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Wednesday, March 20, 2002 |
Final post tonight is a trip down memory lane for Bruce and me.
"Though I loved to play computer and handheld electronic games, I sucked at them. Could never finish them or get high scores without cheating. However, I was pretty good at Mattel's Football, which has been re-released in 2000 as a keychain and game. Another fave was the Baseball game, which has been re-released in 2001." [meryl's notes]
I was just going to say "ditto" to Meryl's post, but then I remembered that [I think] my original Mattel basketball game is somewhere in the house. I almost bought Bruce the new one for Christmas; I actually screamed when I saw it in the store. (It's true - ask Sheree and the guys watching the security monitors.) It had the easiest pattern in the world to figure out for corner jump shots and lay-ups. Does it make us officially "old" when our fave childhood games are now labeled as the "classic" version?
11:40:41 PM Permanent link here
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Movabletype v 2.0 is out, which thrills Meryl, as it should. Eric is also having fun with the new version:
"OK *long sigh* I can now succesfully post from NewsIsFree to any BloggerAPI compliant system. Most important being my Movable Type blog. No neutered characters thanks to the new MT version 2.0.
Radio also posts beautifully to MT as well. I'm now completely satisfied...at least for the moment."
I could never give up my Radio now but if your looking at blog software, it's good to know Movable Type is moving forward.
11:30:44 PM Permanent link here
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I've been more than remiss in noting that Jim sent me a pointer to visual.net's new map for PubMed. My demo disc from VN arrived while I was on vacation and I haven't had a chance to play with it yet. Unfortunately, I am so freaking swamped at work right now that I probably won't have time to do so until April (separate apology to Buzz, too), but I definitely plan to get to it [both] soon. I find these visual maps fascinating, and I'd love to incorporate them into the re-designed SLS site, as well as VIC, IGI, and more (as noted in a previous post).
10:33:44 PM Permanent link here
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For the record, I'm complex, not disorganized. Please strike all references to "messy desks" from my past and future work evaluations.
"But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktop to hold "ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use." The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains." [at The New Yorker, via MeFi]
Oh, and it talks about Melvil Dewey ("the anti-Walt Whitman"), his Library Bureau ("essentially the Office Depot of his day"), and vertical files. I really have to find time to read the rest of this book someday, as I think I've become a Gladwell groupie.
9:36:20 PM Permanent link here
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Frontier ODBC Extension
"The ODBC Extension allows a Frontier user to easily write cross-platform scripts for connecting Frontier to any ODBC compliant database system such as Oracle, Sybase, MS SQLServer, Access, mySql, or anything with an ODBC driver for your platform." [Daniel Berlinger's Archipelago]
More food for thought as I continue exploring options for portal software for SLS. Sigh.
9:20:27 PM Permanent link here
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"Why doesn't Outlook send an SMS every morning summarizing the schedule for the day and pending tasks, and a reminder SMS as scheduled meetings approach? Why doesn't Muvico send an SMS every Friday morning with a list of new releases and possibly their schedules? There are countless ways that businesses could "reach out" to consumers via SMS, providing desired information in an acceptable manner....
Of course, such services are readily subject to abuse. Mobile Spam is the last thing that consumers want, on any continent. A safer approach might be for the phones themselves to provide functionality for "subscribing" to information on the Internet and downloading it on a scheduled basis. Think of it as offline WAP. Avantgo essentially does that on most PDA platforms, I imagine that they can easily support SmartPhone (Palm-based phones are already supported)." [Bryce's Radio Experiments, circuitously via ...useless miscellany]
I agree with Eric that Bryce eyes the nail squarely before he hits it on the head. However, I don't think we'll reach that end via this route. I think faster wireless speeds will be a reality before Americans ever truly embrace SMS or IM on their cell phones in large numbers. (Poor cell phone usability will probably keep hindering us for some time.)
That means information will be the big pull, not just messaging. As you already know, I think information is already shifted and promiscuous, and anyone under the age of 25 (plus a heck of a lot of the rest of us) will start expecting our hand-picked news to come to us this way.
