echo

I usually only post about American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association, if I am going to make fun of it. The November 2009 issue has great columns by Joe Janes and Kate Sheehan, but however, also an interview with David Weinberger.
I just may love to hate this guy, but he reads [...]

lists of listmakers and the lists they make

My attention span is dwindling.
A few weeks ago - no - a week? I don’t know.
Recently, Twitter started letting you make lists. I sort of wondered, why?
Well I guess we all have different strategies for monitoring our social networks. I have a friend who only follows 50 people on Twitter. I’m not one [...]

and then i made another post

In And Then There’s This, Bill Wasik demonstrates how “viral culture” (or “viral marketing”) works and argues that for the most part, it is not accidental.
The most compelling bit of the book is the introduction, most of which is available in Google Books, where he argues that people writing blogs, tweeting and posting their [...]

really, it has something to do with libraries, you just have to make it up for yourself

Like a most other 0th-generation Oregonians I’ve met, I’m interested in the local lore. I usually find it hard to identify with people scalping indians, trapping beaver and cutting down the biggest trees they can find, but the landscape is fascinating, and I haven’t yet grown tired of its starring role in the recent, desperate [...]

geocities, you will not be forgotten

I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the passing of Geocities. This coming Sunday, October 26th, Yahoo! is shutting down the site for good. I am not going to tell you I learned HTML with Geocities, or wax nostalgic on how awesome it was that they let anyone have a website for free, [...]

YOUR STUPID LIBRARY BRANDING HERE pts. 1 and 2

Aaron wrote recently about EBSCOHost Connection, a service from EBSCO that puts their source material into search engines, then lets end users log in through their library.
Nice idea. It’s something I’m interested in: how do we get the library materials into the search engines?
Sometimes you see hits from JSTOR or PubMed also, and searching around, [...]

an end to who and where

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

I checked out this book a few months ago and am finally being forced to read it (someone has a hold on it). I never took a real literature course in college, and 10 pages in, I’m already in over my head.
But my [...]

google books will get better, or will it?

This afternoon I used Google Books to help answer a readers’ advisory question. Keywords from the patrons’ question turned up in a 1971 issue of Horn Book, the children’s literature review.
Google’s misshapen snippet showed part of a summary of the book, but nothing more. I took the elevator to the sub-basement, got lost, asked [...]

I was thinking about the thing where The Scientist (register to see) blogged that Merck payed Elsevier publish a fake journal, and I was wondering what the two companies were saying about it.
Tidbits:
* Merck claims no foul play

what makes a technology new?

I’ve been thinking some about new technology. What really makes a technology new, and what does that mean?
I have an inkling to stand on my high hobby horse and say that a new or improved application of an existing technology isn’t really new. My Subaru Outback and a Model A Ford are basically the [...]