis for Libraries
Training Tutorial Tour and Tips
What's Hot and New with Social Software
Blogging Update: Applications and Tips
Closing Keynote: "Social Computing and the Info Pro" by Elizabeth Lane Lawley

Major Themes of the Conference:

The dominant theme of the conference was the emergence of "Library 2.0" -- how libraries can remain relevant in the 21st century by adapting to changes in technology and culture.

The "Library 2.0" model is a collaborative one; the idea is, as one speaker noted, to "put the 'we' in 'web'". Its central tenants include:

Providing service to the patron at his/her point of need. One speaker said, "It is the height of arrogance to expect patrons to come to the library. This idea goes beyond simply providing remote access to databases, although that is a good start. "Providing service at the point of need may mean making library staff available in a virtual world (such as the virtual world called Second Life, an online environment in which your "avatar" can do everything one can do in real life, including gambling, shopping, developing real estate, and visiting a red-light district, not to mention asking reference questions).
Expanding the brand: Libraries should provide innovative services and learn lessons from non-library organizations.
Thinking about the stories the library is telling. What kind of experiences do people have in relation to the library?
"The User Is not Broken" is the name of a blog post by noted library writer Karen Schneider that was frequently cited by IL presenters. Just like it's arrogant to expect library users to actually come to the library building, it is arrogant to assume that if a computer system (or whatever) is hard to use, the problem is with the user. "You cannot change the user, but you can transform the user experience to meet the user," she writes. "Meet people where they are--not where you want them to be."
Using social networking tools, such as Flickr and MySpace, can help break down barriers between librarians and patrons. For example, the library can offer a photographic vitual tour on Flickr (a photo sharing website). Establishing a MySpace profile for the library was advocated as well.
Libraries should learn from gamers that it's ok to make mistakes.
Create a culture of trust: Libraries should look for ways to demonstrate that they trust users and trust their own staffs. "Radical decentralization" was another frequently used phrase at this conference. For eaxmple, radical decentralization may involve setting up the staff intranet as a wiki, so that all staff may contribute to it. Similarly, patrons should be empowered to contribute book reviews to the library catalog (just like the user reviews that appear on Amazon.com).
Speaking of staff, *all* library staff should be up-to-date on new and emerging technologies. For example, the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenberg County created "Learning 2.0" program to a self-paced program to train all staff (from the shelvers to the administration) on a variety of technological activities, from setting up a blog to viewing YouTube videos. If the public is likely to ask about it, goes the Library 2.0 philosophy, the staff, all staff, need to know about it.

In Library 2.0, it is also worth noting, carrots are preferred over sticks. All staff members who completed the 23 activities as specified in the program received a free MP3 player.

What Other Libraries Are Doing

2006-10-14T16:32:00.000-05:00

On Friday, October 13, I attended a "WebsitePalooza" at NSLS system headquarters. Representatives of five NSLS public libraries of varying sizes, demographics, and budgets (Gail Borden, McHenry, Round Lake Area, Vernon Area, and Zion Benton; Barrington was also scheduled but bowed out) discussed what they are doing with their web sites. Because the meeting was sponsored by NSLS's Public Relations Networking Group, the focus of the talk was more on web site usage and usability than on technology (although the conversation did get rather "techie" at times). The overall trend seems to be to have multiple people in the organization contribute to the library's web site through the use of "bloggy" (blog-like) content management systems such as Mambo and Joomla. Mambo and Joomla (more properly written "Joomla!", but I don't like using exclamation points with prduct names) are both free, open source products. Mambo runs on Linux and Joomla runs on (I think) Windows.

Another interesting idea is to include homemade videos on the web site, specifically of library staff doing brief "book talks" (I think this was on Gail Borden's new site, which has not been officially launched yet). Vernon Area has a classical music library on it's site--just click a link and the site will stream music. Round Lake has had good results with using interactive polls and quizzes to get people (especially teens) to come back to their site again and again.

The participant from McHenry Public Library mentioned that E-vents 4.0 allows pictures and surveys to become part of the patron's program-signup experience. McHenry also uses a color code in E-Vents to distinguish adult programs, teen programs, and children's programs (the colors are rather garish on the McHenry site, but I bet other colors could be chosen).

Vernon and Zion Benton are both using Illinois E-Pay for the online collection of fines.

One participant mentioned a new Illinois law that requires public entities like libraries to post their board meeting agendas and minutes online.

All in all, a most productive and interesting meeting!

Net News is Back

2006-10-14T15:52:00.000-05:00

It's been awhile since I've sent out Net News as an e-mail publication. I've continued to update the Net News Archives blog, however, although not as frequently as in times past. But now NN is back, and hopefully here to stay. This issue contains some articles that have been on the blog, but never made it to e-mail as well as some newer material.

Next week I will be traveling to Monterey for the Internet Librarian conference. That should provide some inspiring material!

"Oh, to Feel Human"

2006-09-09T16:29:00.000-05:00

Slightly off topic, but nonetheless interesting, this column (from _Exceptional Parent_) magazine, lists the many "attributes shared by all humans (regardless of culture, ethnicity or geography)."

Bad Bad Ware

2006-08-07T21:06:00.000-05:00

An often-quoted part of Google, Inc.'s corporate philosophy is "don't be evil". Exactly what this means is open to interpretation; however, here is a new example of how Google is trying to do good.

Google has teamed up with an organization called Stop Badware to warn users when they are about to visit a web site that distributes "badware" such as spyware or adware.
the standard definitions of "badware" doesn't usually include software viruses, although those are certainly bad too). A typical badware site entices visitors by offering free software. When a user installs a free screensaver, for example, he gets more than he bargained for, such as software than causes "contextual ads" to pop up on his computers screen. A victim of badware installation may notice that his computer run more slowly than usual or even crash.

The Stop Badware organization is the brainchild of Harvard Law School's Beckman Institute for Internet and Society and Oxford University's Oxford Internet Institute. It has other high-profile partners, including Consumers Union, publisher of Consumers Reports, but Google is probably the most important because it has the power to warn users of potential badware threats.

When, from Google, a user clicks on a dangerous site, a big full-page warning (adorned with a red and white X) comes up. Here is an example. As of this writing, Stop Badware only has 12 sites on its bad list, but the list may be expected to grow as users contribute their badware horror stories to the organization's database.

Still No Tears for Russian Spammer

2006-08-07T20:19:00.000-05:00

Last year around this time, I wrote a story about Vardan Kushnir, the self-appointed, Moscow-based czar of the Russian spammers. He was brutally murdered in July 2005.

A recent Wired article about Kushnir's life and unmourned death (on Russian tabloid headline about the murder read "Spammer Gets What He Deserved!") gives interesting details about the scummy business dealings and unwholesome proclivities of Mr. Kushnir against the chaotic backdrop of post-Soviet Russian society. Kushnir, a native of Armenia, was devoted to Scientology, spoke unaccented English, and lived with his mother even after he earned a huge fortune by Russian standards as the spam king. Because he was known for boasting about his sexual conquests, using his spamming capabilities to harrass government officials, and failing to pay his employees, he had many enemies. His murder remains unsolved, although recently four suspects have been detained.

Last year, I noted that much of the spam that passed through my home spam filter into my inbox was in Russian. Now, none of it is. So perhaps I too was caught in Kushnir's web.

Chat with Gabbly

2006-06-26T20:11:00.000-05:00

As you know our participation in MyWebLibrarian (which has morphed into AskAwayIllinois) has ended. However, if you find yourself missing online chat, here's a new possibility: Gabbly. Just add http://gabbly.com in front of any URL, and Gabbly opens a window for you to do instant messaging in.

Here's an example of the proper format: http://gabbly.com/http://altavista.com.

I tried the AltaVista example given above, and was surprised to see that there were actually other people chatting on the AltaVista main page as well (although, oddly, they must have signed off when the announcement "gabber65 has joined" came on the screen. Do I really have that effect on people? Or maybe they, whoever they were, figured that everyone had forgotten AltaVista, so they'd have some privacy and were annoyed when I showed up). On the various other sites I tried, I found no one to talk to. And, it didn't work at all on the Chicago Sun Times site.

I think if Gabbly has practical uses at all, it would be for planned sessions for people who know who they are chatting with. Gabbly could be fun, for example, for proud parents who have posted pictures of their new arrival on a now-obligatory baby website. The parents could chat with their far-flung relatives while everybody's looking at the same pictures of the little darling.

New Opportunties in "Digital Sweatshops"

2006-05-23T15:48:00.000-05:00

Back when I was in library school, I remember hearing rumors about battalions of typists in unnamed third world countries who worked night and day to key in citations into (then new) InfoTrac. Reportedly, these shadowy third-world keyboardists are still hard at work, but now they're keying in documents with inconsistent typefaces such as restaurant menus and correcting scanned historical documents.

The online edition of Business Week has a fascinating article, "Life on the Web's Factory Floor" that lists job opportunities in the new world of "digital sweatshops". The story features a former librarian/indexer who left a job as a creator of Google's AdSense ads (the work is much less creative than it sounds) because the pressure-cooker atmosphere (reportedly, the manager stood over the workers and "barked" at them to type faster, faster, faster). In the U.S., needless to say, the turnover rate for such jobs is high.

In third world countries, scanning, typing and correcting jobs provide low-paying, mind-numbing, but nonetheless valuable work for many people, especially people with disabilities who might otherwise be unemployable. One overseas firm teaches its impoverished employees English and computer skills, then has them practice by typing and proofing historic documents, such as over 130 years' worth of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper (that project would be a real eye-opener for someone in a wheelchair living on subsistence wages).

Expect More

2006-05-13T16:13:00.000-05:00

George W. Bush and his administration are not exactly known for their transparency. But there are some things they're willing to be open about. The Office of Management and Budget has just come out with a new web site that rates the effectiveness of the federal government's domestic programs.

Surprisingly, 28% of programs have been declared either "ineffective" (4%) or
"results not demonstrated" (24%) and they're all listed at the site. Take a look at Expect More to find out how programs compare, and how the government plans to improve or phase out with programs deamed "ineffective" and measure the performance of those programs that haven't been able to prove their worth.

13 Digit ISBNs

2006-05-13T15:49:00.000-05:00

You may or may not have hear that on Jan. 1, 2007, the publishing world will switch to the use of 13 digit, rather than 10 digit ISBNs. What does this mean to you? Find out more at these convenient links:

Book Industry Group: Are You Ready for ISBN-13?

Get Ready for the New ISBN!

Koreans Prefer Naver

2006-04-29T13:07:00.000-05:00

Here in the United States, we're unfortunately inclined to think that everyone else in the world shares our preferences. One example is our insistence on establishing democracy in countries that haven't been through the equivalent of the Enlightenment. Another example is the exportation of Google. The Big G is well-loved in many quarters because of its uncluttered interface, fast search results, and automated approach to content management (you will remember that pages are ranked in Google Search and news items are listed Google News without human intervention, to cite just two examples). The features that make Google so popular in the U.S. and in mamy other parts of the world work against it in South Korea, where Google Korea gets just about 11%-17%, of unique visits, depending on who is doing the counting.

The star of Korean search engines, Naver, is everything that Google is not. Naver is designed to have users stay around the site and check out its various features, not just "search and go" as Google emphasizes. South Koreans enjoy one of the highest per capita broadband availablity rates, and Koreans like to use their speedy connections to view animations and graphics. The "uncluttered" look popularized by Google equals "boring" to them. As a group, Koreans also prefer a personal touch. Naver offers sites evaluated by humans and organized into categories, much like Yahoo still does, if you can find their ever-shrinking categories list.

Naver also allows users to ask and answer questions. Reportedly, questions on universally popular topics like dieting and computers are popular. {Parenthetically, for its part, Yahoo recently introduced a "Yahoo Answers" service that allows users to ask and answer questions. Examples so far include as "Is sleeping a thing of the past?" and "What is your favorite type of bread?" I haven't seen anything so far that I would characterize as a reference question).

Apparently, Google is working toward increasing its Korean market share, but this task will probably be difficult. Once people find a search engine they like, it is hard to get them to switch. I wouldn't be surprised if a certain amount of Korean nationalism came into play as well.

For more on this story, see "Google Fails to Make Inroads in S. Korea" by Burt Herman

The End of FrontPage

2006-04-24T20:10:00.000-05:00

Jan brought this to my attention: Microsoft has announced that it is discontinuing its FrontPage web authoring software program in "late 2006". It will be replaced by three new products: Microsoft Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 ("for the enterprise information worker"), "Microsoft® Expression™ Web Designer ("for the professional Web designer") and Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005 ("for the Web developer."). The products that are really new, Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 and Microsoft® Expression™ Web Designer "are partially based on FrontPage technologies and will be launched in the second half of 2006."

I can hardly add anything to Microsoft's own press release , a masterpiece of corporate jargoneering, so for further information, I'll just refer you to that. How can I top:

[Use] Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 if you are a solution creator and content author working using SharePoint technologies. SharePoint® Designer 2007 will enable information workers to develop applications and solutions on top of the SharePoint® platform to enable organizational agility, business process automation, and get the full value of Microsoft® Office applications on the SharePoint platform.

I like that phrase "solution creator". Maybe I should campaign to get my job title changed.