Not everything, mind you. If I subscribe to 100 channels in my news aggregator, I should be able to prioritize six to eight of them to come to my phone, too. And when I say phone, I mean the eventual phone/PDA combo. Bryce is right that synching with Outlook will overcome the largest barrier to widespread adoption of these combination devices. When I have my always-on connection, this is what I want to have in my mobile news aggregator at any given time (in addition to my calendar, my contacts, each family member's schedule, and access to email):
- The schedule at my local movie theater
- The weather forecast (especially storm alerts)
- Library Stuff and LIS News (so I can browse them while standing in line somewhere)
- The Illinois library news channel (after we create this, of course)
- My local library's programs
- Current announcements from my kid's school (especially school closings)
- Headlines from my local newspaper
- The NY Times News Tracker
- Frame-by-frame Dilbert and Overdue (okay, I'm reaching here, but it'd be cool)
Basically a mix of news, schedules, and announcements that I choose. I do think that filtering information through news aggregators could be the next major step in harnessing information (a natural evolution after the PC and the internet). That's what Radio is doing for me already. Making it mobile and accessible from anywhere completes the information shift circle.
Maybe I'm the only one that wants this and it won't happen, but I'll snap it up as soon as the tools are available and useful (probably before they're even useful). I already try to screw my round PDA and round cellphone into this square mobile information hole. I think AvantGo became impatient (or is lacking the funding to wait) and are shooting themselves in the foot by weeding out the smaller channels. Those are the ones I want to be able to pull in wirelessly from anywhere, especially the ones I can localize (like the schools). Add voice synthesizing into the equation so that I can hear my mobile news aggregator and location-based services of my choosing and you're reeling me in even faster.
That's the kind of value-added, wireless service for which I would pay extra. However, there isn't even an infrastructure for this yet, let alone a well-constructed interface. Instead, the telcos are too busy focusing on keeping me on their approved sites, showing me what they want me to see, all of which stifles my desire to use their services. The lure has always been choice (AOL vs. the internet), and news aggregation fulfills that promise in the mobile environment. SMS won't be able to fill those shoes because it leaves you scrolling through multiple messages and your inbox becomes cluttered like your emailbox.
I'm becoming more and more convinced of the power of RSS aggregation as a tool in the war against promiscuous information overload.
8:37:10 PM Permanent link here
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Score one for the Toronto Public Library. Their SmallBizXpress service looks pretty spiffy, and it lets you personalize the page, too (something we're investigating doing at SLS). I also like how the TPL advertises their Ask a Librarian email reference service. Not only do they break it down into request forms for Adults & Teens and Kids up to Grade 6, but the tag line for the service is "Email a question and receive an answer within 24 hours? AMAZING!" Nice thinking on their part, since most email reference sites take the opposite tact and sternly warn users that they'll be lucky to get an answer in 24-48 hours and even then there's no guarantee. Not to mention that their site is top-notch all the way around in terms of usability, legibility, navigation, use of color, and room for white space. Nice job, TPL! [via WEB4LIB]
2:31:57 PM Permanent link here
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While I was away, Axel posted a survey of Web Page Accessibility at 56 North American Campuses: Library Schools and University Libraries. He also includes links to the individual institution's web policies, which is nice. However, what is scary is that there are several sites that have regressed in this area, going from being more accessible to being less so.
I'm about to wade knee-deep into this dilemna, because I have to make some recommendations for new SLS portal software pretty soon. On the one hand, I want blogging, RSS, WYSIWYG editing, remote access, multiple levels of authentication, templates, adherence to the WAI guidelines, metadata, and a heck of a lot more. On the other hand, I can't find a product that will do all of this, so I have to decide what gets voted off the island, what we can reasonably pay someone to modify (should we ever have any money for consulting), what I can reasonably learn to do myself, and what we'll have to just hope for in the future.
I'm starting to lose sleep over this one because if we go with an out-of-the-box solution that does most of what I want, we probably choose Macromedia's Coldfusion and UltraDev. If I want to prepare for the future but make other trade-offs, I'd choose a combination of Frontier and Radio. I'm very worried that we'll fall into the same trap as the institutions in Axel's study, though, and end up with something that is less accessible than we have now (for example, Oracle Portal). What to do, what to do....
