|
 |
Sunday, February 10, 2002 |
I forgot to pass along a link that Bruce sent me explaining why ReplayTV Is Not Another Napster. "SONICblue's Potashner has shown that he has a knack for zoning in on the next big thing. His company's MP3 player has 40% market share and deals with all five major music labels. Isn't it about time the entertainment Establishment stopped wasting time and money trying to use the courts to forestall the future -- and instead embrace the new technology?"
Not only does this article illustrate why I want one of the new ReplayTV 4000s to go with my two older ones, but it hits the nail on the head in terms of the dinosaur broadcasting industry. Just as with Napster, they can start acknowledging the future and working with companies like SonicBlue, or they can stand by and watch helplessly as others jump in to take their place and relegate the bigcos to the backseat.
11:05:40 PM Permanent link here
|
|
Okay, it's time for me to start figuring out how to send an end-of-the-day email to a list of subscribers so you don't have to keep visiting my site every day if you don't want to. I know I could create a list at Yahoo Groups or Topica, or I could use something like NotifyList, but I'm really looking to automate this process. I think Dave has automated this, but I don't know how. Maybe it's something in Manila and/or Frontier, but most likely it's something he's programmed. Dave, what's your secret?
So does anyone have any advice for the best route here?
10:59:29 PM Permanent link here
|
|
How To Think About Technology "We have two choices. We can watch technologies come down the stream and pluck out the ones we think valuable. The questions I pose here can help in making those kinds of decisions, and this is necessary and important work. Or we can, as a profession, decide that it is better to be further upstream, engaged with the people who are thinking up new technological goodies and be a part of that process to influence their design and development. I'd rather be upstream. Our presence in the development process would undoubtedly help to produce things that are more helpful not only to us but in general." [at Library Journal, via NewBreed Librarian]
I would rather be upstream, too, which is one reason I started this blog. I want to prove to vendors, especially those outside of libraryland, that they should be working with us, not ignoring us. I read an interesting interview with Jane Margolis about Computer Science's Gender Gap in which she says we need women in CS for the perspectives and testing we bring to development. She illustrates this point using examples of flawed products that were developed by all-male teams.
I'd make a parallel argument for the need to integrate librarians and libraries into the IT world. There's the obvious taxonomy and organization issues, but another good example of the alternate perspective we could provide comes from a web design mailing list I'm on. It's comprised mostly of techie web designers. It's a great list, but they all seem to think that everyone should run their 19-21" monitors at a resolution of 1024 x 768, surf with browsers that are not maximized, using the latest and greatest browsers, and on a high-speed Internet connection. They just don't understand how the rest of the world really views and uses the Web. I think they would be very surprised to see how patrons use the Web in libraries. They desperately need an alternate perspective.
One last thought about the LJ article: it says one question to ask yourself is "does it feel right?" It's a good question, but sometimes you don't know the answer. Not knowing or not being sure feels wrong, but sometimes you have to get yourself past that uncertainty and take a chance. Failure is better than not even trying.
8:52:42 PM Permanent link here
|
|
It seems like a good time of year for commercials right now, what with the Super Bowl, the X Games, and the Olympics. I love that Dasani is using Dee-lite's Groove Is in the Heart, and the Unicenter ad about the stapler going down is classic (I think it was Unicenter). The Kevin Bacon commercial for Visa. It's too bad Ad Critic is gone....
7:24:02 PM Permanent link here
|
|
"Lawrence wrote a howto for moving content from Blogger and Movable Type into Radio 8. This is still a new art, so if you're not an early adopter, let other people pave the path for you. A few have already made it across." [via Scripting News]
So Lori, if you decide to give Radio a try, you wouldn't lose all of your previous posts. Good to know!
6:40:48 PM Permanent link here
|
|
Assigning Metatags to Chat Logs "Another late-night idea: assigning metatags to online conversations, more specific - to chat logs. How many valuable information will be lost, when people chatting online. A good tip for travelling, a valuable URL, anything. Yep, there are client-side solutions to this - a IM logs, URL collectors etc. But I was thinking to do it server-side." [drop.org - community plumbing]
Now there's someone that's thinking ahead. I use AIM to ask Rich quick questions about Oracle and PL/SQL (I'm sure he doesn't think they're "quick"), and I end up just saving the logs as "rich1," rich2," "rich3," etc. I think there was one time when the conversation was contained to one topic so I could name it "portal dynamic pages" or some such thing. But as John Robb has noted, IM sessions need to be integrated into a KM system, and meta tags would certainly help with retrieval from that system.
6:30:14 PM Permanent link here
|
|
Love Songs Will Serenade Sharks to Help Them Mate "Sharks are to be serenaded by Barry White at The National Sea Life Centre in Birmingham in an experiment to help them mate. His love songs and other romantic tunes will be pumped in to tanks containing dogfish, starry smooth hounds and tope." [via MeFi]
That paragraph alone makes this worth posting, but it's not even the best part of the article. This is:
"The experiment follows the revelation of the centre's 'Rock lobster', Ginger, who has a penchant for pop. The crustacean reacts to music played to it on a radio by picking up the vibrations and wiggling its antennae. Visitors say it looks like dancing."
It wasn't a rock, it was a rock lobster! Now try to get the song out of your head tonight. You're welcome.