"Informational Apartheid"

2006-04-10T21:02:00.001-05:00

The telecommunications industry is lobbying hard to get the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006 (COPE) passed in Congress. If it succeeds, opponents warn, the internet as we know it may be fundamentally changed--and "informational apartheid" (in the words of one legislator) may set in.

The new legislation would allow network providers (like AT&T, for example) to charge web sites fees in exchange for faster access speeds. Sites that pay up would load faster on users' computers than those that don't. Since loading speed is a critical factor in determining web site usability and popularity, it doesn't take much imagination to picture the implications of this. If a tiny-e-commerce startup or new search engine cannot load as fast as the already established megaplayers in the field (because they can't afford to pay the networks to speed them up), the new kids on the block are unlikely to survive. Interestingly, even the high tech megaplayers--Yahoo, Google and Microsoft among them--have come out against this new legislation. In a letter to the Congressional Energy and Technology Committee, they wrote:

Consumers in the marketplace, and not network operators, should decide what content and services succeed or fail...this must be guaranteed by a meaningful and enforceable net neutrality requirement.

For their part, the telecommunications giants argue that if companies want premium service, they should be able to get it--at a price.

Remember that phrase: "net neutrality". It may be become as big a buzzword in the later 2000's as "digital divide" was in the 1990's. As the San Francisco Chronicle defines it:

Net neutrality is about ensuring that all denizens of cyberspace have access to the same thoroughfares, and not relegating some content to country lanes while preferred data zips along the turnpike.

It's about ensuring that no sites or services are discriminated against -- by providers or consumers -- simply because they can't afford special treatment.

One group that's fighting to preserve "net neutrality" is Save the Internet. You can even use this group's comprehensive web site to find out where your legislators stand on this crucial issue, and even send them an e-mail in support of net neutrality. It just took a few clicks to express my opinion to Dick Durbin, Barak Obama, and Melissa Bean.

Online Drinks

2006-03-11T15:21:00.000-06:00

First there were online hugs. Now there are online drinks. Two graduate students at MIT have invented drinking glasses that allow two people in separate locations to feel as though they are drinking together. As reported by Boing-Boing ("The Directory of Wonderful Things") and the magazine New Scientist:

When either person picks up a glass, red LEDs on their partner's glass glow gently. And when either puts the glass to their lips, sensors make white LEDs on the rim of the other glass glow brightly, so you can tell when your other half takes a sip....The technology could also be used to check that hospital patients or elderly people are drinking enough water.

Now one never need drink alone.

New Web Site Helps Readers Find “Cozies”

2006-03-11T11:15:00.000-06:00

For those who have not yet seen it, former WNPL trustee Diana Vickery has a great new web site, the Cozy Library. This site helps readers who like their books “cozy” (“chocked-full of kind-hearted characters, with a terrific story masterfully told, and a satisfying – and generally happy -- ending. No explicit sex or violence, no wall-to-wall profanity”) identify new titles to read, or find out more about their favorite authors. Be sure to take a look!

Writely Bought by Google

2006-03-11T09:45:00.000-06:00

I first learned of Writely, an online service that lets you create documents and edit them online, kind of like an online word processor, back in February, when Stacy wrote about it in her News Sun article "Getting Connected". Now, not surprisingly, Writely has been acquired by Google.

Right now, Writely is closed to new registrants as it completes its migration to Google, so I haven't been able to try it. Those who have, however, say that

[Writely] is a very functional word processor with most of the bells and whistles you’d expect - a range of fonts and styles, embedded images (up to 2 megs each), spell checker, etc. It has a fantastic wysiwyg editor. It also has an option to upload and/or save in Word format. (from TechCrunch 8/31/05)

Writely is made possible by new web development technique called called AJAX, which stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript And XML". Says Wikipedia (which, I have to admit, is often useful for understandable explanations of technology):

The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.

Here's another good explanation of AJAX: Why AJAX Matters Now by Jesse James Garrett.

Another example of AJAX in action is Google Suggest, which suggests terms you may want to search for as you type. Those in the know also say that Gmail and Google Maps make use of AJAX as well.

If Writerly is something that interests you, you can find out more about it on the Writely Blog , not surprisingly hosted by another Google acquisition, Blogger.

New ICT Test Gauges Tech Literacy

2006-02-04T13:31:00.000-06:00

College-bound high schoolers already have the SAT, ACT and AP tests to worry about; soon they may have one more hurdle to jump on their way to post-secondary academic life. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) has just announced upcoming "pilot testing" for its new ICT Literacy Assessment. ICT stands for Information and Communication Technology Literacy, and this 75-minute, computer-based test gauges the student's ability to "find, use, manage, evaluate, and convey information efficiently and effectively."

Unlike most student assessments, this test is not multiple choice; instead, it is "scenario-based." According to the ETS web site, students may be asked to perform such tasks as "Downloading and installing a (simulated) video player," "Synthesizing information from IMs into a word-processing document," "Selecting the best database for an information need." and even "Preparing a text message for a cell phone". Apparently, test takers are even going to be asked to do reference interviews; a really surprising sample activity is "Asking questions to clarify a customer's information need".

Because this test is still in "beta" mode, so to speak, many intriguing questions about it remain unanswered. I wonder how high schools intend to prepare students to take the ICT, and I wonder how colleges and universities will interpret the results. The SAT and ACT are frequently criticized for alleged "cultural bias," but it's hard to imagine an assessment that would be more biased toward the middle and upper classes than this one. How will the playing field be leveled for students on the have-not end of the "digital divide"?

If testing for high schoolers' information literacy catches on, perhaps the library could offer review classes in software installation and reference interviewing, for those who don't match the stereotype of the techno-savvy teen.

To see for yourself, go to the ETS web site and follow the link to "ICT Information Literacy" under "Tests" on the left hand side.

Wikipedia Vandalism Hits Librarians

2006-01-30T19:34:00.000-06:00

For several reasons, I am careful about not using vulgar words in Net News. For one thing, this is an employer-sponsored endeavor. For another, it's a web site that theoretically could be read by anyone from anywhere, and I don't want anyone to find it by searching for sexual or scatological terms. Thirdly, I think that the use of such terms shows a lack of vocabulary, education and breeding. All this is to say, I can't tell you exact the exact words someone out there has been replacing the Wikipedia entry on "Librarians" with, but they aren't very nice. Librarians are evil, mindless c%^#s" reads one example. I think you get the idea.

As you know, the culprits could be anyone from anywhere, and their nonspecific language does not give us any clue about the nature of their gripes with the library profession. I've seen it suggested that the defacement could have to do with the ALA Council's resolution against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, but that theory seems unlikely. Since when has the non-library world paid much attention to ALA resolutions?

Some insist on putting a positive spin on the matter. "[H]ighlighting of Wikipedia vandalism usually just makes those articles, eventually, even more accurate than before. People keep blanking out the article on librarians and replacing it with epithets, which I think has only served to make sure that more people keep an eye on the article and keep it accurate," writes a librarian who is also a contributor to Metafilter, which is the only place I've seen this issue discussed.

Wikipedia may not pass the COCOA-A test for reliable reference sources, but it is an interesting way of gauging the internet Zeigeist.

Make Your Own Graph Paper

2006-01-24T15:45:00.000-06:00

It's an idea so simple, I wonder why no one thought of it before. The Imcomptech web site (motto: "Ugly Website, Brilliant Content") offers you an easy way to print lines on paper, or to make your own graph paper (in PDF format) according to your own specifications. Also check out the amusing section of British authors (see left hand side for link).

Interesting Google Sidenote

2006-01-24T11:54:00.000-06:00

The grossly inflated salaries of corporate CEO's often make it into the news. The CEO of Wal-Mart makes something like $23 million per year. But, you know how much Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders and leaders of Google, get paid per year? $1.00! It's their stock options that make the billionaires,which means they potentially have a lot to lose if the price of Google stock declines.

Pay Fines Via the Library's Web Site

2006-01-21T12:41:00.000-06:00

The Smithtown (N.Y.) Public Library now offers the patrons the option of paying library fines over $5.00 online via Visa or MasterCard. An interesting idea, but to offer such service, the library would have to pay all the fees associated with taking credit card payments. It might cost more in dollars than the convenience and p.r. value is worth. Any thoughts?

Note: this is the first NetNewsArchives post that will also appear in the new WNPL WebWeavers blogfor those of us who are involved in the redesign of the library's web site.

Subpoena

2006-01-21T11:44:00.000-06:00

You may have heard that Google has been subpoena'd by the U.S. government. Specifically, the government is looking for evidence to help it defend COPA (the Child Online Protection Act) in the upcoming court battle Gonzales vs. ACLU. The feds are asking for one million random Web addresses from Google's databases as well as records of all search terms entered on Google during a given one-week period. The requested data would not identify any particular Google user.

It turns out that Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have also received government demands for search logs, and they've quietly complied. Google's getting all the attention in this matter because the search giant has refused to hand over the data. Google's stock price (it's now under $400/share!) has suffered for this brave stand, but the price dip is likely to be only temporary. Google may even be the ultimate victor in Gonzales vs. ACLU, if it can capitalize on its newfound role as defender of user privacy.

For more on this issue, which is way too complex to summarize here, see

CNET's "What does the Google Subpoena mean?" FAQ

Keeping Up with Google

2006-01-21T10:45:00.000-06:00

There's always so much going on with the world's most popular search engine that it can be a full-time job just for the librarian just to keep up. Google now has a corporate "Library Partnership Team" that publishes a Google Librarian newsletter that you can subacribe to or read on the web. The current (January) issue features a good article by well-known library writer Karen G. Schneider on evaluating web sites.

Meanwhile, Julie (no last name given), a librarian at the Cleveland Public Library, is doing much the same thing from her vantage point in western Ohio. Julie's created a Google Librarian , website designed to be the

ultimate guide to Google made especially for Librarians (sic) and information professionals. We understand that your quest for information is not limited to books, and extends to electronic media. Google Librarian was created to help you - the librarian - master the art of online searching and harness the infinite power of Google and its services. We provide you with tips, tricks, strategies, lesson plans, tutorials, and easy to understand explanations to make your Google experience the best. As an added bonus, we will also track Google development and keep you up-to-date with the latest Google innovations

Julie offers a blog and even a monthly e-mail newsletter to help you stay current with all Google is doing, both as a search engine and as a corporation. One would hope that Julie's production would be more objective than the Google-issued material, but that doesn't seem likely. She's a self-described "huge advocate of Google," a Google Groupie, if you will. She writes:

3. Accountability. Google's company motto is "Don't be evil", and they take it very seriously. It's nice to see a company striving for something more than just the almightly (sic) dollar.

So, who's Google accountable to? Its stockholders. And what do stockholders want? Profits (aka "the almighty dollar"). I love Google and I use it every day, but I think Julie's idealistic assessment may be more in line with what the company used to be (pre-IPO) than what it is now.

But I do hope for her sake that Larry and Sergey notice Julie's efforts to promote their product and offer her a job on the Library Partnership Team.

If all this Google Love gets on your nerves, try Google Watch for an alternative view of the search engine and its influence. And if Google Watch seems too negative to be true, try Google Watch Watch for an alternative view of Google Watch.

DHS-ILL Hoax Exposed

2005-12-27T12:06:00.000-06:00

The story about the college student who claimed that the Department of Homeland Security knocked on his door after he ILL's Chairman Mao's Little Red Book has been exposed as a hoax. The story got quite a bit of media attention, and as journalists and others descended upon the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth campus (a state school, not to be confused with the elite Ivy League Dartmouth College) looking for details, the student in question embroidered his story more and more. But he couldn't produce any evidence to support his allegations. Finally, he tearfully admitted it was all a lie. Poor kid, he got in way over his head.

Beware (Maybe) the Knock on Your Door

2005-12-19T18:58:00.000-06:00

I was all concerned about this story until I found out that it may just be the latest internet hoax. Even the American Library Association has gotten involved in checking this story's accuracy. Meanwhile, here's what's allegedly going on:

"I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of The Little Red Book]," Professor Pontbriand said. "Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring interlibrary loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

The above quote, from an article that appeared in the Massachusetts newspaper The Standard Times on Dec. 17, 2005, encapsulates the entire story. The professor quoted above claims that one of his students at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth (not to be confused with Dartmouth College in Rhode Island) was visited by agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after he ILL'd an unabridged edition of Mao Tse-Tung's classic of Chinese Communism, The Little Red Book. According to the story, the agents told the student that the book was on a federal "watch-list". Furthermore, the student's "background, which included significant time abroad, triggered [the agents]to investigate the student further." Allegedly, the agents brought the ILL'd book directly to the student's home, but wouldn't let him keep it (that's the detail that really makes this story sound fake to me. Since when have federal agents hand-delivered ILL's? And since when has the DHS started telling subjects that they're being watched?).

The student himself has not been publically identified because, the newspaper says, he "fears repercussions". The student apparently hasn't spoken directly to the reporter who wrote the story, although the reporter claims he knows who the student is. The reporter only spoke to the above-named professor and one other at UMass-Dartmouth.

There are those who suspect that this story may be the latest version of the old "my dog ate my term paper" tall tale, although the journalist who wrote the article says he stands by his reporting. At any rate, it doesn't sound like anything came of the investigation. If it is true, however, it does make you wonder--where are the feds supposedly getting this ILL information? And why don't they have anything better to do?

