A study by the DNER's formative evaluation project has found that 45% of students in the UK turn to Google first when looking for information online. This is more than four times the number who turn first to their university's online catalog, the runner-up resource. The study is online (RTF format). [FOS News]
I'm not surprised. And I'm pretty sure the percentage is going to rise as scholarly material continues to make its way to the web. There's no way that even big teams of information specialists can beat the millions of people who collectively make up Google's "global brain".
Real estate agent Tara Sue Grubb is fed up with what she calls "individual rights sacrificed for big corporate politics." Grubb, 26, is running as a Libertarian candidate against North Carolina's Howard Coble, the 71-year-old Republican congressman whose public opposition to P2P file-sharing networks has made him the target of an online backlash.
UserLand's Mail to the Futureallows you to send mail to yourself or others at a specified date and time.. in the future! It's simple, it's fun, and it's futuristic! (Of course..)
Personally, I use the RemindMe email service to track important dates. It works pretty well.
First, the industry's gotta change. We have a recording business that was built around its ability to solve what was once a really hard problem - distributing music. Now any 11 year old with Internet access can solve it. So, the current recording industry has to change or fail.
...The very thing the most conservative among us have dreamt of, have died for since the founding of this country, is now within our grasp: free markets, free speech, worldwide. And we're blowing it because some dinosaur companies insist on maintaining their grip on every last dollar before their industry dies. 500 million of us can see how close it is, how the world economy would blossom, how the human spirit would get dizzy with possibility, and we're arguing about how we can best prevent it? We should be talking about how we can explode the barriers.
So, I don't know how the law should change. I'm not a lawyer or legislator. But what's at stake isn't whether some of us get music without paying for it but the type of world we're building. We're have the chance to move from a world based on scarcity and greed to one built on abundance and generosity. And the effect will be evolutionary growth ....unless we stay really stupid about it.
That's what I said. Then we had coffee. Nothing changed. [JOHO the Blog]
A quick plea for help from readers who know more about Radio UserLand than I do; hopefully someone will come up with an answer.
Here's the deal: I just got a new computer and want to run Radio on it. I want to reproduce the exact same setup that I have now on the new computer. I don't want to lose any of my previous posts, templates and the like. I have the tingling feeling that it's tricky stuff. Could someone please tell me how to do this properly, or point me to relevant material?
Update #1, 12h43: Capt. Nemo offers advice. Thanks Captain! sounds good, but the the "Hope it works" part makes me think perhaps I should wait a little for others to chime in.
Update #2, 13h03: OK, here's an eleven-step how-to that I found at the very end of the Missing User Sections in Scott's book; but it's about reinstalling rather than moving Radio, so I'm not 100% sure it will do.
Update #3, 13h55: Bingo. A sudden flash of inspiration prompted me to Google "userland radio reinstall "another computer" " and I found the official How to move Radio to another computer. Now to try it. Wish me luck...
Update #4: Cyp writes: I have moved my radio from WinNT to Mac OS X to Win XP. The last move was pretty much seamless! and points me to this.
Update #5: Done. I followed the official guide and it seems to have worked, as far as I can tell.
Funny how so many people (myself included) have been talking about K-logs in the absence of an explicit definition. Yesterday, in my referers, I found a google search on the phrase "A K-log is". Follow the link and see how pitiful the results are. But the last result, on the second page, is actually the best one, and helped me find a very interesting (but sadly, abandoned) weblog.
"A K-log is a knowledge-management weblog, where you use weblogging tools (like Blogger, Manila, or Radio) to write about your work, what happens, and what you know about. Presumably everybody else does too -- or some reasonable portion of "everybody else". Then you might use RSS to aggregate all this content, and you have the core of a knowledge management system." writes Pete Harbeson.
Now that's the kind of definition I like: to the point and understandable. I'm putting that in my knowledge repository.
OK. Here comes the part where you should pay attention, because this is the first time I've seen something like this since I've been following the K-log world, and it seem pretty relevant. Pete has experience with implementing k-logging in a large company. He says:
"It turns out that I've been building a system to do this for the past year or so. It's not yet very distributed throughout my client's company (yet), but we've reached about 1.7 million hits on a site that's available only behind a corporate firewall. It's a big company, but not that big. We've also found that other groups in the same company are doing similar things; this is clearly something an organization needs when it reaches a certain level of complexity.
I've learned a few lessons along the way, with (I'm sure) many more to come. They are:
Posting the information is a small problem. Organizing and retrieving it is a big problem. We're working on a shared ontology and RDF metadata.
Most people don't like to write. We've had a difficult time designing interfaces that encourage adding information instead of just reading.
There's no substitute for good, accessible writing. We have several people who write consistently for the system. The logs show that postings from one writer get far more attention and prompt far more linking than those from the other writers. "
All three points confirm the intuitions I had. The rest of his blog ("On explaining and explanations") is also very interesting and well-written (Lilia, you should definitely have a look at it). I really hope Pete comes back to blogging soon. Looks like he'd have a lot to contribute.
Update, 11 AM: It turns out Pete hasn't vanished. A reader (Wayne Messer) commented on this post to point me to Pete's new blog, Infoliage. Definitely going on my reading list.
RFC: Kuro5hin.net. For a long time, I've held the domains kuro5hin.com and kuro5hin.net, but haven't done anything with them. ... Kuro5hin.net, we thought, would be a cool place for K5ers to have their own web space. A larger, looser community where people could do their own thing and expand K5 in ways that our fairly rigid structure doesn't really allow. Weblogs, personal sites, things like that. www.kuro5hin.net could serve as a "center," where people could fill in some information about their site, like where they're from and what they're interested in. Then you could easily find other K5ers who lived near you, or liked the same things. [kuro5hin.org]
A great idea, though the proposed implementation seems costly for members, as several people have commented. The more I think about it, the more I think rigidity and tight coupling is going to be a hindrance to the growth of communities like k5 in the long term. Intelligence and freedom need to be at the ends, not at the center.