10:49:21 AM Permanent link here
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 "Logitech KeyCase: "Built around an ingenious multilayered-fabric technology, this pressure-sensitive sheet pulls double duty as a protective case and a keyboard. When not in use, you can wrap it like a nylon burrito around your Palm m100- or m500-series handheld. Once it's unfurled, though, you'll see each key silk-screened on the fabric's surface. However, this keyboard has a few drawbacks." [CNET Computers]
Did Logitech acquire ElekTex fabric PDA keyboard technology to make this? I've been trying to follow their keyboard for a couple of years now, but it still isn't available publicly.
 Logitech Typeaway: "Like the Palm m500 Portable Keyboard, you unfold the TypeAway on a flat surface and drop your Palm into it in order to type. This model, however, is much thinner than Palm's--roughly the size and shape of a cigarette holder (0.5 by 5.3 by 3.4 inches)--making it perfect for stashing in a coat pocket. The QWERTY keypad has some unusually shaped keys, but thanks to its reasonable touch-typing response, you'll find yourself typing almost as fast as you do at the PC with just a bit of practice." [CNET Computers]
This one looks interesting, too, although I'll stick with my Stowaway for now. I hope both of these keyboards will be available for the Sony Clies soon.
10:00:49 AM Permanent link here
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"In addition to all the fantastic XML news sources that Radio can bring you, now for the first time, direct from the source, we are proud to offer fresh headlines from The New York Times, every hour, on the News Aggregator page in Radio UserLand." [via Scripting News]
Now that it's official, I'm going to capitalize all of the letters in the word wow, bold it, italicize it, and even change it's color. WOW! Check out what you can subscribe to now, straight from the horse's mouth.
1. Arts 
2. Books
3. Business
4. Dining and Wine
5. Education
6. Fashion and Styles
7. Front Page
8. Health
9. Home and Garden
10. International
11. Movies
12. National
13. New York Region
14. Opinion
15. Politics
16. Science
17. Sports
18. Technology
Hey librarians, go back and read #2 again - BOOKS! Every time you hear someone use the phrase "the slippery slope," it's in a negative context. For some reason though, I want to apply it to this Userland-NYT partnership. Hopefully this is just the beginning of a coming landslide of direct, professional journalism feeds congregating hourly in my news aggregator. It's the perfect complement to the blogged commentary that's already appearing there, so I'm glad a BigCo finally woke up to this! Who do I have to talk to at American Libraries and Library Journal to get this party started?
Oh and by the way, between this announcement and their recent implementation of the Times News Tracker Alert, I hereby declare the NY Times to be officially shifted! (You folks know it's a given that Userland is shifted, right?)
9:23:01 AM Permanent link here
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For future reference, blogs are being used by publishers now, too, as evidenced by Avatar Press. As happened with web sites, it starts with the hipper ones, but it's yet another example of blogging for Cluetrain connection. The fact that it's from a comic book publisher just makes it that much more fun.
Side note to Jolene: I hadn't thought to just remove the date from the daily template, so you should be able to use Radio to publish What's Gnu without the date headers. Permalinks would still be available and the addition of titles really helps, too, not to mention the new Google-It macro. The only problem I can see is the lack of individualized titles for pages, but I think the search engine can compensate enough for that.
7:32:20 AM Permanent link here
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Mike: "I'm disappointed to see that my favorite character of all time, Phineas from A Separate Peace, isn't on the list. I guess librarians would just laugh if I told them. Damn Librarian elitists."
Just for the record, this list wasn't compiled by librarians, even though the magazine says it was put together by a "panel of experts." I just knew we'd have fun debating it. Also for the record, I agree with Mike 100%. How can Phineas not be on this list?! The full list with short commentaries and factoids for the top ten is at http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue21/100best.shtml . (Hint: if you want to read the whole article, call your local public library and ask them for it.)
Also, check out Mike's blog because he's doing some interesting educational things with it (and in only two days, I might add). PDF flashcards in addition to links for studying for an upcoming test. I don't know if this will remain the focus of his blog, but it's pretty cool.
7:24:51 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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