My Virtual Model

2005-12-19T18:44:00.000-06:00

I don't know about you, fellow Big Losers of 2005, but I'm seriously reconsidering rejoining Weight Watchers. I'm the kind of person who needs external accountability and inspiration. Fortunately, to help in the inspiration department, there's an online tool that can help me, and perhaps you too, imagine yourself at different sizes. It's called My Virtual Model, and it allows you to create an online "model" of your body type. Change the weight specification, and you can see a shape like yours but twenty pounds lighter, or if you dare, twenty pounds heavier.

If you click on "Weight Loss Imaginer" on this site, you'll be told to go to the NutriSystem site to sign up for an ID first. You don't have to do this; you can just use the regular service to imagine different weights.

Even if weight loss isn't your thing, you could use the My Virtual Model service to "try on" clothes at L.L. Bean, Lands End, and others to see what they look like on your specified shape.

Online Hugs

2005-12-19T17:39:00.000-06:00

Scientists in Singapore say that they've developed just the tool for working parents who want to stay close to their children: the online hug. All the hugee has to do is wear a special hugging jacket. The hugger uses the internet (how hasn't been disclosed)to signal to the jacket to give the hugee a squeeze. They're testing it on Singaporean chickens (who must feel very well-loved by now), and are hoping to market it to parents sometime in the unspecified future.

Wikipedia's Crisis of Authority

2005-12-05T19:40:00.000-06:00

As you know, I'm not crazy about Wikipedia, the huge internet-based encyclopedia that allows anyone from anywhere to write and/or edit its articles. Although some people think it is an expression of the collective intelligence of the people, I can't get past the fact that it is sorely lacking in Authority, the last and most important component of the COCOA-A rubric for the evaluation of web sites. I guess you could say that I don't have much faith in the collective intelligence of everyone from everywhere. It's not that people don't know stuff; it's that their motives for writing may be mixed, at best. And if you don't know who the writers are, you can't judge what those motives may be.

It was only a matter of time before Wikipedia suffered from a crisis in authority, and now it has happened. John Seigenthaler, a former assistant to Robert Kennedy, wrote in the newspaper's op-ed column that for "for 132 days," the Wikipedia article about him (Seigenthaler) falsely accused him of being involved in the Robert and John F. Kennedy assassinations. Some of its other facts (including some that implied Communist sympathies) were wrong too. And to make even things worse, annotations on the site called him a "Nazi" and other nasty things (I'm not sure that you can be a right-wing Nazi and a left-wing Communist at the same time, but no matter, Seigenthaler denies both allegations).

It did not seem to occur to Seigenthaler that he, too, could sign up for a Wikipedia account and remove the libelous words himself. Maybe he just wanted to see how long the article would remain uncorrected. Wikipedia, for its part, claims the libelous words have been removed, and has instituted a new registration system for the authors of new articles. The idea is that if authors of new articles are required to register, fewer people will write new articles, and then the 600-strong, all-volunteer editorial staff will get a better handle on what appears in Wikipedia But anyone from anywhere will will still be able to modify existing articles. Considering that the Wikipedia people claim that "impulse vandalism" is a major cause of ill-considered additions to the site, this approach doesn't seem likely to solve the problem.

Legal expert Eugene Volokh says, "I sympathize with [Seigenthaler], but it's really not any different than a posting on an anonymous Web page." I don't agree. Wikipedia entries often come up at the top of Google results lists (an anonymous web site is unlikely to achieve that kind of popularity), and even the "pedia" ending of the site's name confers an air of authority.

The New York Times (registration required) quoted a researcher as saying "Instead of figuring out how to 'fix' Wikipedia - something that cannot be done to our satisfaction, we should focus our energies on educating the Wikipedia users among our colleagues." And among the general public, too, I would add.

Updates: The man allegedly responsible for the fake information on Seigenthaler claims that he created the inaccurate entry as a prank to trick a co-worker. According to the BBC, Brian Chase "did not realise that the online encyclopedia was taken so seriously." Chase was unmasked as the culprit thanks to online detective work by Wikipedia critic Daniel Brandt, founder of Wikipedia Watch. Chase has since apologized to Seigenthaler.

Meanwhile, the scientific journal Nature found that articles on science in Wikipedia are about as accurate as those that appear in the online edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. In a side-by-side study, the Nature panel of experts found that "the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three...Of eight "serious errors" the reviewers found — including misinterpretations of important concepts — four came from each source."

Internet Vocabulary Words

2005-12-03T12:59:00.000-06:00

Just like any specialized field of endeavor, the internet has its own vocabulary. Here are some interesting words:

Astroturfing: One of my all time favorite NN stories is "Rage Against the Cow" story? You may remember its broad outlines: marketers of a new line of milk-based beverages selected prominent young bloggers and gave them knicknacks and product coupons in exchange for their promises to mention the flavored drinks in their blogs. This was very controversial at the time; bloggers resented Corporate America attempting to co-opt some of their number. It took the beginning of the Iraq War to finally drive the anti-milk-drink outrage out of the blogosphere. But the general practice creating "artificial grassroots" movements continues unabated. Hence the clever term for such shenanegans: "astroturfing"

Net News Note

2005-11-22T12:16:00.000-06:00

This brief article appeared at the top of the "print" November 2005 NN issue:

You didn’t miss it; due to various other emergencies, there was no e-mailed issue of NN for October. This is the November issue, the first of volume 6! Can you believe it?). Part of the problem is that I do the writing for NN directly on the blog, and then put together this paper copy, which is rather time consuming. I’m thinking about making NN a bimonthly rather than a monthly as a “print” publication. But, you can always see what I’m working on at http://netnewsarchives.blogspot.com, and even read articles from all the way back to the beginning.

There are even two articles on the blog that didn’t make it to this print copy, which, at five pages, is long enough as it is: Scientology vs. the Internet pt. 2 and Citation Muddle.

Splogger? Who Are You Calling a Splogger?

2005-11-21T18:40:00.000-06:00

No sooner do I read in this week's Newsweek about spam blogs (or "splogs") than I find out that that's what Blogger thinks I am--a splogger. "Splog" and "splogger" are ugly words with ugly meanings, so I'm offended. Let me explain.

A splog is a computer generated blog that is characterized by "irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site," according the Blogspot help. Automated programs create splogs, and, and they're yet another way some people are trying to turn a dishonest profit off the internet. I admit I don't really get this (I guess I don't have a devious mind), but here is what Newsweek says about how spam blogs make money:

Here's how they work: first find a subject that draws consumers who may be valuable to advertisers on Google or Yahoo, and register for the programs that let those search companies place ads on your blog. Then set up a blog that automatically sucks in items from the news (via easy-to-set-up feeds) about that subject. If you've done it right, Google's search engines will identify your blog as a prime place for a high-value ad. Then, as (Technorati's David) Sifry says, "you can pay housewives in India to sit there and click on the ads.

Because it is a free service that makes setting up a blog so easy even a computer can do it, Blogspot is particularly prone to splog abuse.

Like e-mail spam, spam blogs clog up the system. What's worse, they threaten to distort the results you get when you search Google, the world's most popular search engine. Remember, when you search the big G, Google uses its proprietary "Page-rank" program to determine the order in which search results appear on your results page. The most linked-to sites appear at the top of the list; the idea is that sites with lots of links to them must be the best. Writes one observer:

Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning. "It won't be long before Google itself is infested. ... It's time for Google to get on top of this. They're both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank.

The "victimizer and victim" part of the quote refers to the fact that, ironically, Google owns both the Blogger blogging software and Blogspot hosting service.

Like the bird flu, the distortion of Google search results is more an ominous threat than a present reality. Google has taken steps to stop the creation of "blogspam," most notably the addition of a "word verification" requirement for blogs that are suspected of being splogs. This is the situation I described in the first paragraph of this post. Because Blogger's spam-prevention robots think that the NN blog "has characteristics of a spam blog." ("irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text?!" I'm offended!), I now have to type a string of meaningless letters (like "yjygmr")into a box to prove that I'm a real person before a new post is added to the NN blog. The letters are distorted and are not computer readable. This method of verifying that a person is a person and not a machine is called CAPTCHA (which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). You may have seen CAPTCHA when you've helped users set up a free e-mail account with Yahoo.

Blogger apologizes:

Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

I could ask Blogger to review my blog to determine if it merits the removal of the CAPTCHA, but it hardly seems worth the effort.

Since the splogging seems to have reached a critical mass, and since it seems to be such a Google-centric problem, it will be interesting to see in the coming year if this issue causes any major changes in the way that Google and/or Blogger do business.

Search Back in the Spotlight

2005-11-21T18:32:00.000-06:00

Back in January 2004, there was a NN article called "When Is A Web Surfer Not a Web Surfer?" The answer to this riddle is that is that a web surfer is not a web surfer when he/she is using non-browser internet applications such as "media players, instant messenger programs and file sharing programs such as KaZaa." This article reported that at that time, 76% of web users were using these non-browser applications.

The answer to this riddle is that is that a web surfer is not a web surfer when he/she is using non-browser internet applications such as "media players, instant messenger programs and file sharing programs such as KaZaa." This article reported that at that time, 76% of web users were using these non-browser applications.

Times have changed. Old-fashioned searching the web is back to being the most popular online activity. According to the Yahoo’s report on the Pew Charitable Trust's Internet and American Life Project

These results from September 2005 represent a sharp increase from mid-2004. Pew Internet Project data from June 2004 show that use of search engines on a typical day has risen from 30% to 41% of the internet-using population, which itself has grown in the past year. This means that the number of those using search engines on an average day jumped from roughly 38 million in June 2004 to about 59 million in September 2005 – an increase of about 55%. comScore data, which are derived from a different methodology, show that from September 2004 to September 2005 the average daily use of search engines jumped from 49.3 million users to 60.7 million users – an increase of 23%.

And furthermore:

This means that the use of search engines is edging up on email as a primary internet activity on any given day. The Pew Internet Project data show that on a typical day, email use is still the top internet activity. On any given day, about 52% of American internet users are sending and receiving email, up from 45% in June of 2004.

Where, I wonder, does this leave those "media players, instant messenger programs and file sharing programs such as KaZaa"?

International Crisis Averted

2005-11-20T14:10:00.000-06:00

Nobody owns the Internet, but the U.S., and U.S.-based companies like Google do a pretty thorough job of running the show. Even the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the group that controls the assignation of top level domain names (.com, .org, etc.) ultimately answers to the U.S. Department of Commerce. To be fair, ICANN has board members from several different countries. But foreign leaders don't like the U.S. control of the "root zone file," of top level domain names, including the two letter country codes you see on web sites in other countries. "Control of the root means that the United States could, in theory, wipe another country's top-level domain out of the system for political reasons, leaving it largely unreachable to web and e-mail traffic," writes one observer. Some nations are calling for ICANN to be brought under international control, perhaps under the auspices of the United Nations. The Bush Administration, on the other hand, argues that it's better to have ICANN hosted in one country, in order to ensure its stability and to cut down on red tape.

Tensions came to a head recently just before the U.N.'s World Summit on the Information Society. Technology observers were prepared for a battle between the U.S. and the forces for an international ICANN (the European Union and its allies on this issue, including Brazil and Iran), but negotiators managed to avert a crisis. For the foreseeable future, it looks like the U.S. will retain its hegemony regarding the internet. The U.S. may have won this battle, but the war for control of top level domain names isn't over yet.

Search Engine Promises Something New

2005-11-19T20:41:00.000-06:00

It's hard to find anything new under the search engine sun, but here's a system that claims to be really different. The Australians who created Factbites claim that while "other search engines spew out meaningless site-names and mangled phrases.
Factbites offers you real, meaningful sentences that are right on topic." These sentences appear on the results page, and directly from the pages indentified as being most relevant by the Factbites search engine. The Factbiters say:

You can often gain a great deal of factual information on a topic without ever having to leave the search page! When users do select a page, they can have much more confidence that the page deals directly and informatively with their topic.

Keeping in mind that Google is the de facto standard for web search engines, and that G's hegemony is not likely to change anytime soon, comparisons are inevitable. FactBites vs. Google page shows you the differences between the two services. FactBites, however, does not point out that Google's "define" command (just type "define [word]" into the Google search box for a list of definitions of the word in question, culled from the web, along with links to the sites the definitions came from) does much the same thing as FactBites does.

Give it a try at FactBites.com, keeping in mind that the search engine is still in beta and many searches won't work.

Scientology vs. the Internet pt. 2

2005-10-31T11:49:00.000-06:00

You can hardly hide from Tom Cruise these days. The famous actor's couch-jumping enthusiasm for his new fiancee, his vociferous hatred of psychiatry and especially his fanatical devotion to his religion, Scientology, have made him a prime candidate for Internet satire. But, would-be satirizers are learning that when you mess with Tom, you mess with the entire organization that's behind him, and Scientology isn't an organization that has much of a tolerance for satire.

In a previous NN article (all the way back in 2002), I reported on some of the Internet-related run-ins Scientology has had with its detractors, everything from a conflict with Google over the placement of the church's official web site in Google results lists (Scientology was mad because an anti-Scientology site would often come up at the top of the list, rather than the organization's official site), to conflicts over the posting of Scientology-copyrighted scripture on unauthorized websites. At one point, Scientology even required its adherents to use special web filters so that they wouldn't encounter any of the many anti-Scientology sites out there.

