If you want a depressing exposition of what you can and can’t do as a college student armed only with a mobile phone, read this article: Smartphones Bring Hope, Frustration as Substitute for Computers. It details all the limitations with smartphones as computers, a situation many poorer students with either no computer or no Internet access face. And let’s face it, without Internet access, a laptop might as well be a brick when it comes to research. Sure, many of us wrote numerous college essays on computers with no Internet access (and probably even some typewriters), but that was before most of the research material was online, back with journals and indexes were in print. With a wifi-less laptop, you could still do a lot of reading and writing, but finding and getting to that reading would be a lot more difficult. Imagine trying to all your college research and writing on a smartphone.

(Source: twitter.com)

The Georgetown Law Library and members of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group have released new data that shows within a five-year period, nearly 38 percent of online legal reports and web pages preserved through the library’s efforts have disappeared from their original web addresses.

And in our world, computers have replaced human interaction.  Virtual people have replaced people.

And this is absolutely where Stoll predicted correctly.  He concluded in his Newsweek article, “What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact.”  He could never have imagined that in the 10 years following those words that we have successfully replaced physical contact with emotional contact and that emotional contact would be derived from tweets and pokes and updates and texts.

An effective online presence really comes down to not putting one’s ego first.  That could be the collective ego of the library as an institution,  the ego of the director, the ego of the board of trustees, or the ego of that territorial librarian who controls the library’s online content with an iron fist.  As soon as any person or entity’s ego overrides the need of the online patron, the library, as a whole, loses.

While there was a big outcry against SOPA that included protest from many well-known Internet giants like Wikipedia and Reddit, the backlash against CISPA hasn’t had quite as many champions. Some sites that came out against SOPA, like Facebook, are actually pro-CISPA for very self-interested but logical reasons. Along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), whose opposition to the bill is frankly no surprise, the American Library Association (ALA) has also come out against CISPA, and in doing so have suddenly become my heroes. Here’s why.

(Source: twitter.com)

Following up on comments last week in which the RIAA finally admitted that innovation is the best tool for tackling piracy, Brin said that the piracy problem would continue as long as people found it easier than using legitimate offerings.

“I haven’t tried it for many years but when you go on a pirate website, you choose what you like; it downloads to the device of your choice and it will just work,” Brin explained, adding that the restrictive mechanisms employed by authorized sites only represent artificial walls and “disincentives for people to buy.”

(Source: twitter.com)

First, a growing number of people are using mobile as the only way they access the web. A pair of studies late last year from Pew and from On Device Research showed that over 25 per cent of people in the US who browse the web on smartphones almost never use any other platform. That’s north of 11 per cent of adults in the US, or about 25million people, who only see the web on small screens. There’s a digital-divide issue here. People who can afford only one screen or internet connection are choosing the phone. If you want to reach them at all, you have to reach them on mobile. We can’t settle for serving such a huge audience a stripped-down experience or force them to swim through a desktop layout in a small screen.

(Source: twitter.com)