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Tuesday, November 26, 2002 |
Barlow Talks Libraries. Library Journal has a great interview with John Perry Barlow.
"LJ: The Internet has certainly attached itself to libraries[~]and so, not surprisingly, your work is popular with librarians[sigma]
JB: Well, then it's a mutual admiration society. Libraries are one of my most favorite things....
LJ: How did the Deadheads inspire the world's first Internet guru?
JB: Well, Deadheads had a lot of characteristics of, say, a medium-size town. They were a tight community. But what I couldn't understand was how they had achieved that aspect of random interaction that is so essential to community. You know, meeting at the public library or the village square. Until someone suggested to me that the continuous space Deadheads inhabited was called the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the forerunner of the Internet. The ARPAnet was a government network mostly for defense contractors. It just so happened there were a lot of Deadheads among defense contractors, and they had set up newsgroups on the ARPAnet. A lot of the random interaction in that community was taking place there. When I first got on the ARPAnet and a community bulletin board called the Well, I immediately felt like I was dealing in a social space....
LJ: As cyberspace develops, do you think libraries will maintain a physical role in their communities?
JB: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I think physical libraries will be even more important in the future. Communities need that physical element. But libraries will have to be places where people do more than go to get books, because a lot of what people want they will be able get online. Libraries will be places where people will go to exchange ideas, and librarians will be even more essential than they are now, guiding people to information, knowing where to find it. I look at the potential for librarians and for libraries as being venues for all manner of salons, where the objective is not silence but conversation....
LJ: One line you wrote that has always stuck with me is, "information is experienced not possessed." What is the Internet teaching us about the nature of information?
JB: I think cyberspace is gradually teaching us that information is a verb, not a noun. This is a very important thing. Information is a relationship. It is something that exists in the space between two minds or many minds. It is not something that is merely encapsulated and collected into some physical object. But we have a lot of habits that were developed out of an industrial economy that make it very difficult for us to imagine things any other way.
LJ: So what does the idea of viewing information as a verb mean for libraries?
JB: Even with their physical books in their traditional libraries, librarians have always had a holy mission to see that information was available. Now they have the opportunity to see that information is everywhere. That is enormously exciting. The problem is, for some, especially administrators, that they have to think a lot about legal issues[~]which is their job, in fairness. They have to be concerned about copyright violations, keeping pornography from minors, and all the other kinds of proscribed materials that are, as many librarians would argue, still part of the overall ecology of ideas. So, unfortunately, right now there is also a great deal of tension....
LJ: You cofounded the EFF, which has fought on the front lines in a number of battles important to the library community. What's your message to librarians on behalf of the EFF?
JB: I hope more librarians will join us. Librarians' entire raison d'être is up for grabs. The American Library Association has been extremely helpful, especially with the [Child Online Protection Act] case and other legislative issues. But librarians still have a culture that is kind of polite, circumspect, maybe a little reticent. If librarians really care about what they do, they need to become more politically involved. These issues in cyberspace are not going to go away, and they could turn out very badly. I would love to see more librarians ready to charge the battlements, because you can't be confident that this is all going to work out and virtue will prevail. Not now." [The Shifted Librarian]
11:03:14 PM 
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Blogging 101.
"Saint Leo University is giving wireless-network-equipped laptops (with built-in video editing capability) to every residential student and faculty member." [DV for Teachers]
Imagine what could happen if they also gave each student blogspace and software. What a way to chronicle your college years, and you could come out of it with an incredible portfolio for job interviews. [The Shifted Librarian]
11:02:01 PM
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Bill Vaughan. "A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election." [Quotes of the Day]
8:36:14 PM
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Is it finally coming to be? After years of talk of video on demand maybe something is going to be done in this arena.
Demanding Video. Video on Demand Is Finally Taking Hold
"After years of failed promises, unripe business plans and half-baked technology, the cable industry is finally beginning to deliver reliable and economical video-on-demand services.