This latest episode in Scientology vs. the Web involves a web site called ScienTOMogy.info. This New-Zealand based site reports on Cruise's latest doings as a way of "EXPOSING TOM CRUISE'S MORONIC CRUSADE TO PROMOTE THE ~~CULT~~, CHURCH OF $CIENTOLOGY" (screaming caps, satiric cross-out, and dollar sign in the original). The site is loaded with disclaimers and is so ugly and amateurish looking (perhaps on purpose) that no one could mistake it for the real Scientlogy official site, yet Scientology's lawyers claim that the domain name is confusingly similar to ones that they've registered. The ScienTOMogy people are calling Scientology's lawsuit bluff and say they'll see 'em in court.

Read more on this developing controversy here.

Meanwhile, for those who enjoy celebrity train wrecks, there's a lot of TomKat material out there that's better done than ScientTOMogy, anyway. For example, try www.tomcruiseisnuts.com .

UPDATE (3/11/06): It's not clear exactly what happened, but the scientomology web site has changed its name to passionofcruise.info. Looks like for all the tough talk, the scientomology people backed down.

Citation Muddle

2005-10-11T11:33:00.000-05:00

Please note: this article is a little off-topic for NN, since it doesn't really deal with the internet. But it does deal with the world of information, and for that reason (and because the topic is interesting), I am including it anyway:

You probably haven't thought about "citation indexes" since library school, and maybe you didn't think about them too much even back then. Depending on when you graduated, maybe you didn't even use them. But, do remember the big multi-volume sets with ISI in big letters on their spines? They had titles like "Science Citation Index" and "Arts and Humanities Citation Index" and their purpose was to show you which scholarly journals cited which articles. You may even remember being told that citation patterns are a big part of the study of information dissemination, and that they even play a role in deciding who gets tenure at universities. Citation journal listings are also used in the computation of journal "impact factors" which determines which journals are "the best" (i.e. most prestigious to publish one's work in).

Well, even though we don't see much of them at public libraries, citation indexes are still around, and they are still playing a big role in the major life decisions of colleges and their faculties. Impact factors have become so important in academic life that reportedly scientists decide what studies to conduct, committees award grants, and as mentioned, tenure gets bestowed based on these numbers. The logic is that if your work is any good, it will be published in the "best" journals; conversely, if your journal is any good, it will publish only the "best" articles by the "best" researchers. Critics say that over-reliance on impact factors is "statistically dimwitted," but their warnings so far haven't decreased the impact factor's pervasive influence, according to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education..

The impact of "impact numbers," as CHE reports, is not limited to U.S. academic life. For example, in China, scientists get cash bonuses for publishing in high-impact journals, and graduate students in physics at some universities must publish at least two articles in journals with a combined impact factor of 4 to get their Ph.D.'s (the higher the impact number, the better; the highest score is the ultraprestigious Nature with 32.128, and more than half of all science journals have an impact score of less than 1).

All this impact does lead some individuals and journals to try to beat the system. Some researchers repeatedly cite their own previous works . Some academic publishers try to boost their publications' impact scores by requiring potential authors to cite articles that appeared in their journals.

You can read all about the many and varied implications of the "cult of the impact factor" in the CHE article cited above.

Goodbye, Jeeves

2005-09-24T14:56:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Kate Moss isn't the only supermodel who's gotten the ax in recent days. The Inter-Active Corp., owner of Ask.com aka Askjeeves.com, has just announced that Jeeves, their longtime symbol, is on his way out. The online “butler”, named for the ever-helpful valet in P.G. Wodehouse’s series of Jeeves novels, has been with the search engine ever since its inception ten years ago.

A survey revealed that the continued use of the old “Jeeves” icon was keeping users from realizing that the search engine’s scope has changed. Askjeeves was originally known for its ability to handle "natural language" queries, but now it offers more options, including local searches and news. Ask.com also owns Bloglines, a blog searching service.

No date for the start of Jeeves' permanent vacation has been set yet, but the company has announced that it will forge a new brand identity, perhaps as ask.com.

Moral Dilemma of the Day

2005-09-20T14:49:00.000-05:00

Read this entry in the Feel Good Librarian and ask yourself, what would you do?

Blogger Work Around

2005-09-13T11:35:00.000-05:00

I have found a work-around for Blogger's inability to classify posts into categories. This method involves using Del.icio.us to create categories, then posting one's own blog entries as bookmarks in Del.icio.us. You can see this in action in the blog I've created for the LTA 121 class I'm teaching (!) at College of Lake County this fall.

I got the idea from the Library Supporter blog. It is far from a perfect solution, however, and some really object to the idea of a blogger tagging his/her own posts on a social bookmarking site. Steven Cohen of LibraryStuff.net denounces this approach on no uncertain terms:

[Tagging your own content] is spamming the system. Sure, [people who tag their own content] may be building up their own metadata (it's very useful in that regard), but they can do that locally on their own desktops. Leave it out of the collective knowledge base that is del.icio.us.

Tagging your own content can be equated somewhat to sending out spam e-mails of your products to thousands of people. The only difference is that the user has voluntarily signed up for the tag feed and spam e-mail is sent without permission. The point is, there is no need to pimp your own blog posts. If at least one person finds it worthy, it will be tagged. Let your blog posts speak for themselves.

Objection noted. I'm not trying to get anyone outside my class to read my blog posts--but I do need them to be categorized, and this, for now, is the way I've found to do it. In my defense, I would also point out that most links within my categories are to other sites.

Dell Responds to Bad Buzz

2005-09-10T16:02:00.000-05:00

It doesn't pay to anger powerful bloggers, as computer giant Dell found out this summer. Jeff Jarvis (who, among other things, is a former critic for People and TV Guide, and the creator of Entertainment Weekly)used his blog BuzzMachine to go public with his frustration over the malfunctions of his Dell machine, which was a lemon from the day he bought it. His problems were compounded, in his view, by the incompetence of Dell's customer service and technical support people. Jarvis's convoluted tale of computer woe struck a chord with his readers, who chimed in with their own stories of Dell stupidity. Soon, Jarvis's site became the place to go for Dell-haters of all stripes.

It's not likely that the bad buzz from BuzzMachine had as much an effect on Dell's sales as the fingertip incident of earlier this year had on Wendy's, but the computer company did sit up and take notice. As one observer noted:

When someone like Jeff [Jarvis] is going on at length like that, you do more than just listen to it," said marketing consultant Steve Rubel. "It's like a cancer that has to be stopped--and people are going to start listening, and it's going to have an effect on your reputation."

As a result of the flap, Dell has adopted a new policy. The company's marketing people now monitor the blogosphere looking for posts that criticize their products and/or services. When they find one, the Dell people contact the blog owner (if identifiable) and resolve his/her problems. In this increasingly interconnected world, I think this proactive approach will become more common.

I did do a Technorati search for Warren-Newport Public Library. The "Chewing Feed Grass" blog links our Business and Investment Reference Desk page, for no discernable reason. Cook Memorial's perennially disgruntled patron J. Martin has a blog that mentions that compares WNPL's circulation per employee statistic to the average of Lake County libraries:

FTE/CIRCULATION: The average Lake County Library circulates 13,065 pieces per employee. Highly efficient circulation Libraries such a Highland Park at 20,083, or, Warren-Newport to our North at 18,968, circulate substantially more library pieces per library employee.

Originally, I thought that keeping an eye on the world of blogs would be a time-consuming task, but it turns out that it is not. Anyone can set up a Technorati "watch list" that will tell where the terms you specify appear in the blogs Technorati keeps track of. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like automatic notification, though; it does look like you have to check back with Technorati to see if any results come up on your list).

I have set up a Technorati "watch list" so I can tell if anyone else mentions the library by name. If I get any notification, I will forward the information to the appropriate parties.

Google Halts Print Project

2005-08-13T10:46:00.000-05:00

You've heard of--you couldn't miss--Google's plan to digitize books from three of the world's major research libraries: Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan. Now, work has stopped on the ambitious Google Print project, at least until November, due to the vociferous objections of the publishing industry.

Publishers don't like the Google program for several reasons. Many of the works that Google wants to scan from these huge libraries are still under copyright. Even though the Google plan calls for showing only a few sentences from a copyrighted book, publishers say this is still too much. Google's original scheme to allow publishers to "opt-out" of the program, rather than "opt-in" if they wanted their works scanned, placing the burden of keeping works from being included on the publishers rather than Google. "Google's procedure shifts the responsibility for preventing infringement to the copyright owner rather than the user, turning every principle of copyright law on its ear," said the president of the Association of American Publishers.

Moreover, publishers are understandably concerned that the availability of free online editions of books will hurt their sales--much like the availability of free music downloading has harmed the music business. They also don't like it that Google has not agreed to share any profits derived from the digitizing project with publishers.

This story makes me wonder, however, why these issues were not resolved before the project began, and why are they being brought up now. The project began at least eight months ago, and although Google hasn't said how much it's all going to cost, all that scanning and staff time are likely to cost the company millions. Why did Google think that agreements with libraries could confer permission to use copyrighted material? Why didn't the publishers object back in January? Why didn't the librarians involved at the major research libraries inform the Google people that they might run into objections, and that they might want to talk to the publishers before they fire up the scanners? It's hard to say what went on behind closed doors, but from my perspective, this part of the project was not very well thought out.

One analyst said, that Google is "really a bull in a china shop. "They put out the technology, they forge ahead to the next one, and they clean up in their wake. They deal with the business matters afterward."

Google is also scanning public domain material from the New York Public Library and the Oxford University libraries. Work presumably continues on this part of the project.

Speaking of disregard for copyright law, Google is also being sued by Agence France-Presse, a French news agency. The agency claims that Google's "Google News" feature illegally uses copyrighted material.

The Truth about Arial

2005-08-13T08:59:00.000-05:00

When a web designer is putting together a web page on a Windows computer, he or she might have fun to play around with all the amazing fonts that come with Windows. But when the designer is thinking about how a web page is going to display on computers all around the world, he/she usually sticks with the tried and true--Times New Roman, if for a serif font, or Arial if the designer is going for a slightly classier sans-serif look. That's because any computer can only display typefaces that are already installed on it. The designer's computer may have the "Zitz" or "Adolescence" fonts, but if web users do not, they won't see the pages as they are intended to look. If the designer specifies a font that a given computer out there doesn't have, that computer will display in Times New Roman or Arial anyway.

Typeface snobs, however, have it in for Arial. In his article "The Scourge of Arial." Mark Simonson writes, "[Arial] is actually rather homely . . . [and it] has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor."

”Imposter? In what way?” you may ask. It's not a secret that Arial is a knock-off of Helvetica, a Swiss font that was popular in the 60's and 70's. Adobe, the company that started the "desktop publishing" phenomenon of the eighties, licensed Helvetica from Linotype, the company that owned the rights to it. Microsoft found that it needed a font that was compatible with Helvetica for its own products, so the company hired a typography studio to create an imitation font so that Microsoft would not have to pay Linotype’s steep licensing fees. Thus Arial was born.

Since Windows 3.1, Microsoft has included Arial with all of its products, and so the upstart typeface became the de facto standard for sans serif type, replacing even genuine Helvetica itself.

Purists debate the implications of the Arial phenomenon, asking themselves such questions as "Does Arial's ubiquity mean that Microsoft has already taken over the world?" and "Arial does work well on computer screens. Can it really be that bad?" Meanwhile, other common fonts such Times New Roman and especially Comic Sans have their own detractors to contend with.

Accept No Imitations

2005-07-30T12:02:00.000-05:00

Blogger may be the best known free blogging program in the Internet, but it certainly isn't the only one. Recently, I experimented with an upstart competitor called Blogsome (http://www.blogsome.com), but came away from the experience with my loyalty to Blogger intact (at least for now).

It all started several weeks ago when Barb asked me about category listings for our reference blog entries. She wanted to be able to assign subject headings to reference department blog entries, so that all entries on a given subject could be found under the same heading. The heading would run along the side of the page, along with the "Previous Entries" and "Archives" (by date) entries are now, as in this example. Sounds like a highly desirable feature to me, but, unfortunately, Blogger doesn't offer it.

I don't remember now how I stumbled across Blogsome, which is a free blog service based in Ireland, but it did offer the "category" feature in question, so I signed up that very Saturday morning. I e-mailed Barb expressing my hope that Blogsome would meet the department's needs. I even started an experimental new Net News blog, thinking that if the Blogsome thing worked out, I'd move my entire NN blog to the new service. But by that afternoon, troubles were already apparent. Someone had hacked his/her way into the Blogsome site, and replaced the "forum" page (where you do your logging in) with a Spanish-language advertisement that opened in multiple windows. I e-mailed Barb and took back my recommendation of Blogsome. I also e-mailed the Blogsome people and informed them of the security breech.

More recently, I decided to start a private blog, and still thinking that a categorization feature would be nice, I reconsidered Blogsome. I set up my blog at home and chose one of Blogsome's attractive templates for my backdrop (say what you wlll about Blogsome, as I am; Blogsome's templates are better than Blogger's and there are more of them to choose from). I received a password in the mail that worked in the morning, but did not work later that day. I tried to send a message to Blogsome's tech guy asking for help, but, alas, you need a functioning login and password to send messages through the site.

