Sunday, March 31, 2002

Mike wrote me to note the letter he has written to his elected officials advocating that they oppose the CBDTPA. In it, he makes some excellent points, and he's posted it so that you can use it as a template in case you'd like to make your voice heard, too. Thanks, Mike! 11:42:32 PM  Permanent link here

Ozzy Keeps MTV Rocking "Powered in part by dark horse reality series The Osbournes, MTV scored its highest first-quarter ratings in its history among all its young viewer demographic categories." [MediaWeek, via MetaFilter] I just had to post this to note my opinion that The Osbournes is indeed one of the funniest half-hours on TV these days. The last two episodes about Kelly's tattoo and the noisy neighbors have been better than any scripted sitcom! 11:01:06 PM  Permanent link here

"Paolo at eVectors wrote up his deployment of the Radio Community Server.  Every person at his company uses Radio on the desktop.  They publish personal weblogs to the Intranet via an RSS server.  They use Radio categories to publish topic specific weblogs.  Their Intranet server aggregates RSS feeds from the multiple employee weblogs (both their main weblog and their category specific weblogs).  The Intranet server also integrates data from their accounting system (this could be generalized to extend to any source of application specific data that is aggegated centrally via web services), hosts discussion groups, manages task lists, and serves as centralized document store.  Their Intranet is a portal to all the information, people, and feeds that are available.  Nice."  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] I'm going to have to give Paolo's setup some serious consideration to see if it (or something similar) could work at SLS. I don't know that it would work for the extranet, but perhaps it could be one piece of the puzzle for the intranet. Question: what languages would I have to learn to truly understand Paolo's diagram and to be able to tweak it to do what I want at SLS? SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS, UserTalk...? 10:46:49 PM  Permanent link here

A Boycott the RIAA (recording industry of America) site.  The RIAA has set itself up for a fall.  Dribbling songs out on a per unit basis isn't going to last as a business model. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:34:07 PM  Permanent link here

"Like everyone else I heard about Yahoo's change in policy about opting-out for marketing messages, but until now I didn't know where I had to go to do that. Thanks to Eugene Leitl for posting the pointer. Very clear. I'm turning them all off. And thanks to Yahoo, no sarcasm, for letting me do that. They're in a tough spot, for sure -- with a big burn rate, low sales, and no place to turn to get more free money. Those of us who use Yahoo's mail list service for community and standards work really don't have a choice but to continue to use it. We're all in a tough spot." [Scripting News] You might want to warn your patrons about this, as well as opt-out of their spam yourself if you have any Yahoo accounts. 10:30:26 PM  Permanent link here

Groucho Marx letter to Warner Bros "Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal document warning us not to use the name Casablanca.... You claim that you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without permission. What about 'Warner Brothers'? Do you own that too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about the name Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the sticks as the Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor’s eye, and even before there had been other brothers—the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit; and 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' (This was originally 'Brothers, Can You Spare a Dime?' but this was spreading a dime pretty thin, so they threw out one brother, gave all the money to the other one, and whittled it down to 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?')" [via Ernie the Attorney] I'm sure Groucho would have had much to say about the current goings-on.... 10:25:02 PM  Permanent link here

"The Cleveland Area Metropolitan Library System has linked to The Handheld Librarian and are sponsoring a really neat program The Dog Ate My PDA. The speaker is Steve Bush, the editor of Pen Computing magazine. The program will provide an overview of mobile computing and pdas; case studies from high schools and universities; hands on use of a pda; and popular applications from course scheduling to e-books and more. CAMLS even has their own blog, Jenny!" [The Handheld Librarian] We're doing a more informal take on this topic at SLS on May 9 for our next "Tech Summit." We've decided to try and convene a panel of local experts together to discuss specific PDA projects. Teri has agreed to discuss her planned project at CLS (thanks, Teri!), a gentleman at School District 230 will talk about their Palm program, and I'm still hoping Lori will be able to highlight her ongoing PDA project within her medical library (please oh please oh please!). Staff at SLS libraries can sign up using the SLS Calendar of Events - May 9 at 1:30 p.m.! Any non-SLS folks are welcome to come, but you'll have to register via fax, email, or phone. I'm pretty happy about this because I really wanted to highlight this topic before the schools let out for the summer. I couldn't pull together the DMCA/CBDTPA panel fast enough for this session, but I will keep trying for a future one. Keep you posted.... 10:04:25 PM  Permanent link here

I'm adding Todd Gitlin's book, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives to The Shifted Reading List, thanks to Librarians Anonymous. I'm also going to try to keep up with LA, but it's getting more difficult to keep up with blogs that don't have RSS feeds because I have to manually visit them all, rather than having them appear automatically in my aggregator. Steven did this, and now I keep up with his site very easily. So if you have a Blogger site, you might want to consider using RSSify to create a feed for it. 9:11:56 PM  Permanent link here

Thanks, Steven. You have to admit that when the lead went from twenty to five in just four minutes, you were worried. It was almost one heckuva comeback! I'm still in mourning, but I'm proud of them. I feel bad for Roy most of all. However, if Gooden comes back to play with Miles, Langford, and Simien, you'll see them back in the thick of things next year. Roy will have his day yet! 8:59:45 PM  Permanent link here