Want to watch an episode of "Sex and the City" from last month? Punch a few buttons and sit back as the program begins when you want it to. Phone ringing? Hit pause on the remote, and the program will freeze. Miss a line? Press rewind. Bored? Choose from hundreds of other films, series and specials [~] none of which requires you to record it ahead of time.
Video on demand reached a significant milestone recently, when Time Warner Cable announced that by the end of the year the service would be available throughout the company's biggest market, New York City, where it has 1.2 million subscribers.
Besides Time Warner Cable, owned by AOL Time Warner, other big companies now offering video on demand around the nation include Comcast and Cablevision. The Yankee Group, a technology research firm, estimates that by the end of this year about seven million homes around the nation will have access to video on demand, up from only about three million at the end of 2001.
Despite the omnipotence that the label implies, video on demand does not allow users to watch any program or movie under the sun. No database is yet infinite. But in New York City, for instance, Time Warner Cable plans to have 1,300 hours of programming available at any one time [~] the equivalent of almost two months of TV watching." [New York Times]
This is another form of The Heavenly Jukebox, where the middleman is cut out of the process, the product never ships in a box, and the sale goes directly to the consumer. In this case, the middlemen are video rental/distribution channels like BlockBuster, Best Buy, and libraries. There is no mechanism here for a library to circulate a video over the Time Warner network (in part because there is no way for a library to logistically circulate a digital video file at this point in time). [The Shifted Librarian]
8:18:04 PM
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The Miami Herald | 11/25/2002 | In digital world, you must protect your privacy rights. People complain about the lack of privacy in our digital world, and yet they seem all too willing to give away their secrets for a pittance. Maybe it's ignorance about what they're giving away, so let's dispel some of that. I haven't seen this as much in South Florida as other parts of the country, but many stores have discount programs that require you to give the cashier a small card with a bar code as you checkout. The bar code identifies you, which gives them the ability to record and study your purchasing patterns. In return, you get a small discount on what you buy. In some ways, it strikes me as a fair deal. You give the store the ability to market to you better because they know what you like, and the store gives you get a discount. The problem I have with this is so few consumers really understand what it is they are giving away. After all, it's not like the drugstore or supermarket has a big warning sign that says, ``By signing up for this program, you agree to let us collect personal information about you, use it to our advantage, and sell it to whomever we want, whenever we want.'' If you think that can't be the deal because there ''must be a law,'' you're sadly mistaken. There is very little in the way of privacy protection in the United States. Most of your protection comes from educating yourself about privacy issues. [Privacy Digest]
8:09:22 PM
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Sychip offers SDIO Wi-Fi: Devices with Secure Digital (SDIO) slots should shortly have full Wi-Fi access available through a Sychip chipset and reference design. The SD slot is found in Palm and PocketPC models as well as cell phones and other devices. [80211b News]
7:55:56 AM
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Smartphone review
Lengthy review over at Mobigeeks of the new SPV from Orange, the first cellphone to run Microsoft's new Smartphone operating system. The review includes plenty of screenshots of the different applications and games available; besides the usual email and web browsing apps, the SPV has a version of Windows Media Player, so it can double as an MP3 and MPEG player. It even has an SD slot which accepts cards up to 512 MB, so you could in theory watch movies on this thing. The SPV is only available in Europe at the moment, but other cellphones running the Smartphone OS should be hitting the US sometime early next year. Read...
http://gizmodo.net/archives/000722.php#000722
7:53:48 AM
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iCal World Offers iCal, iCal, and More iCal
from the don't-forge-the-ical dept. Ken Moulton writes in that "iCal World combines news, tips, help, applications; public, private, pay, and secure calendar hosting; and an extensive iCal calendar library."
http://www.icalworld.com/
7:50:17 AM
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What's the definition of innocence?
A nun working in a condom factory, thinking she's making little sleeping
bags for mice.
7:43:21 AM
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We're Sure Happy It's Tuesday. Of course we're also half way through the work week.
7:28:12 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Paul W. Swansen.
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