Blogsome also doesn't have a spell check feature as Blogger does; I downloaded a Mozilla Firefox "extension" called Spellbound that performs spell checks in text boxes, but haven't had the opportunity to see if it works because I can't get back into Blogsome.

If you know of any good free blogging services, please let me know. Or else, I may just spring for Moveable Type's Typepad.

Secrets of the Waiters

2005-07-30T10:12:00.000-05:00

Those of us in public service often wish we could get revenge on the nasty patrons/customers we serve. In librarianship we have no mechanism by which to do this, and it wouldn't fit in with our professional ethics, anyway. But, many in the hospitality and retail industries have no such compunctions, as evidenced by the bitterwaitress (www.bitterwaitress.com), a website devoted to true stories of the joys and frustrations (mostly frustrations) of wait staff (and a few store clerks) all over the world.

One site highlight is the which lists the real names and stories of bad tippers " S---- Tipper Database". Take care that your name doesn't end up on this venom-drenched list! (but, also keep in mind that you are hearing only one side of the story).

Another is the Celebrity Gossip section, in which servers share their encounters with the rich and famous. Can you guess which celeb is known in the restaurant world as "Dollar Bill" because of his cheap ways? Hint: it's not Bill Gates, who has been known to leave $8000 tips.

As you might expect, much of the language on this site is not genteel and the writing is not always polished, but chances are you'll be able to identify with the put-upon servers who contribute to this site, and leave with a new understanding of their aggravations.

No Tears for Russian Spammer

2005-07-30T09:04:00.000-05:00

Much of the spam that gets past the filter on my home e-mail account is in Russian. Even though I studied Russian in college, I never was all that good at it and can no longer read it. Still, spam is spam in any language, and you know it when you see it.

But my in-box may be a little emptier now that Moscow's "King of Spam" is dead. The body of 35-year-old Vardan Kushnir was found on July 25 in his apartment. His skull had been bashed in repeatedly with a heavy object. Like many murders in Moscow, this case remains unsolved, and there are not even any suspects.

Mr. Kushnir certainly wasn't the only spammer in Russia, where it's unbelievably easy to set up one's very own "spam shop" and the laws against computer crime are rarely enforced, but he may have been the most notorious. Unfortunately for Kushnir, he became the human face of the ever-increasing spam problem in Russia. Unsolicited e-mail has reached crisis proportions in the former Soviet Union; some mail filtering programs even offer an option to block all e-mails sent from Russia's .ru domain. This means Russians often can't send legitimate messages without having them get blocked. (I wonder if people have the same problem in Nigeria?).

Russian commentators aren't even trying to hide their glee over the death of Kushnir. Sample headlines in Russian language newspapers (as reported by the English-language mosnews.com) include "The Spammer Had it Coming”, “Spam is Deadly”, “Ignoble Death Becomes Russia’s Top Spammer”, and “An Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem.” It's hard to imagine a newspaper anywhere else so blatantly celebrating a brutal murder, isn't it?

Russian spam isn't going to stop with Kushnir's death, of course. There has to be a better answer to Russia's spam problem than death by heavy object.

Read This

2005-07-02T16:58:00.000-05:00

For a pro-librarianship pep talk, read this from the Feel Good Librarian!

Open CRS Project

2005-06-27T18:30:00.000-05:00

You may remember the Congressional Research Service (CRS) from your gov docs class in library school, if you took one. CRS is the organization that prepares non-partisan background reports on current events for U.S. representatives and senators. CRS works for Congress only; even though taxpayers foot the bill for this service, the reports aren't routinely made public. The reports only become public if a taxpayer asks for one of them, and then only if the congressperson's office chooses to supply it.

The Open CRS Project of the Center for Democracy & Technology ("a non-profit, non-artisan public interest organization dedicated to developing and implementing public policies to protect and advance civil liberties and democratic values on the Internet," according to its website) aims to change all that. By creating a free, accessible database of CRS reports, Open CRS aims to put valuable CRS material into the hands of interested citizens everywhere.

It sounds pretty easy to participate in the project. Just volunteer to contact your his or her member of Congress and asks for a copy of a given report to be e-mailed to you as a PDF file (sought-after reports are named on the website; however, since their is no publicly available list of all reports, it is hard to know what else might be out there). Then forward the PDF to opencrs.com.

Currently, the Open CRS web site contains over 8000 reports, but, say its Center for Technology and Democracy, the site's owners, that that's only a tiny fraction of what the CRS really produces. By creating the Open CRS database, the Center for Technology and Democracy wants to pressure Congress into making even more CRS material accessible to the public.

I'd like to see these reports made available, but I hesitate to contribute information to a public forum if that information isn't mine to share. I'd really like to know more about the copyright implications of all this before I start pestering Melissa Bean's office for reports. Unfortunately, the people behind the CRS project don't address the legality of what they are doing in their FAQ section.

Human, All Too Human

2005-06-04T14:34:00.000-05:00

It sounds like it would be the blogging equivalent of the Jerry Springer show, but it's not. Post a Secret is fascinating site that collects individual's secret confessions, but with a twist. Instead of posting directly to the blog, you write your secret on a postcard, decorate it and mail it anonymously to the P.O. box on listed on the blog. The week's most resonant confessions are posted on the site each Sunday. Some are entertaining ("I sit in public and pretend to read, but actually I'm eavesdropping on your conversation"); some sound like show for daytime TV ("Sometimes I think my fiance isn't The One"--the "O" in one is made out of a bridal-magazine-style photograph of a wedding ring); and some can only be described as all-too-human ("This jackass at my school died. I'm kind of happy I don't have to see him anymore.").

Unfortunately there is nothing on Post a Secret that about its originator ("Frank") or that explains how the site came to be. There is also no archive.

The "comments" section is almost as interesting as the postcards themselves. Many readers thank Frank for coming up with this idea; one even says goes to far as to say that he must have been inspired by God. Others say that their sense of connectedness to all of humanity has been strengthened by their experience atthis site. Some even say they've hosted "Post a Secret" dinner parties," at which all guests prepare a postcard and send it in (now that's its been featured on NPR and the New York Times, among other places, Post a Secret may even become a trend). A few, however, question Frank's motives. Is he planning to collect all the postcards in a book?

Whatever Frank may have in mind, do be sure to take a look. The evocative visuals of the postcards combined with the simple force of the words make for an affirming reading experience.

Rhymes with Icky

2005-06-02T09:55:00.000-05:00

I don't like the word "wiki" (rhymes with "icky") and I'm not all that crazy about the concept (An online work that anyone from anywhere can contribute to or alter? Call me a snob or a professionally-trained librarian, but that doesn't pass the COCOA-A test!). But, as wikis are becoming increasingly popular, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention them in Net News.

The most famous example is still Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that's edited by anyone who cares to contribute. According to Time magazine, the wiki that started it all currently has about 1.5 million entries in 76 languages, "and counting." And some regard the project as an editorial free-for-all (According to Time, "An Encyclopaedia Britannica editor once compared Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don't know who used it last.") the Wikipedia community does take its work seriously. An M.I.T. study revealed that that "an obscenity randomly inserted on Wikipedia is removed in 1.7 min., on average." Also, entries on controversial subjects can be locked to prevent partisanship from taking precedence over objectivity, as were the entries on John Kerry and George W. Bush during the 2004 election.

Just like a blog, anyone can set up a wiki for work or personal use. Some companies use wiki software for project management tasks, just as other companies use "plogs. The group Aspies for Freedom, which consists of people with Asperger's Syndrome, had, when I wrote this article back in June, its own wiki for information about the condition they share (but now, less than a month later, it seems to have disappeared).

Despite the profession's reservation about some wiki productions, the wiki format is even catching on in the library world. There's a wiki for attendees of the 2005 ALA conference in Chicago , and plans are afoot for a WorldCat Wiki (that would include, according its planners, "reviews, cover art, comments...[plus] good stuff that we're not expecting" related to the bibliographic records contained in the database.

If you want to wiki, you'll find more information about MediaWiki, the software that makes it happen, at http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/

Delicious and Delirious

2005-06-01T10:27:00.000-05:00

They look very similar, serve the same basic function, and have very similar names. So, what's the difference between Del.icio.us and Del.irio.us? Not much. Both web sites are free services that provide "social bookmarking," which, you'll remember, means that both sites allow users to share their bookmarks, and to classify web sites using "tags" web sites (using schemes they make up called "folksonomies").

The difference is that Del.icio.us is a proprietary system, created by a guy named Joshua Schachter, and Del.irio.us is an "open source" system, created by a guy named Steve Mallett. "Open source" means that programmers can have free access to the source code and make improvements, enhancements etc. Because anyone out there who knows what they are doing can contribute, open source systems evolve more quickly than more restricted proprietary systems. The other difference is that Del.irio.us has more room to add notes to entries.

Mallett's "clone" of Schachter's work, right down to the very similar domain name, is kind of disquieting. In a way, it seems like plagiarism. Moreover, del.icio.us power users think of themselves as a community; fans of the original site worry that the cohesion of their online group may be "fractured" by the introduction of a competing product. Others, including Mallett himself, argue that there is room for both products. Del.icio.us is the de facto standard for social bookmarking sites, so Mallett says that it is only natural that anyt imitators would resemble the original. And, well, imitation is the highest form of flattery, isn't it? It seems to me, however, that with the millions of typefaces and color schemes out there, Mallett could have gone with a slightly more original look, if nothing else.

Share the Experience

2005-05-14T10:15:00.000-05:00

Share the Experience

People always like to talk about their health. Now, some hospitals are giving patients a means by which to tell their stories via patient blogs.

High Pont [North Carolina] Regional Hospital is one such facility. On its blog page, it provides links to hospital sponsored blogs by two cancer patients, two gastric-bypass patients, and one mother-to-be (all female, as indicated by their names, which have been changed for privacy purposes). The hospital says the "thoughts [the bloggers] expresses within the blog are [their] own, and have not been edited by High Point Regional." Interestingly, the bloggers do not say much about the hospital itself. The gastric-bypass patients, for example, write a lot about how great they feel now that they are losing weight.

All the patient bloggers have similar writing styles. None of them know much about paragraphing. I can't help but wonder if there are real people behind these blogs (and, if so, what are they getting in return?), or if the authors are really hospital employees trying their hands at fiction.

Steven Cohen of librarystuff.net has suggested that libraries should consider patron blogs. It's unclear whether he means one blog for all patrons to post their thoughts on library materials and services (that could be interesting), or that the library should offer blog access for each patron so that everyone could have his or her own blog (to use for writing, presumably, about book and library related topics). On the one hand, library sponsored blogs would be a nice link off the home page; but on the other, with all the free blogging services, how could we convince users to blog through/about the library, or a hospital, either, for that matter?

This Time, It's Personal

2005-05-02T12:14:00.000-05:00

In discussions about homeland security, you hear a lot about the Internet "chatter" that supposedly gives an indication of what terrorist organizations might be up to next. But have you ever wonder where people actually "hear" this "chatter"? Ask A. Aaroon Weisburd of Carbondale, Illinois. This former computer programmer has taken upon himself not only to monitor terrorist activity on the web, but also, along with loosely organized band of international assistants, bring down dangerous sites by lobbying the bad guys' internet service providers (ISPs) to remove the objectionable material.

According to the Washington Post, Weisburd is one of a "new breed of activist," one who is using the Internet to make the War on Terror his own personal battle. Deeply upset by the September 11 terrorist attacks but denied entry into the military, Weisburd, who is half-Jewish, specializes in fighting ultraradical Islam at the web site level. For example, if he finds a message board on a web site on which contributors are engaging in "shop talk" regarding terrorist activities, he'll bug their ISP until the site is taken down. Most ISPs have rulesagainst using their servers for "hate speech," so they comply.

Weisburd's actions are controversial, although he insists that everything he does is legal. He says that he recently received a "scathing letter calling him a 'grave threat to national security' because his work was interfering with [official government] investigations." He's gotten death threats from terrorists, too, of course. He may be a little naive, I think; his picture and home town were identified in the Washington Post, and interviews with him appear in several places around the web. If someone put a mind to it, he wouldn't be very difficult to find at all (assuming that he really lives in Carbondale and looks like the guy in the photograph). In one article, he says he is "concerned, but not scared"; in another he mentions a loaded gun in his house.

Weisburd says his own web site, Internet Haganáh (Hebrew for “defense”) is mirrored in many different web locations, so if the terrorists hack into it in one place, it's still around in others (their web sites, which have message boards and other interactive features, can't be mirrored as easily). Interestingly, he doesn't read Arabic but relies on software and Mideast experts for translation services.

It is effective? Weisburd really thinks he's helping, but I wonder, if the web sites of terrorist groups are removed once they come to Haganáh's attention, how can investigators keep track of what these groups are up to?

Today's Gimmick/Novelty Item

2005-04-25T20:36:00.000-05:00

Today's gimmick/novelty item is Yagoohoogle. This homemade meta-search engine, the brainchild of some guy in Norway, lets you search both Yahoo and Google simultaneously and side by side. Not terribly useful, but kind of fun.

