August 2011
88 posts
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Econsultancy: Using social media at live events:... →
There is always a small group of consumers who think it’s hilarious to upload pictures of nudity, or swear on screen, to deliberately try to damage the brand’s reputation or just for the fun of it.
The bigger the potential embarrassment to the brand (i.e., the bigger the audience witnessing the naked picture), the more likely people are to post inappropriate content.
[…]
It’s good...
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85 Reasons to be thankful for librarians
ankova:
1. Librarians take care of libraries, which are still invaluable today. 2. Not all information is on the internet. 3. Older books still hold great cultural significance. 4. Libraries are still repositories for some of the most valuable works of literature in the world. 5. Even with the internet, the library is still the best place to do research. 6. Girls with glasses can still rock the...
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Sunset: Time lost and found →
I sometimes teach classes on writing, during which I tell my students every single thing I know about the craft and habit. This takes approximately 45 minutes. I begin with my core belief—and the foundation of almost all wisdom traditions—that there is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that...
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Social Media Examiner: 9 Reasons Why Your Content... →
Many articles have been written on how to increase your audience size and make people aware of your content, including these by Mari Smith and Denise Wakeman. This article will focus on the motivations for sharing.
…
Your customers don’t trust you
Your customers don’t care about your brand
Your posts are boring
People care about causes more than brands
People share to build...
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USC Daily Trojan: Digital libraries wasted →
Most students are, however, oblivious to the newest online resource additions. They also grossly underutilize the libraries resources — especially the very substantial number of e-resources and database subscriptions USC provides.
Students should take more advantage of the number of digital libraries that the university provides in order to have more success in their academics.
Often,...
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New York Times: Are Research Papers a Waste of... →
If research papers — or dissertations, for that matter — were to become a thing of the past, what would we lose in our pursuit of knowledge? Is there a better way to assess knowledge?
An interesting collection of viewpoints from a panel that includes the founder of The Concord Review (which publishes academic research papers), two professors, a librarian (and associate...
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Tohu Bohu: The Library, it's academic →
But… by the same token that these instructors are specialists in their fields, the reference librarians are specialists in library reference. No instructor in the university knows the databases as well as the reference librarians, or the ways the citations sometimes fail to surface in one way but come back in a different way. Nobody knows the resources of the library better than the...
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TechCrunch: Book Piracy: A Non-Issue →
When it comes to peer-to-peer file sharing, however, I’m calm to the point of apathy. The reason: books have always been free to those who don’t want to pay for them. Since as far back as the 17th century, people too poor, or too cheap, to buy a book could walk into a public library and borrow it. In most civilized countries, a fund was established to pay authors a royalty on those loans —...
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The Tragedy of Missing Out →
strangemonkey:
read this. now.
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Tech Daily Dose: Stay Informed: Online and Mobile... →
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The Guardian: Are books dead, and can authors... →
An interesting perspective; the opening is obviously trying to be provocative:
Will books, as we know them, come to an end?
Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of “the writer” as a profession. Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams,...
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“Liberal arts colleges should better recognize the obligation of our sector of...”
– Views: The Public Service Obligation - Inside Higher Ed (via infoneer-pulse)
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“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”
– Jorge Luis Borges (via ghardin)
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NY Times: Just Give Me the Right to Be Forgotten →
In the United States, however, personal information about a consumer generally may be kept by the company that processes it — except for certain regulated industries like credit. Individual companies in many sectors set their own policies on data retention. Some agree to delete information; others don’t.
“As a general matter, companies in the United States don’t have to recognize your...
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Respectful Insolence: The consequences of blogging... →
The result was, unfortunately, predictable. René was ordered by his superiors to cease all blogging, Twittering, and other social network activity related to public health. Having just last year been the subject of an e-mail and telephone campaign to try to get my university to fire me for my online activities, I completely sympathize with what René went through. Government and corporate...
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TechnoSocial: On Pseudonymity, Privacy and... →
Here lies the huge irony in this discussion. Persistent pseudonyms aren’t ways to hide who you are. They provide a way to be who you are. You can finally talk about what you really believe; your real politics, your real problems, your real sexuality, your real family, your real self. Much of the support for “real names” comes from people who don’t want to hear about...
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Galleycat: How To Find the Book on the Tip of Your... →
Trying to remember a book you read as a child? Need help finding the title of a short story you loved in college? Post your query on the Tip of My Tongue page at Reddit–hundreds of dedicated readers will help you find the book.
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The Atlantic: Why Facebook and Google's Concept of... →
Excellent (brief) article about how using real names on social networks is radically different to what we would expect if we made the same sort of statement aloud in public.
But this week’s discussions have made me rethink my intuition about names on social networks. My instincts had strongly pointed to requiring real names; my experience in the comment trenches of different websites...
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Guardian Books: The true price of publishing →
official-which:
lemonsharks:
calimae:
In other words, publishing is a business that incurs high fixed costs. And it’s this, to return to my initial question, that accounts for the high price of (indeed the very existence of) hardbacks. The publisher needs to maximise revenues in order to defray its outlay. Some people are prepared to pay top dollar to have the premium product – a ...
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Booklamp.org →
Booklamp.org is the result of an exploratory project intended to help you find new books by comparing the content of the books themselves, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music. We’re attempting to help you find books with similar themes and writing style to books you’ve enjoyed in the past - comparing elements like Description, Pacing, Density, ...
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“90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use CTRL/Command F to...”
– Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL F - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic (via infoneer-pulse)
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Guardian Books: The true price of publishing →
In other words, publishing is a business that incurs high fixed costs. And it’s this, to return to my initial question, that accounts for the high price of (indeed the very existence of) hardbacks. The publisher needs to maximise revenues in order to defray its outlay. Some people are prepared to pay top dollar to have the premium product – a hardcover copy that comes out, crucially,...