6:21:40 PM Permanent link here
|
|
Web Journals by Pros Are a Font of Insight "Tech 'bloggers' (that's really what they call themselves) are most often industry pros who keep their Weblog as a hobby-something to do at 2:40 a.m. While some of the sites offer straight tech news, most are sprinkled with a lot of personality, authoritative firsthand information, and fresh insights. With so many tech magazines out of business (we're not naming names), these e-newsletters, once solely for tech heads, are becoming mandatory information sources for the mainstream." [at Fortune, via Scripting News]
This is what I was trying to say on the ILA RTSF list last week. I don't really read tech magazines anymore, and while I have a core set of mailing lists to which I'm subscribed, I get most of my news, tech tips, and insights from blogs now.
This is part of a larger phenomenon I've noticed in my life that I plan to write an essay about soon.
6:09:16 PM Permanent link here
|
|
How's this for kids using the Internet. Our 7-year old has found a horse she wants to buy, and it's only $1500. (ONLY?!) She found it herself at HorsesForSale.com. Every day she goes on the Web and checks her email, looks for inexpensive horses (she still doesn't understand the concept of boarding), trolls the American Girl site to add to her wish list, plays games online, and today she discovered the Disney site. She also takes her friends online to show them all of these things, none of which they have ever seen before. She thinks all laptops are connected to the Internet using a high-speed connection. Like I said... shifted.
5:57:15 PM Permanent link here
|
|
Yay! Today I finally got the remote authentication set up for the Homer Library's databases. I've been trying to get to this for some time now, so I'm happy I can cross this off my list. Plus, now I won't feel like such a hypocrite when I preach to other libraries the gospel of remote access. Expect to see this in action at this month's SLS Tech Summit.
And BTW, that there is an official plug. If you're a librarian in the Chicagoland area, you're eligible to attend this event for free-free-free. I'll have covered some of this material at past Tech Summits, but I'll go into more detail at this one and provide a more complete picture, as well as discuss how blogging can be utilized on library Web sites.
5:07:38 PM Permanent link here
|
|
From my referers today (I say referers, you say referrers....), I found my way to LibrarySpot's News section. It's a collection of solid links that will keep you up-to-date on news (not on new reference sites per se), but what would be really neat is to see all of these feeds generated via RSS so that all of the latest headlines for each site are automatically displayed on one page. That would be information diffusion in libraryland. Plus, you could pick and choose which of those headlines you want displayed on your own page. I'm still hoping to find time to write up how to do this with a third-party aggregator. If you know of a good article or tutorial that has already done this, please send it along!
As Paul and Lori will attest, you can't really grasp how this works or how valuable it could be until you see it in action.
12:19:15 PM Permanent link here
|
|
Question for you: what do you call it when you contact someone via IM? For some reason, it doesn't seem right to me to say I'm "calling" them. I don't feel comfortable using "IM" as a verb, and "chatting" doesn't convey initiating the conversation. Will this take on the language of one of the big players? For example, "xerox" became synonymous with photocopying, so would I "AIM" you to initiate an IM session? What term do you use or would you propose?
12:10:28 PM Permanent link here
|
|
"CNet. Library radicals targeted by copyright owners. We need to resurrect the "digital divide" debate to make sure libraries remain sacrosanct. It is in the public good to make sure there is an ability for people to get access to information, even if they can't afford it." [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Even though he's pointing to an article from July, 2001, John gets it. When this article appeared online, I didn't think there was as much of an uproar as there should have been. Had I been blogging then, I would have tried to bring this issue to the forefront, but I'm glad to see that others aren't letting it go unnoticed either. It's up to librarians to educate the public and our elected officials about these issues.
12:05:08 PM Permanent link here
|
|
Review Of Netflix DVD Rental Service "What kind of selection do they have? Well, their selection is IMMENSELY larger than anything that Blockbuster offers. Over 10,000 movies to rent. Can't beat that! What about late fees? There aren't any. You simply rent the movies, keep them as long as you like, and send them in when you are done. It's really that easy. NO LATE FEES!! WOO HOO!" [Slashdot]
This is partially a "me, too" post to let folks out there know that there are better places to go than Blockbuster for DVDs. I recently joined NetFlix after paying $12 in late fees. Twice. Most of the reviews of NF focus on how you can rent a lot of movies for $20 a month, but I subscribed for a different reason.
I want to watch movies I've chosen, not something that was left on the shelf after I dragged my butt over to Blockbuster and there wasn't anything better to select. And the whole point of DVDs is the extras, which require additional time to watch. So even if I only watch 3 movies a month, it's still worth the $20 to me because I factor in my time, the convenience factor, and the wide selection from which to choose.
Here's the thing - NetFlix understands my schedule. They know that I want to watch what I want when I want without having to go somewhere to get it. The DVDs magically appear in my mailbox, and the fact that there are no late fees solidifies my loyalty to them.
Libraries need to pay careful attention to this model. You need to be able to provide me with the service I want when I want it without having to go somewhere to get it. And if your circ staff is still haggling with patrons over dimes and nickels in late fees, then you need some serious customer service training. Your library needs to fit into my busy life, not the other way around.
10:56:24 AM Permanent link here
|
|
© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
|
|
|