Big Losers

2005-04-23T11:11:00.000-05:00

You've undoubtedly seen the flyers for the "Big Losers" the new, informal WNPL support group that meets at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and is open to all staff, volunteers, and board members who are interested in weight control. What you may not know is that the Big Losers not only have their own secret handshake (you have to attend a meeting to find out what it is), they also have their own blog, which you will find at http://www.wnplbiglosers.blogspot.com/. This blog will feature recipes, menu ideas, encouragement, health and wellness information, relevant web links, [and] anything else that would be of interest to the group as a whole.

A Great Day in Classical Literature

2005-04-23T10:25:00.001-05:00

Scientists at Oxford University are employing infra-red technology to read the so-called Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a huge collection of ancient writings found in the remains of an Egyptian garbage dump. This collection of about 400,000 partially-decayed fragments has been stored under glass in Oxford's Sackler Library since the 19th century. Most of these pieces are in such bad shape, they've been impossible to decipher until now. The new photographic technology, developed from satellite imaging, "bring[s] the original writing back into view."

Already scholars have found portions of lost works by the big names in ancient Greek literature--Sophocles, Euripides, and Hesiod, to name a few. They suspect that they may even find previously unknown early Christian gospels. The collection also contains a great deal of lesser material, but even access to the "pulp fiction and sitcoms of their day," as well as to personal letters and grocery lists will increase the scholars' understanding of everyday life in the Greco-Roman world.

Attention Deficit Trait

2005-04-09T16:53:00.000-05:00

Mind wandering at work lately? Maybe it's not spring fever. Maybe you have the latest "disease" to reach epidemic proportions in the working world: Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). According to Dr. Edward Holliwell, a psychiatrist who studies attention problems and who coined the term, this new malady is not inborn, like the more familiar attention deficit disorder (ADD). Rather, ADT is malady induced by the conditions of modern life, especially all the high-tech items we surround ourselves with, including e-mail, constantly updated news sources, and cell phones. According to the doctor, ADT sufferers become "so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that [they] become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving."

Dr. Halliwell doesn't know how common ADT is, and, it seems that much of the information about this problem is ancedotal. But in a related story, British researchers found that "workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ [10 points throughout the day] than a person smoking marijuana [4 points]." Unlike computers, human beings simply can't "multitask"; the best we can do is rapidly shift our attention from one thing to another. The constant sense of being distracted makes it difficult, if not impossible, for people to sustain concentration on any one thing.

So far, suggestions for remedying this situation are vague. "Companies should encourage a more balanced and appropriate way of working," write the British researchers. And what, pray tell, would that be?

Crime in the Library

2005-04-02T11:21:00.000-06:00

A kid totes a gun to the library. An employee violates confidentiality laws. A director steals change from the copy machines. A trustee gets arrested. A patron exposes himself in the stacks. Books, computers and DVDs get stolen. People outside the library world are often amazed at amount of human drama that goes on at libraries of all types, and even those of us who've been around the library world a long time may be astonished by the things that happen.

The Crime in the Library blog, run by an Arizona librarian under the pseudonym "Anbolyn" gathers together reports of crime in libraries all over the world. Blog entries are usually just a sentence long and describe the incident in question. Each entry contains a link to the full story, usually from a newspaper.

Anyone interested in libraries, crime, or just unusual human behavior (often involving people you'd think would know better) will find this blog fascinating.

The "Feel Good Librarian"

2005-04-02T10:25:00.000-06:00

Once I came upon an interesting, if mean-spirited, blog which focused on the foibles of the anonymous librarian's patrons. As I remember, he/she worked at a small public library in the foothills of Appalachia, and he/she had to deal with a lot of impoverished, uneducated, medically-underserved mountain people. I thought about mentioning this blog in NN as part of a "blogging about work" feature, but it just didn't seem right. Even though I understand that this librarian was just venting, and not naming names (although he/she did come up with some rather descriptive nicknames for the patrons), he/she lacked any sort of fellow-feeling, let alone compassion, for the very people he/she has devoted his/her career to serving (or, at least that's the impression I got. I did not read every entry).

Fortunately, another anonymous librarian has come up with the antidote to the nastiness evidenced by the aforementioned blog. It carries the rather Pollyannaish title "The Feel-Good Librarian," but don't let that put you off. The author (who "works at the reference desk of a Midwestern library") shares anecdotes of her public service experiences, then uses them to illuminate the spiritual (but non-sectarian) significance of our work in often surprising ways. For a sample, see "Each in His Own Way"

France's Latest "Counterattack"

2005-03-28T17:40:00.000-06:00

U.S. relations with France have been complicated during these past few years, to say the least. On the one hand, France is a traditional ally of the U.S. and the two nations share similar values of liberté, equalité and fraternité, but on the other, France strongly disapproves of what it sees as U.S. hegemony and imperialism (as France made abundantly clear during the discussions leading up to the current Iraq war). Now France is gearing up to launch a "counter-attack" against what it sees as Google's (i.e. America's) domination of the Internet, and by extention, domination of Western culture.

In response to Google's recent announcment of its plan to partner with a number of U.S. research universities to digitize their holdings and put them online, French president Jacques Chirac has met with bigwigs of the European library world and asked them "to analyse the conditions under which the collections of the great libraries in France and Europe could be put more widely and more rapidly on the Internet." And to send euros; a digitization project on the order of what Google is doing and what Chirac proposes will cost big money.

Apparently, it was the Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of France's National Library who came up with the idea for this initiative. Of the Google digitization project, he writes,

It is confirmation of the risk of a crushing American domination in the definition of how future generations conceive the world. The libraries that are taking part in this enterprise are of course themselves generously open to the civilizations and works of other countries ... but still, their criteria for selection will be profoundly marked by the Anglo-Saxon outlook.

In keeping with his warlike imagery above, Jeanneney describes his proposal as a "counterattack." He writes about how terrible it would be, for example, if the only materials commonly available on the French Revolution were written from a British or American perspective.

He does have a point, and anyone interested in world scholarship would hope that this plan would succeed. I do wonder, however, how Chirac is planning to sell this plan to the British government (as he intends), when the idea is to provide a counterpoint to the "Anglo-Saxon outlook." If I were him, I'd go directly to Prince Charles; having read several books about the Chuck and Di saga, I've always thought that his real problem was that he wasn't allowed to fulfill his destiny and become a librarian.

Leet-speak

2005-03-11T11:49:00.000-06:00

In every generation, teens diffentiate themselves from those older and younger than themselves through their music, their clothes, and their slang. Due to the Internet, the youth of today have even more ways to create and affirm their own subcultures. One such way is "leetspeak" also known as just "leet". "Leet," short for "elite," has become the way kewl (rather than cool) people communicate. Says the Microsoft article "A Parent's Primer on Computer Slang" leet "is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically—creating the digital equivalent of pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics." For example, numbers may be used as letters (in more elaborate ways than just using "4" for "for" or "2" for "to")and characters may be substituted for each other based on appearance. It seems that leetspeak got its start in hacker culture, but has now gone mainstream.

To those in the know, for example, the word "leetspeak" may be written !337$p34c (! resembles "l", the three's look like backwards "e's" the seven bears a superficial resemblance to a "t", "$" is like "s", "p" is just "p", "3" is "e" again, "4" is sort of like an "A" and "k" and "c" are often substituted for each other. For more details and examples, see the Microsoft article linked to above. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom to see the character formations that often refer to illegal activities.

Here is the first sentence of this Net News article translated into leetspeak:

I\ 3v3ry g3\3r4+i0\, +33\5 diff3\+i4+3 +-3m531v35 fr0m +-053 01d3r 4\d y0u\g3r +-4\ +-3m531v35 +-r0ug- +-3ir mu5i(, +-3ir (10+-35, 4\d +-3ir 514\g.

(translation courtesy of the conversion tool found at http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/l/leetspea.htm

Always ahead of the curve, Google even offers a leetspeak search engine at http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/ (your results, however, won't be in leetspeak).

Parents who are really perplexed can download a leetspeak translator at http://www.teenangels.org/

Google Movies

2005-03-01T13:43:00.000-06:00

Those guys at Google never stop thinking of new services to provide. The latest, released "just in time for the Oscars," says the press release, is Google Movies. Google's movie search is good for serveral different types of information

Movie Locations and Times: Just enter "movie:60031" into the Google search box to find out what movies are playing in Gurnee's zip code. Alternatively, enter "movie: million dollar baby gurnee il" to learn when the Best Picture winner at the 77th Academy Awards will be showing in Gurnee.

Yes, your saying, but there are lots of web sites out there that can tell you movie times and locations. What can Google Movies do that's new and different? How's this:

Name that Movie:

Ma Vie en Rose [My Life in Pink

Of course the quality of your results with of this kind of search (which, like Google News, is entirely computer generated) depends on the keywords you put in. I tried grabbing a movie at random off our DVD shelf (The Dirty Dozen, with Lee Marvin, not an obscure film), and tried various keyword searches with the words on the back of the box, and didn't come up with that particular film (although when I searched just "movie: dirty dozen", I did find it). Google's sources include the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), Roger Ebert's reviews, and epinions, a web site where moviegoers can write and post their own reviews.

The Ethics of Blogging

2005-02-15T10:59:00.000-06:00

Having been through two masters degree programs (librarianship and public administration), I've observed that the real purpose of grad school is not to teach the student a specific skill set (although you get that, too), but to inculcate him/her with a specific set of values. For example, in library school one learns to cherish intellectual freedom and open access for everyone. In an MPA program, one learns to embrace the bureaucratic model of institutional organization (I don't know how many essays I had to write defending it) and to "avoid not only impropriety, but even the appearance of impropriety" (one wishes more public administrators and elected officials would actually follow that one).

It's too bad that there's no masters degree in blogging yet, because that would ensure the adoption of certain ethical standards for bloggers. Right now, there are no such standards, and some even argue that there shouldn't be. Blogging is like having a conversation, says one prominent blogger (from Harvard, no less), "and you can't develop a code of ethics for conversations...a conversation with your best friend would become stilted and alienating."

I don't agree. In the first place, although it has become increasingly common, the analogy between blogging and having a conversation doesn't really work. Blogging is more like posting your diary on a bulletin board and having other people read it and (sometimes) write in the margins and sometimes comment on your writings in their own diaries (and then putting their diaries where you can see them). Words in print have more impact than spoken words, and, as with e-mail, when you write in a blog, you don't have the benefit of facial expressions and other non-verbal clues to help you get your message across. There's no written (i.e. permanent) record of private conversations, and most are not newsworthy, influential or of any concern to anyone outside the participants. Blogs, on the other hand, are written documents that are accessible to a wide audience and although most are not newsworthy or influential, some are both.

Secondly, even if you do concede that blogging is like a conversation, that doesn't eliminate ethical considerations. In other words, there is an ethical component to ordinary conversations as well. This component is often called etiquette, but there's more to it than that word implies. You generally don't stare over the speaker's shoulder, reply with a non-sequitur, use inappropriate language, interrupt while another is speaking, or gratuitously insult the speaker. You also agree with the speaker when you can, point out where you can't, and correct yourself when you're wrong. Usually, also, if you have a particular bias on a subject, you reveal it during the course of the conversation.

The CyberJournalist.net web site has published a "Bloggers' Code of Ethics" based on the code of ethics of The Society of Professional Journalists. To see the whole thing, including examples, follow the link below (under "Link"). The code can be summarized in three principles:

Be honest and fair

Minimize harm

Be accountable

In particular, in the blogging world, it is important to cite your sources, to label questionable information as questionable and to let your readers know if you are getting compensation for advocating a certain position or promoting a particular product (remember the "Raging Cow" controversy of 2003?).

Lately, there have been a number of instances of employees getting fired for writing unfavorably (or even just revealingly) about the companies they work for. For example, a recent Google new hire became a new fire after less than a month because he shared workplace gossip in his blog. The former self-proclaimed "Queen of the Sky," a flight attendant for Delta Airlines, was canned for similarly telling tales out of school. She's fighting back, claiming that she's protected under the First Amendment, but legal experts don't think the "Queen" has much of a chance of emerging victorious. "People mistakenly believe that the First Amendment protects them in the workplace, which is generally not the case," said one. Both the former Googler and the deposed "Queen" might have done well to take to heart the following Will Richardson's Teacher Blogger Guidelines, reprinted in Tame The Web and also summarized here:

Decide carefully if you want to create a public space for your ideas with your name on it.

When you write, assume it will be read by the very people you may not want to read it. Think about the consequences.

As much as possible, blog on your own time with your own equipment.

Tell the truth. If you can't, don't write. [on the other hand, I would add that if writing about work, just because something may be true doesn't mean that you should write about it. I'm guessing, but it probably wasn't the truth of their observations that got the erstwhile Googler and the overthrown "Queen" sacked.]

Ask people's permission before you write about them in your blog.

If you do use a blog for professional reflection or opinion...take the time to present those ideas well.

Start simple, and find your groove.

Again, if you decide to blog openly, don't try to hide that fact from peers or supervisors.

If you think people may have an issue with your blog, ask first, and make your decisions based on the feedback you get.

If you find yourself looking over your shoulder, don't blog.

[For more on bloggers being shown the door, see "Have a Blog, Lose Your Job?"]