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MindShift: How Social Networks Might Change the... →
Reading hasn’t always been seen as a solitary act. Our first experiences with books demonstrate that: before we know how to read, we often have people — a parent, a teacher — reading out loud to us. But once we know how to read, there’s a sense that we’re supposed to read silently and oftentimes, read alone. Even so, we’re still compelled to share what we’re reading with others — whether...
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'Cyberloafing' At Work Boosts Productivity,... →
infoneer-pulse:
Bosses may have it all wrong when they assume that funny cat videos and FAIL slideshows are a drain on the workplace. Some new research finds that a moderate amount of mindless web surfing actually makes workers more productive at their jobs.
And the more mindless the surfing, the better.
“Employees who browse the web more end up being more engaged at work, so why fight that...
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Tame the Web: Office Hours:Finding Balance? →
Balance can mean a few things. I urge librarians to find the balance between online pursuits and physical world pursuits. Both are important and necessary. I’m revisiting a charged statement from the first “Office Hours” column – “If the online world is not for you, then neither may be a career in librarianship”...
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Sherlock Holmes book banned in Albemarle County,... →
Cali comments:
On the bright side, they proposed putting “Hound of the Baskervilles” on the sixth grade reading list instead. And it’s not like the kids can’t still read “A Study in Scarlet”, it’s just not on the sixth grade reading list anymore.
But still, objecting to the Mormon bits? Even though this story is obviously not modern? Really, now. One can...
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shhh! no running in the library!: Library links... →
thelifeguardlibrarian:
1) Library of Congress. Explore the Center for the Book (free reads & downloads), The National Jukebox (free historical sound recordings), the digital collections, the US Copyright Office, the Law Library of Congress, the home of the poet laureate, and so on, and so on, and I love America.
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Library Babel Fish: Sources of Confusion →
Many readers of college student prose will not be surprised to learn that students don’t summarize sources – that would require reading and understanding them well enough to sum them up in a sentence or two. In fact, when Jamieson and Howard examined the way sources were used in 174 papers, only 6% were summarized; all the rest were paraphrases or quotations of specific sentences. For the...
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“A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need...”
– Leo Rosten (via solitudeandsolicitude)
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LIS News: Practical Advice On Choosing Good... →
Do you always use unique passwords? Are those passwords always “strong”? Does your library’s web presence require strong passwords for all users? Do you have password recommendation clearly posted on your web resources for your users? What makes a good password? Are complex passwords the most secure? Is it uniqueness? Is length the most important thing in a password?...
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American Libraries, Technology in Practice:... →
…With online instruction, instead of trying to cram as much information as possible into a single one-shot, librarians can design instructional modules that can be assigned to students at logical points in their learning. Online instruction doesn’t need to take up valuable class time, perhaps making it a more attractive option to faculty whose syllabi are already packed with content....
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The Guardian: Is this the end for books? →
So, even if they now seem natural, the lengths and formats of books are but cultural accidents. If this all goes, there will be consequences for the shape, size and format of prose narrative. How far is up for debate. Fiction by mobile phone is still essentially at the gimmick stage in Europe. But in Japan, keitai shosetsu, or “cellphone novels”, are composed on mobile phones and...
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Library Babel Fish: An Incident of Road Rage on... →
There’s something about being halted abruptly while careening along a familiar path that is intensely frustrating. The smallest things – a book the catalog says is available that’s not on the shelf where it’s supposed to be, a link that no longer works, a search box that has gone into hiding or acts differently – can let slip the dogs of war, or at least the puppies of profound...
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eLearning Technology: Twitter for Learning – 55... →
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PC World: Yahoo, Bing Beat Google in Search... →
I’ve often used Google to look up word definitions, and thanks to the way it displays results, it’s not uncommon that I don’t click through to any of the sites it uses (since what I needed is shown in the excerpts). Obviously they have to use some concrete metric to gauge success, but clickthroughs aren’t the whole story. Still, this is interesting; I wonder what it is...
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Social Media Collective: “If you don’t like it,... →
I think the same principle applies to internet sites. Members of a community (nation, state, book group, dining club, whatever) have a responsibility to criticize and suggest alternatives to things they find problematic, whether those are government principles, media representations, website policies, or laws. In fact, this is such a cultural norm that the right to protest is enshrined in...
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Information Wants to be Free: Be the change you... →
We all have our own standards of excellence. Some people’s bars are set higher than others. We also have different priorities and what motivates me to put in 100% won’t necessarily be the same for you. Whatever your own standard of excellence is in your work – whatever you passionately believe in doing – that’s what you should be true to. Be yourself. Don’t stop volunteering for things just...
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LISNews: Practical Tips for Online Privacy →
There are ways to opt-out of most major tracking companies. However, a study by Stanford University Law School’s Center for Internet and Society has found that many online advertising networks are not adhering to their own privacy policies and continue to rely on and push out Web tracking cookies even after users have indicated that they do not wish to be tracked. Half of 64 online...
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The Telegraph: The printed book is doomed: here's... →
However, I’ve noticed that I’m increasingly frustrated when reading printed books because they don’t have a search function. With an ebook I can quickly search the text to remind myself who a character is or to re-read a particular passage. It’s also much easier to annotate and highlight an ebook. I’ve never liked annotating printed books. It feels too much like spoiling them....
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Matt Mullin: Ebook Subscription Models, Revisited. →
muttinmall:
About two weeks ago, I wrote a little bit about the cloud-based ebook reading startup 24symbols. In case you missed it, the short version is that I’m skeptical of any sort of unlimited subscription model for ebooks in the United States, mainly due to problems with the ebook lending model in…
