December 2011
48 posts
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Federal Computer Week: Agencies question value of... →
Government agencies are expanding their use of social networks but are still unsure whether they’re getting a good return on the investment, according to a recent survey.
The survey results from Market Connections Inc. released in a Dec. 15 webinar showed government use of Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter rising to high levels in 2011, but also found that 31 percent of the...
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Both Sides of the Table: The End of the Web? Don’t... →
Argues against the long-term success of mobile apps over the mobile web based on computing history—a fascinating read.
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OhMyGov!: Three Mistakes Agencies Often Make on... →
These three points apply to non-government organizations (e.g. libraries), too:
make sure your upper-management team believes in social media.
if you’re jumping into social media because everyone else is doing it, please step away: Social media is a long-term commitment and not a gimmick.
before committing to social media, you need to have a reason for using it
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ReadWriteWeb: What I Learned About the Wired World... →
I learned so many lessons about the Web on jury duty last week. Here are just a few.
Write Like What You Say Will Be Read To A Jury
I’m not speaking abstractly here. If you document your life dramas online, and if those dramas end up in court, the lawyers will dig it all up. Work emails are one thing, but people in this case admitted private Facebook messages as character evidence.
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gigaom: Publishers still missing the point on... →
When the major book publishing firms signed an agreement with Apple that allowed them to control the prices for their e-books — unlike the deal they had with Amazon, which gave the online retailer the right to cut prices if it wanted to — they probably thought they had won a major battle. But as a Wall Street Journal story points out, they are still shooting themselves in the foot when it...
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USA Today: Self-published authors find e-success →
Today, authors such as Prescott can bypass traditional publishers. They can digitally format their own manuscript, set a price and sell it to readers through a variety of online retailers and devices. Amazon sells e-books via its Kindle device and on its Kindle app for smartphones and computers. Barnes & Noble sells e-books through its Nook electronic reader device and app. There is also...
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govloop: New Twitter Guides for Government... →
Some of the guidelines are the same for agencies and employees, and while this is labeled for government, these guides should be useful for anyone tweeting on behalf of a company/organization/business/etc (I’m thinking specifically of libraries, of course, but that’s not the only possibility).
The 15 commandments for agencies:
Thou Shalt Listen Before You Leap
Thou Shalt Use Thy...
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Scientific American Blogs: Digital divide and... →
Beside the divide in Internet use and in the context of technological infrastructure, there are other types of digital inequalities that move beyond internet access such as information literacy. Information literacy involves, for example, online search, digital, media and networked literacy or technical and cognitive, critical literacy skills in order to navigate online.
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Huffington Post: Upstairs, Downstairs: Torn... →
I agonized for weeks over which was better: digital books or “real.” At first, reading the Kindle was downright confusing. For one thing, what to do with that free hand flapping around while you hold such a slim rectangle and touch buttons to flip pages? (And why didn’t I have a Kindle while I was breastfeeding my kids?) How do you pretend not to notice an annoying...
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Wired: Amazon Doesn’t Care About Your Local... →
want to show how this entire argument pitting local book stores against online-bookselling juggernaut Amazon is based on profoundly flawed premises. It misses the significance of Amazon’s transformation of retail — not just books — as well as the transformation of literary culture that’s been wrought by the web. And not just Amazon.
These arguments, reducible as they are to the back of a...
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Salon: Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller →
Some interesting arguments are made in this piece. Not sure I agree with everything, but as one who is very attuned to how much things cost, I can sympathize with some of the reasoning. (Ultimately, I use my library rather than buying my reading material—that’s even cheaper than Amazon. ;-) )
What rankles me, though, is the hectoring attitude of bookstore cultists like Russo,...
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Library Babel Fish: The Language of Libraries →
You’d think books might have the same power to distract – what is behind that tooled leather binding up on the top shelf? Ooh, that title down there looks intriguing – but that’s not their effect. Somehow, books signify a more intentional and contemplative relationship with knowledge. It’s partly because nobody shoves a message about a pizza party or a note about a funny video between the...
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NYT: E-Books, Shmee-Books: Readers Return to the... →
Encouraging news. I would’ve posited that maybe people are giving print books as gifts for the holidays because they can’t afford to give an ereader, but some of the books mentioned cost as much or more than some of the basic ereaders, so I’ve got nothing. :)
But the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales...
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The Librarian's Commute: The False Economy of... →
…On the supply side, things do seem to be heading in that direction. The message to students seems to be all about saving money, which I could see being very persuasive at the community college. In the long run, however, I have to wonder if there is truly a cost saving. First, there is the issue of portability. Online classes aside, if everyone taking classes had a tablet or a...
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Times Higher Education: Do you feel lucky? Google... →
Two years ago, Google Books was becoming the world’s largest digital library and, with an effective monopoly, seemed “almost certain to be the last one”.
The tragedy for scholars was that Google Books’ metadata - which allow users to search the catalogue - were “a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess”.
Such was the argument made in 2009 by...
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NYT Sunday Review: The New Digital Divide →
FOR the second year in a row, the Monday after Thanksgiving — so-called Cyber Monday, when online retailers offer discounts to lure holiday shoppers — was the biggest online sales day of the year, totaling some $1.25 billion and overwhelming the sales figures racked up by brick-and-mortar stores three days before, on Black Friday, the former perennial record-holder.
Such numbers may...
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EFF: How SOPA Affects Students, Educators, and... →
Libraries and librarians
They’re not alone. Libraries represent another educational group that could face fallout from SOPA. The Library Copyright Alliance, a group whose members include the American Library Association and two other major library organizations, has also written a letter to the House of Representatives [pdf]raising major issues with the bill.
Alarmingly, the librarians point...