Despite the documented cases of bloggers getting in trouble for their words, there are still those out there who don't think that formal statements of blog ethics are necessary. They argue that as blogging becomes more and more popular, certain ethical standards will automatically emerge (perhaps through negative examples) and will be adopted by anyone who wants his/her blog to be taken seriously. I think that if this really does happen, those standards will look a lot like those formally advocated by cyberjournalist.net.

Tags that go with this article: Ethics;Blogging

Teens Will Be Teens

2005-02-05T13:20:00.000-06:00

Conventional wisdom holds that teenagers' prowess at using computers in general and the Internet in particular leaves their elders' skills in the dust. But, a recent study reveals that, stereotypes aside, teens as a group are less competent at searching the web for information that adults are.

While computer users aged ages 13-17 are quick with a mouse and comfortable with technology, their effectiveness at actually obtaining usable information is severely limited by their poor reading and research skills. In fact, said the co-founder of the firm that sponsored the study, "If things aren't immediately apparent, they go away. Their distaste for reading was a big surprise. It has to be very short, brief text and big pictures." They tend to click on the first link of a results set, whether that's the most appropriate one or not, and none of the others. When faced with tricky navigation, too much text, slow loading time or any other difficulty, teens give up more easily than adults.

The study also found that teens in general like sites with clean designs, as opposed to ones with heavy graphics (not too clean, however, "boring" is just as bad as cluttered). One site mentioned as popular with study participants is the Apple web site). Web-based advertising, such as pop-up ads, doesn't bother teens as much as it bothers adults. Teens enjoy online games, quizzes and polls, and like the ability to post anonymous questions. Teens are wary of downloading unknown software plugins because they fear computer viruses.

Perhaps the biggest turn-off to the teen community is the word "kid." Teens don't see themselves as kids, and don't like any site that refers to them that way or that seems childish in its design or content.

I Love My Flash Drive!

2005-02-03T11:27:00.000-06:00

Recently, as I prepared to teach the Basic Computing class, I spent some time reminicing about my early experiences with computers. For the first time in a long time, I thought about bernoulli boxes. Does anyone else out there remember them? Back in mid-1980's, when I was working in publishing, Iomega's bernoulli box was the cutting edge storage device, an approximately 8x11 black plastic case with inner workings that stored data, just like a very, very large floppy disk. It went into a large special drive that was attached to the CPU.
I don't remember the storage capacity of the bernoulli boxes I worked with, but apparently they were available in 35, 44, 65 and 90 MB capacities during that time period. My co-workers and I always treated the bernoulli boxes with reverence, because they held our crucial data and (rumor was) they were very expensive and delicate.

Almost twenty years have passed. The computing world has progressed through big bernoulli boxes to 5 inch floppies, then for a long time, 3.5 inch floppies were the dominant storage medium, then CD's became writable as well as readable. In December, I bought my first 256 MB flash drive at Target, for about $35 dollars. It's a Sony Mini Microvault, and you can see a picture of one just like it below. I didn't take it out of its packaging for about a month, because I wanted to show it to my January Basic Computer class and it's so tiny (about 2 inches long) I was afraid the students wouldn't see it if I held it up and that someone might pocket it if I passed it around.

Finally, just this past week, I needed my flash drive to save a Microsoft Publisher document (Publisher, which is used for creating newsletters, brochures, etc., creates graphics-intensive files so big they sometimes can't be saved to a single 3.5 inch floppy), so I took it out and used it. Now I'm a convert!

The Sony Mini Microvault can hold the equivalent of 177 3.5 floppy disks, or to put it another way, over 76,000 pages of plain text. So, there's enough room for everything I may be realistically creating in the next few years (even if I do get around to writing my novel, or several novels) and I can use at any computer with a USB port and Windows 98 or above. The Nov./Dec. 2003 issue of Computers in Libraries describes the durability of these flash drives, which are also known as "pen drives, key chain drives, key chain memory, pocket drives, thumb drives, USB mini-drives, USB Memory Keys, or simply removable flash disk drives," according to this article. These babies can withstand temperatures anywhere between 32-140F (the author of the articles left one in a car overnight during a Michigan winter. It still worked),
gravity to 1000G (1000 times the earth's gravity), and vibration resistant to 15G. Thinking back to the bernoulli boxes of old, I thought that the tiny flash drive would be too delicate to hang from my keychain, but now I think it would be ok.

Here's a picture of a Sony Mini Microvault:

"Fisking"

2005-02-01T13:48:00.000-06:00

There's something about blogging that makes people want to create ugly neologisms. I recently gave you a phrase from the conservative end of the blogging world ("legacy" as in "legacy publications"); here's a word that's popular with the more liberal end of the political spectrum. According to the Samizdata Blogging Glossary, "Fisking" is the act of "deconstruct[ing] an article on a point by point basis in a highly critical manner. Derived from the name of journalist Robert Fisk, a frequent target of such critical articles in the blogosphere (qv).

Usage: "Orrin Judd did a severe fisking of an idiotic article in the New York Times today..."

A fisking may look something like this:

[Original article quoted:]

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

[Fisk:]

I don't agree with that third blah. And the fourth one isn't necessary either. Furthermore, the article doesn't even mention that there are way too many blahs' around.

[Original article, next paragraph, quoted again]

abc cee sisi ipjv woqqui jmsq mfo9a mmm qqq iii isss 0ppp mis km; qqw m,sfo mmms mee, ddid iii qqq uuu bbb eee www iii ppp ttt 999 ccc usu uuw qqq.

[more fisk]:

And then the author ties to get you off the blah's by throwing in a bunch of random numbers and letters! mfo9a, indeed! Why, everybody knows it should be 9m121! mmms and mme do not work at all here.

You get the idea.

I Love LibraryElf

2005-02-01T11:52:00.000-06:00

At the Internet Librarian convention I went to back in November, one of the many innovations I learned about was LibaryElf, a computer system that sends you e-mails to help you keep track of your library items checked out/and or overdue. Because my family and I are Waukegan Public Library cardholders, we were able to sign up for the LibraryElf service (libraries must subscribe to this service in order to offer it to their patrons). It's great! It sends me e-mail before five days before items are due, and now that someone in my family has an overdue item (not to mention any names), it has been sending me an e-mail every day to remind me to get that thing back before the fines accrue any more (LibraryElf allows you to combine all family members accounts and monitor all of them; this feature is good for people who want to keep track of what their children are checking out, and can't understand why the library can't tell them). I don't have to keep remembering to check my account, or to hold on to those little blue receipts that I always lose anyway.

I think that WNPL should consider adding LibraryElf to its menu of services.

Folksonomies: What's In It for Us?

2005-02-01T10:53:00.000-06:00

I've got to hand it to Ned Finck, whoever he is. Even though I didn't really like his article "Ten things your web site should be doing," it did get me thinking. And, it introduced me to a term I hadn't heard before: folksonomy. I've been wondering, in my off moments, what a library-oriented application of a folksonomy might be.

Here's an academic library application from Joy Weese Moll, of the blog "Wanderings of a Student Librarian." She writes that de.lio.us "seems like the perfect tool for creating course-specific subject guides. Just agree on a tag, like the course number, and the subject librarian, professor, and students can build a subject guide [to web resources] cooperatively, on the fly." For example, click on this link to see the online resources she found for her "digital libraries" class.

And, as you can imagine, there's been a lot of discussion of how a folksonomy approach fits in with the traditional practices of library cataloging. I found this discussion at Catalogablog useful, not that I understood all of it. As David Bigwood points out, one needn't take an either/or attitude toward either folksonomies or controlled vocabularies. He writes:

I think it was Michael Gorman who years ago said that there are basically four levels of materials, those deserving of full cataloging (MARC, EAD, FGDC), those deserving of qualified Dublin Core or some similar level of minimal level of description, those deserving unqualified Dublin Core and those that the search engines can provide access for. Folksonomies can be useful in providing some kind of access to the great mass of material in the latter two categories. It can provide additional points of access in the previous two groups.

I admit, I don't really understand the in's and out's of Dublin Core, but what he's saying is that some things deserve a full treatment, some a less than full treatment, and some only the minimum. The "great mass of material" Bigwood is referring to is all the junk that's out on the web (like abandoned blogs, pictures of someone's cats, etc. These are his examples, not mine).

He also points out that librarians can study folksonomies to find out how their users really go about looking for the items they want.

Technorati

2005-01-22T16:37:00.000-06:00

I'm experimenting with a blogger search engine (for lack of a better term) called Technorati. I've just signed up with it, and now they're asking me to post the following link to "claim" my blog:
Technorati Profile
(Technorati really wanted me to put some code in my template, but when I did, it ruined the blog--all you could see was weird code. So they're going have to be happy with my posting the link).

I'm also experimenting with Technorati "tags". Technorati tags are an example of a folksonomy. I've assigned two to the "Ethics of Blogging" article. Now I'll be able to see if they are of any practical use to me as a blogger.

Ten Reasons Net News Works Better as a Blog

2005-01-15T08:34:00.000-06:00

The complete run of Net News, minus items of ephemeral interest only, is now available at the Net News Archives blog site. I don't know why I hesitated so long! (actually, I do, but never mind...). Net News is a better publication for being a blog. But don't worry, NN is also still an e-mail newsletter, and will be until those of us at WNPL get NewsGator to read our RSS feeds as conveniently as we read our e-mail. The e-mail version of NN will still come to your mailbox on the third Tuesday of each month.

Here are the ten reasons that NN is much improved for being a blog:

It looks better:Net News has never won any awards for graphic design. I've always wanted it to have a slicker look, but didn't have the time or talent to make it happen. Now, using one of Blogger' pre-designed templates, the publication has an attractive interface. And when it gets stale, the template is easy to change.

It's easier to update:. It may just be the novelty factor at work, but it just it seems more fun to post to a blog than to create a Word document. I don't have to worry about remembering where I saved the issue I'm working on, if I may have left it open at the reference desk or on my computer at home, or what file name I gave to it.

It has given me a new burst of enthusiasm for NN: Since I went to the Internet Librarian conference in Monterrey, I've wanted to join the ranks of librarian-bloggers. I'm not really in the same category with conference presenters Steven Cohen, Jenny Levine or Michael Stephens (their level of devotion to blogging, RSS feeds and all forms of technology for technology's sake is overwhelming; for example, to use a phrase that Steven and Michael use often, I can't imagine ever saying that a gadget or a piece of software "rocked my world."), but, in its own small way, NN is contributing to the revolution.

Back issues are easily accessible: You don't have to save them (if you were saving them); they're all right here.

Search will one day be possible: The "search" feature at the top of the page doesn't seem to work as of this writing (and I don't know what to do about that; I suppose wait for Google to discover and index the NN blog), but once it does, back issues will be accessible through keyword searching. The ablility to do keyword searching eliminates the need for me to index the entire run of the publication (you may remember that I tried to do this a few months back, but the results weren't worth the effort involved).

NN will be RSS-accessible: When we at WNPL do have easily-accessible RSS, you won't have to wait for the third Tuesday of the month for your periodic dose of NN. You will be informed whenever there is an update. Even before NetGator arrives at your desktop, if you feel like a NN fix, you can always go to the web site to see what's going on (although, I can't imagine that anyone outside of me personally is all that interested in what I'm thinking).
No more awkward explanatory footnotes: The "permalink" feature allows one to link from one article to another (I'll explain permalinks in a future post). Footnotes will now be separate NN articles linked to the main article, rather than at the end of each article.

I've learned a lot about Blogger: by setting NN up, such as the permalink trick mentioned above. This knowledge may be useful in setting up future blogs.

It allows users to post comments. I've actually got one comment so far, from Marnie Webb, whose wrote the "Ten Reasons Non-Profits Should Use RSS. You, too, may post a comment, if you so desire. But, please, no profanity. Comments with vulgar words in them will be deleted.

It has an international audience, at least theoretically: There are those who have suggested that NN should be brought to the masses; I've always hesitated because I though that the pressure of knowing that there was a wide readership would induce in me a bad case of writer's block. Now, NN has its own web presence, which puts it in a different category as far as I'm concerned. It isn't quite so personal. So if you care to share NN with someone, you can just give that person the link.

Ten Things "We" Learned About Blogs

2005-01-11T10:57:00.000-06:00

The "we" in this case is Time Magazine. In their "Person of the Year" year-end wrap up issue, the venerable "legacy publication" listed the following points about the blogging phenomenon:

Blogging can get you fired

Bloggers get scoops too

Bloggers keep news alive

Bloggers can be titillating

Bloggers can be fakers

Bloggers make money

Most bloggers are women

Candidates love blogs

Pets have blogs too

Anyone can do it

Maybe Time's reaching a bit to fill out the top 10 ("Pets have blogs too" is an important observation?), but they do have a point in that blogging has truly gone mainstream. To see further proof that "anyone can do it," just click on "next blog" at the top of any Blogger-powered blog (like this one). Keep doing this, and you'll cycle through a wide variety of blogs by people of various countries, languages, ages, and walks of life. It's an oddly fascinating thing to do in your off moments, and you get different results every time.

Despite Time's contention that "bloggers make money" and "bloggers get scoops too", you'll see that the vast majority of blogs are of interest only to the people who are writing them and perhaps their close friends. But there's nothing wrong with that. There seems to be a renewed interest toward self-expression in our zeitgeist; I read somewhere that this may be an indirect result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Or maybe this drive has always been there; it just needed an easy-to-use tool to set it free.

