January 2011
43 posts
3 tags
“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope...”
– Neil Gaiman’s Journal: Another Year
December 2010
71 posts
My Year Without Star Wars →
Structure should be armor — the protection that makes it safe to seek out originality in the dangerous tunnels where raw matter is buried — not a pop-culture sign post indicating where the emotional…
Putin orders Russian federal agencies to switch to... →
Never one to pass up the opportunity to run a hunkitudinous (look it up!) picture of Vladimir Putin, we were thrilled to hear that the Russian Prime Minister and ex-KGB man has signed…
Patton Oswalt: “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to... →
The last supper… before Oswalt’s “a-pop-calyplse.” Image from The Last Supper Collection.
Yesterday, Wired published an essay by writer/comedian Patton Oswalt titled Wake Up, Geek…
book review: floating in my mother’s palm →
I read Ursula Hegi’s book about postwar Germany, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, because of the story within it called The Dogs of Fear. This was the story Holly told me about when I was talking…
Commensurable Nonsense (Transliteracy) →
Wikipedia uses a definition from PART (Production and Research in Transliteracy):
Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from…
book review: the warrior’s apprentice →
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga is a space opera classic. There are wormholes and space battles and currency discrepancies between worlds. This book, The Warrior’s Apprentice, is about Miles…
False and Misleading Information →
The study of misinformation is as important as the study of information to librarianship. In the current polarized political environment it might be impossible to look at this study dispassionatey,…
Collaborative Consumption →
One thing which excites me about Transliteracy is, because of its newness, the skills involved are not well-defined. It seems like many people interested in the topic have an “I know it when I see…
book review: at the mountains of madness →
It’s kind of sad when the Lovecraft book is the least racist in a series, but it’s also kind of good, because I really like At the Mountains of Madness. Most of why I like it is because of how…
The Things I Carried →
I’m just back from a First Year Reading Experience Committee meeting. Briefly, the university is looking into a common reading program for incoming freshmen…Google “common reading program” for…
“Digital Public Library of America” →
Soooo…whoever said libraries are a thing of the past has got it all wrong. Take a look at the researchers of the “internet” at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (a hybrid academic think tank…
Education and the social Web: Connective learning... →
Dr. Norm Friesen, Canada Research Chair in E–Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, provides an alternative take on education and social media in …
Netlabels: Release, Remix, Repeat →
(Photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by BB reader Josh Koonce)
If there’s a more robust realm of music more closely simpatico with the Creative Commons philosophy…
6 tags
“I wrote her a bedtime story, a disarming blend of humor and affection,...”
– Peter Watts’s Blindsight
8 Tools for Easily Creating a Mobile Version of... →
Jacob Gube at the American Express Open Forum gathers a helpful list of 8 Tools for Easily Creating a Mobile Version of Your Website. I have personally used Mofuse and Winksite and found…
Library and Archives Canada Announces Suite of... →
From an LAC News Release: Within the next seven years, Library and Archives Canada will put most of its services online, transforming the country’s leading memory institution into a fully engaged…
Universal Subtitles: add subtitles to any video on... →
The nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation has just launched an amazing new tool: Universal Subtitles. As the name implies, Universal Subtitles makes it ridiculously easy to add subtitles to…
Transliteracy Research Group: Metaphors for the... →
The anatomy of snowbirds →
posted by Neil It’s not the walking the dogs I mind. I like walking the dogs. What I mind, when the temperature is, as it is now, a hair below 0F (minus 18 C) is what I have to do in order to walk…
Introduction to Beyond Article 19 →
We have posted the introduction to Beyond Article 19: Libraries and Social and Cultural Rights to our website. Julie Edwards’ introduction is a good read in itself regarding the United…
Questioning Longitude →
Blog post looking at the issue of what libraries should do (if anything) to connect readers to information that is critical of a particular book or article.
Free E-Books: The Open Library (from The Internet... →
The Open Library (an Internet Archive initiative) has just launched a new version of their online ebook reader (aka BookReader) featuring a new user interface and other tools. It’s terrific….
Live-blogging Wikileaks →
For the past 13 days or so, Greg Mitchell at the Nation has been live-blogging the Wikileaks saga, which then became the rape charges and arrest saga, which then became the here are some more…
Federal Ban of WikiLeaks Website Embroils... →
Beverly Goldberg
Reaction continues to pour in from all over the world since the Library of Congress confirmed December 3 that it was blocking access from all LC computers to the…
What the F**k is Social Media NOW? →
What the F**k is Social Media NOW?View more presentations from Marta Kagan.