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Harvard Law School: Zittrain in Technology Review:... →
… But the fact that apps must routinely face approval masks how extraordinary the situation is: tech companies are in the business of approving, one by one, the text, images, and sounds that we are permitted to find and experience on our most common portals to the networked world. Why would we possibly want this to be how the world of ideas works, and why would we think that merely...
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Academic Libraries in Flux →
thelifeguardlibrarian:
One function of the library that has not substantially changed is that of a teacher of information literacy — a skill that recent studies have suggested is sorely lacking among students doing research. In 2004, about a third of academic libraries reported that their institutions had a strategic plan that included improving information literacy among students. A fifth...
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Publishers Weekly: Cory Doctorow: Copyrights vs.... →
If the fights of 2011 have shown us anything, it’s that the Internet and the quest for human rights are inextricably linked. The Internet is where human rights fights are rescued from obscurity and brought to the world’s attention—whether Ustreams of Occupy protestors being forcibly evicted, Lt. John Pike’s pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis, or YouTube footage of Tahrir Square or the...
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NY Times, Media Decoder: What Writers Are Worth... →
One of the interesting things about the increasingly measured world of journalism is that new and surprising statistics are emerging about what kind of writing and writers are the stickiest.
Read It Later, the Web service that allows surfers to hit a button and save an article for future consumption, has been around since 2007, but it has really gained traction with the advent of tablets....
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O'Reilly Radar: Why cloud services are a tempting... →
The largest cloud providers today are Google, Microsoft, and Amazon; each offering multiple services and platforms for their respective customers. For example, Microsoft Azure, Google Apps, and Amazon EC2 are all hosting and development platforms. Google Docs, Acrobat.com, and Microsoft Office 365 all provide basic word processing, spreadsheets and other applications for individuals to use...
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Shatzkin Files: Competing with Amazon is not an... →
Although Anobii’s founding CEO, Matteo Berlucchi, tells an imaginative and persuasive story about converting the social aspect of books into a commercial proposition (which has been the effort of independent start-up Copia for the past year), I think the challenge for them and for Bookish, the US version of a publisher-sponsored online book retailer, is steep. The problem for them is the...
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NYT: The New Digital Divide →
Over the last decade, cheap Web access over phone lines brought millions to the Internet. But in recent years the emergence of services like video-on-demand, online medicine and Internet classrooms have redefined the state of the art: they require reliable, truly high-speed connections, the kind available almost exclusively from the nation’s small number of very powerful cable companies....
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gothamist: Who Needs Books? NYPL Main Branch May... →
Such a change would have at least one upside (you’d be able to take books out of the main branch for the first time in decades) but also huge downsides for those who love the gorgeous temple to reading. Most significantly for researchers, many of the 3 million books currently in the building’s stacks won’t be moved to further stacks under Bryant Park and will instead be...
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Collection Reflection: Whoever you're with, know... →
Librarians are knocking on wood when it comes to their electronic resources. The Penguin saga is just one more example that we need a course correction in how we’re approaching this issue. The problem isn’t Penguin. They are a for-profit company and are acting in their own best interest. The problem isn’t Overdrive. They are also a for-profit company and also acting in...
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Charlie Stross: Cutting their own throats →
For various reasons the major publishers don’t sell direct to the public themselves — they go via external retail channels. Of these channels, Amazon is the 500kg gorilla of internet sales. Amazon has ruthlessly used its near monopoly of online sales to exert monopsony buying pressure against suppliers, forcing the likes of Holtzbrinck or Penguin or Hachette to give them a deep...
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marco.org: A human review of the Kindle Fire →
The more I read about the Kindle Fire, the less inclined I am to want one…
I expected the Kindle Fire to be good for books, great for magazines and newspapers, great for video, and good for apps and games.
In practice, it’s none of these. Granted, I’ve only spent two days with it, so I can’t share any long-term impressions. But I’m honestly unlikely to have any, because this isn’t a...
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Wordshore: The privacy of the library patron, and... →
This is where public libraries provide an invaluable and potentially life-saving service. These are places where a person can go and browse the books and other information literature, and borrow what they need, or looks relevant, without having to discuss why with anyone. Much easier, less fearful, than talking to your friends, family, employer, or even your doctor.
The only interaction comes...
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Agnostic, Maybe: The Ever-Increasing... →
What irks me is when publishers continue to use language in their publicity and marketing about how they “value” or even “love” libraries. If this is how they treat an institution that they profess to value or love, then I think they need to check their working definitions of those terms. The love here sounds like the tactics of an unstable ex-flame who wants to get us into bed but won’t...
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Study Raises Doubts About Effectiveness of... →
I think most people use Facebook more for personal pursuits (e.g. posting photos for family/friends, playing games) than for academic/professional pursuits. I certainly don’t use Facebook to connect to libraries or pretty much anything having to do with my professional life (and I’m a librarian!), so it makes sense that students don’t either.
infoneer-pulse:
A new analysis of...
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Bruce Eckel: Why I'm Returning My Kindle Fire →
The more I used the Fire, the more it felt like I was looking through the wrong end of a spyglass and all I could see was Amazon. I had read that the Fire is designed as a consumption device for Amazon products but I hadn’t believed that they would go to so much trouble to hobble what should be a general purpose computer. This is an unfortunate sign for the company; it means that the...
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Malware-as-a-Service Blooms →
Serious implications for the typical internet user. Can’t say I’m surprised, though.
infoneer-pulse:
To all the other “aaS” providers out there, add this one: MaaS, for malware as a service. Yup, the bad guys have their own routines that can provide a one-stop, full-service shopping for fraudsters. How depressing is that?
Turns out, very depressing.
Here is how full service this...