Legacy Publication Footnote

2005-01-11T10:17:00.000-06:00

"Legacy publication" footnote: "Legacy publications" (or "legacy media") are the old titans of mass communication, such as the New York Times,Time, CBS News etc. This term is often used in a pejorative sense by political conservatives to describe the giants of the "liberal" mainstream media. Writes Jed Babbin in the ultra-conservative American Spectator blog, "In the computer biz, 'legacy systems' are old, outdated, and must be replaced if their purpose is to be served." Some of those who think that the legacy media should be replaced see independent blogs as one of the logical replacements.

Ten Reasons Internet Librarians Own the Future

2005-01-08T16:42:00.000-06:00

Probably the most entertaining presentation I heard during my time at the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, (Nov. 15-17, 2004) was the keynote speech, "Internet Librarians Own the Future" by Lee Rainie, head of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. I could base several NN articles just on his material alone. You can read his whole speech at the link below, or maybe you'd just like the highlight--the crowd-pleasing "Ten Reasons Internet Librarians Own the Future":

Nobody knows better than you how to manage information.

Nobody knows better than you how to track down information.

Nobody knows better than you the importance of information standards – common ways to categorize, sort, and act on things.

Nobody’s word about what’s right and what’s important has more credibility than yours.

Nobody is in a better position than you to teach people about information and media literacy.

Nobody in a better position to be a watchdog on new systems of sorting information than you.

Nobody is in a better position than you to teach the world about the history and built-in wisdom of credibility-assessment systems. I’m struck at how tongue-tied researchers often are in describing the rationale for the scientific method, and how unwilling lawyers are to articulate the underlying logic of the adversarial system, or how poorly editors of peer-review journals explain why they do what they do.

Nobody is more empowered by professional creeds and training to articulate the rationale for freedom of speech than you.

Nobody is in better shape to play a thoughtful, constructive role in debates about the value of information “property” and the meaning of copyright in an age where it takes a couple of minutes to download a brand new movie on BitTorrent – for free.

Nobody can be as constructive in helping us think through the new norms and even new laws we need to develop about what information is public and what is private.

Ten Reasons Non-Profits Should Use RSS

2005-01-08T16:30:00.000-06:00

Marnie Webb, a blogger in California who works CompuMentor, the home of TechSoup. lists these ten reasons that non-profits should use RSS (her comments omitted; for the full scoop, follow the link below):

It's a ridiculously easy way to read the web.

It's ridiculously easy to discover relevant information.

It's ridiculously easy to share the information you get.

It's ridiculously easy to participate in conversations

It's ridiculously easy to control your own subscriptions

It's ridiculously easy to allow people to trade your good content like it's a baseball card.

It's ridiculously easy for other people to lend you a bit of their web real estate.

It's ridiculously easy to avoid being a spammer.

It's ridiculously easy to contribute to web-wide conversations.

It's only just beginning

Ten Things Your Web Site Should Be Doing

2005-01-08T16:00:00.000-06:00

Recently, Barb handed me a brief article by a Nick Finck called "Ten Things Your Web Site Should Be Doing"(link below). In case you're curious, here's the complete list:

Offering regularly updated information (blogs, CMSs, etc.)

Increased efficiency in news and information distribution (RSS, ATOM, etc.)

Alternative methods of information distribution (email newsletters, RSS, del.icio.us, etc.)

Enhanced notification and announcement systems (pings, email alerts, etc.)

A place for your site's users to offer feedback and input (blog comments, forums, etc.)

Improved performance and code optimization (CSS, XHTML, etc.)

Multiple ways to access information (multi-faceted navigation, folksonomies***, etc.)

Intelligent system to system communication (XML, SOAP, etc.)

Collaborative communication and documentation (Wikis, blogs, etc.)

On-demand support feedback (user-driven FAQs, click-to-chat, etc.)

I don't disagree with the author's suggestions per se. As a general rule, it's always better to offer something rather than to not offer it; Blogs are good, RSS is good. CSS are good, etc. You can't really argue that it is time to turn the Internet clock back to 1997.

But, if you want me to sign on to something, you have to do a better job of persuasion than Finck does. I dislike his arrogant tone. "After all, we are living in a modern world, it's time your web sites start acting like it," he writes. I don't know what Nick Finck looks like, but the image conjured up in my mind by that last sentence is that of a cartoon drill sergeant pointing an oversized finger at a new recruit. He doesn't tell you why you should be doing these things, other than that "modern world" reference and his insistence that you should "work smarter, not harder." Well sure, Mr. Finck, I want your approval and I want my web site to be a part of the modern world and I want to work smarter, not harder, but how do your recommendations fit in with this sage advice? Elsewhere, when responding to readers' comments on his list, Finck writes that the list "is simply stating the obvious as far as what the user's needs are for company web sites (both Internet and Intranet)." Which users? How does he know?

Like most post-baby-boomers, I balk at "shoulds" that have nothing to back them up.

So, I didn't like the paragraphs that surrounded the list; what about the list content itself? Is there anything here that the library should (oops, there's that word) be thinking about? The bottom line of Finck's list is interactivity, and interactivity should (oops, again) be what the web is all about.

It seems to me that most of Finck's requirements could be fulfilled by implementing a RSS-enabled blog that allows readers to post comments.

But, as a public, nonprofit entity, there may be a limit to the amount of interactivity we would want. Our new web site will have a focus (even more so than the current one) on allowing users to "do-it-themselves" (as in renewing books or signing up for programs) if they so desire; this kind of interactivity is important. But, do we really want our patrons to be able to post publically-viewable comments on articles on our blog? A "user driven faq" is one in which most or all of the content is contributed by readers rather than provided by the site owner. How would this idea apply to the library?

Lists like this one are useful as discussion sparkers, but, as one commentator on this article wrote, "it's important not to find something to build just because we have the tools."

Folksonomy footnote

2005-01-08T15:12:00.000-06:00

Folksonomy footnote: The term "folksonomy" was coined by Thomas Vander Wal. A folksonomy (also called "social classification") is a classification scheme in which users make up their own descriptors (or "tags") for the things they are categorizing. For example, when you create a bookmark in the del.icio.us social bookmark web site, you have to assign it a "tag". A tag for a library web site might, for example, be "libraries", and presumably the user would use this tag for all the library web sites she bookmarked in del.icio.us. The "most active" or popular tags are listed on the right hand side--other users should in theory be inclined to use the tag terms that have already been established by others. If you click on a tag listed on the right, you get other bookmarks on the same subject. All the tags together could be considered a “folksonomy”. The idea is that a folksonomy is created on an informal (or “grassroots”) basis by a collaborative process, rather than imposed from “above” by a person or institution (such as the Library of Congress).

Holiday Cheer

2004-12-21T11:38:00.000-06:00

Finally, for a good laugh as you prepare for this holiday season, check out the “Scared of Santa Photo Gallery” at http://www.southflorida.com/events/sfl-scaredsanta,0,2245506.photogallery?coll=sfe-events-headlines&index=1

Best Of/Worst Of

2004-12-21T11:37:00.001-06:00

If you enjoy the annual critics’ best of/worst of list ritual, you’ll like the list of links you’ll find at Fimoculous (http://www.fimoculous.com/year-review-2004.cfm). From the New York Times’ Magazine’s highbow “Year In Ideas” to the tabloid Star’s “Most Annoying People of 2004”, it’s all here. Be sure to check out the extensive “Books” section; you may find lists that will aid in your collection development duties.

New Top Level Domain Names

2004-12-21T11:37:00.000-06:00

In the New Year, or maybe the year after that, look for two new top level domain names, the suffixes .jobs and .mobi. The jobs suffix will be for internet employment sites, and the mobi section will be used for sites that are specifically aimed at wireless users. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (INCANN), the international organization that approves such things, has given preliminary approval to these suffixes, but there’s a long way through the bureaucratic maze to final implementation. Two other top level domain names in the approval pipeline are .post (for postal services) and .travel (for travel services).

Spam Tasters

2004-12-21T11:35:00.001-06:00

In bygone eras, kings and queens had food tasters to make sure that only untainted victuals passed the royal lips. Today, the world’s most wealthy man has a staff of employees who read his e-mail and keep the low-rate mortgage solicitations from his private inbox.

Yes, that’s right: In addition to being the richest person in the world, Bill Gates is also the most spammed person in the world. He gets an estimated four million e-mails per day at his official Microsoft e-mail address (which I think is billg@microsoft.com) and the vast majority of it is unsolicited and unwanted. Most of it goes unseen by the big man, too; because he has a whole team of human e-mail readers who make sure he only receives only email he would want to read. So much for Microsoft’s anti-spam technology.

A Dubious Achievement—A Month Early

2004-12-21T11:35:00.000-06:00

Usually, I like to put dubious Internet achievements in the January NN issue, because that’s when Esquire magazine does its “dubious” review of the year before. But this one can’t wait.

Someone at Lycos Europe (remember Lycos?) came up with a campaign called “Make Love, Not Spam” (MLNS). European users (or anyone willing to lie about his/her location) could download a screensaver from the project’s site (http://www.makelovenotspam.com/) that would bombard spammers’ websites with excess traffic. The idea, according to Lycos, was to overwhelm the spammers’ servers and generate high bandwidth bills for site owners. The happy consequence Lycos intended was to position itself a friend of web users who are sick of spam.

This type of assault on a web site is known as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, because all that excess traffic makes it impossible for legitimate users to get into the site. DDoS attacks are illegal in the U.S. and most European countries and are generally regarded as immoral as well. Lycos got around this difficulty by claiming that their screensavers weren’t mounting a true DDoS attack because they were designed just to slow down the targeted spam sites, not to make them entirely inaccessible.

In a technical sense, the MLNS project did work. Lycos Europe estimates that the response time of some of the spam sites targeted by the screensaver slowed by as much as 85%. But it seems that no one at Lycos counted on the spammers fighting back. For example, at least one of the targeted spam sites simply redirected their excess traffic to the Lycos Europe site, thus turning Lycos Europe’s own weapon against it. There is also a disputed story that hackers broke into the MLNS site and changed it to say that it was going to report screensaver down-loaders to their internet service providers (ISPs).

All the excess traffic placed a heavy burden on ISPs as well, so they got mad too. Some went so far as to block access to the project. A British ISP, Global Crossing, issued the following statement, “[Our] acceptable use policy prohibits DoS attacks. As a result, we have 'black holed' the Lycos Europe Website … ‘Black holing' means we are not carrying any traffic to or from that Website on our network.”
The experts have minced no words in describing how stupid the MLNS fiasco has been. “I would have to characterize it as an astonishingly stupid idea,” said one. “This seems like a very shortsighted idea of theirs, lowering themselves to the same level as the hackers and spammers,” said another consultant. “In this case, it only causes traffic saturation. It's a noble gesture to fight back against spammers, but when you try to take down a spam site, a lot of innocent people get caught in the crossfire. As a big company, Lycos has to be more responsible than that," said yet another. A French security expert said it best: “I find the anti-spam downloadable DDoS tool to be without a doubt irresponsible, possibly illegal, sets a really bad precedent, gives the wrong impression to users, and possibly the dumbest thing I have heard of this week … I can summarize my thoughts into a single word. Dumb. With a capital 'D.'”

After just four days, Lycos took down the screensaver from the MLNS site, but not before it had been downloaded some 90,000+ times. And now, the final kicker; according to the MLNS web site on Dec. 18: “It has been reported in the media that fake software is being circulated on the Internet under the "makelovenotspam" name, which is actually not a screensaver but a computer virus. You are therefore advised not to download or install any software purporting to be the "makelovenotspam" screensaver, and to remove any copy you may have on your PC.” So, if you do come across anything called “Make Love, Not Spam” don’t touch it.

The Past of NN

2004-12-21T11:34:00.001-06:00

I was able to easily find the above quote from volume 1, issue 1 of Net News (November 21, 2000), because I’m in the process of creating a Net News Archives blog, which you may find at http://netnewsarchives.blogspot.com/. When completed (as of this writing, I just finished June 15, 2004, so there isn’t that much more to go), this archive will contain all the news-type articles from NN, with ephemeral information (such as “What’s New on the Web Site”) omitted. You’ll be able to access articles by date (Blogger allows you to backdate articles back to 1999, so the articles come with their actual dates), by title (there’s a “previous post” listing that runs down the right hand side), or by using a Google-powered search mechanism that doesn’t seem to be working as of this writing.

I will continue working on adding back articles to the archive as time permits. When a new issue of NN comes out, it will also be added to the archive (but, as stated above, it will still be a newsletter as well, so you won’t have to check the archive if you don’t want to).

This arrangement takes the place of my trying to index the last four years of material by hand. I’m finding it interesting to look over the back issues and see what seemed important at the time. Look for a future NN “Where Are They Now?” issue.

I got the idea to create an archive blog from Sarah Blake, a woman whom I don’t actually know, but whose life story I’ve followed off-and-on on the web for the past several years. She’s put her entire diary (with many entries edited for privacy; most of what remains deals with her evangelical spiritual journey) in her blog going all the way back to 1984. Her site is at http://www.growingstrong.org.