Rogue Archivist beer →
John Taylor Williams (who, incidentally, is a talented sound engineer and masters my podcasts) and Thomas “CommandLine” Gideon both volunteer for Carl Malamud’s Amateur Scanning League (a…
Invaders from Mars →
“Voting doesn’t change anything — the politicians always win.” ‘Twas not always so, but I’m hearing variations on that theme a lot these days, and not just in the UK. Why do we feel so politically…
Wikileaks: Anonymous stops dropping DDoS bombs,... →
If this image is to be believed—and I have no reason not to, other than that I found it on the internet—the rebel squadrons behind Anonymous (attn. “news” hacks - that would be an entirely…
Ribaric, Tim: Some tools to overthrow the empire →
I’ve been extra paranoid these days. The embroilment around WikiLeaks and Jullian Assange has made me reach for the foil hat more often that I would care to admit. Unknown organizations are…
Just hopping freights doesn't make one a Hobo. ... →
A Hobo is a person that travels to work. A tramp is a person that travels and won’t work. A bum is a person that will neither travel or work. Folklore abounds with the irresistible pull or
7 tags
The rush to smear Assange's rape accuser →
By Sunday, when Keith Olbermann retweeted Bianca Jagger’s link to a post about the accuser’s supposed CIA ties — complete with scare quotes around the word “rape” — a narrative had clearly taken hold: Whatever Assange did, it sure wasn’t rape-rape. All he did was fail to wear a rubber! And one woman who claims he assaulted her has serious credibility...
5 tags
China uses newfound clout to lash out at Nobel’s... →
First thus →
Blog posting at Metadata, cataloging, & various librarian-like stuff concerning Why RDA?
I completely agree with this, and I have still not found any adequate replies either. Naturally, the…
Harvard Business Review: "Six Social Media Trends... →
By David Armano (From “The Conversation”/Harvard Business Review) Mr. Armano, Senior Vice President at Edelman Digital, lists the following six trends. The blog post includes a discussion of each…
Silencing Wikileaks is silencing the press →
(image: Reuters)
Operation Payback is a bitch. “Anonymous” is retaliating against Mastercard for denying payment processing services to WikiLeaks, and Mastercard.com is currently down as a…
Composite photos made from time-series -... →
Brazilian photographer Diego Kuffer sez, “Photography only lets you capture instants (even long exposures are
only blurred instants).
So, I hacked the idea of photography, mixing together many…
Desaturated Santa →
Santa is an immediately recognizable figure, and a Classic Santa has a fixed set of signifiers. The red and white suit, the black belt, the black boots with fur on top, the hat with the pompom on…
A portal to my Cataloguing Aids website: Stray dog →
Sometimes I get really frustrated by LCSH. For instance, today I have a work about a stray dog. The subject heading for stray dogs reads Feral dogs. The dog in question is NOT wild or…
Die, Pluto, Die! →
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years trying to understand the astonishment that people feel over the demotion of Pluto. I mean: it’s really really really really tiny, compared to…
Linda Ueki Absher: The Hipster Librarian →
So why have hipsters latched onto librarians? Because we’re losers, at least in the public’s mind. Ask anyone with French tip nails and a frappuccino, and they’ll pretty much describe us as the Amy…
book review: the narrative of arthur gordon pym of... →
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a tale about sailing. There are three main stories of adventure: one is about accidentally setting sail with a drunk, one is about stowing away on a ship and…
It’s the money, stupid! →
Some people have speculated that libraries will have no place in an ebook world, and those people are probably right, if libraries don’t get their shit together. I don’t have the patience to search…
The pacifists who went to war; violence and... →
This documentary is the story of two Mennonite brothers from Manitoba who were forced to make a decision in 1939, as Canada joined World War II. In the face of 400 years of pacifist tradition,…
Easily incorporate free tech tools for teens @... →
Censorship is censorship, especially when it’s the... →
The Library of Congress has blocked access on all of its computers to Wikileaks. This action was taken, according to the Library of Congress blog, in direct response to a memo from the…
Open Knowledge Foundation: Opendataday & the... →
The following guest post is from David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared on eaves.ca.