We were able to squeeze in more than 50 librarians into the Library BoF. Topics of discussion included migrating to Drupal from other systems, integration with ILSs, creation of research guides, etc.
I put together a complete write-up for Library Hi Tech who'll be publishing it at some point.
That takes care of time.
On the way home, I made a last sweep through our local Borders. I went through the bookshelves and magazine racks and wondered what exactly will be the extent of our access to print media when none of this is around any more. Is the publishing industry (no matter how vibrant or moribund) about to run out of outlets?
The Illinois Library Association has just sent out an 'Action Alert' with the title, "Contact your representative to oppose filtering legislation".
Although I agree with all the 'talking points' it suggests, this one really strikes a nerve:
You'd think these people had better things to spend their money on:
Facebook and Google size up takeover of Twitter: report(Reuters) - Google Inc and Facebook Inc, plus others, have held low level takeover talks with Twitter that give the Internet sensation a value as high as $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Sites like Twitter come in and out of fashion all the time. $10 billion bucks? Can you say, 'MySpace'?
So let's say the iPad Fairy™ comes down and gives everyone at your school a free iPad. Miracle, right?
Well, apparently not at Stanford's School of Medicine. As an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education explains:
But when Stanford's School of Medicine lent iPads to all new students last August, a curious thing happened: Many didn't like using them in class.... In most classes, half the students had stopped using their iPads only a few weeks into the term.
How's this possible? Didn't they hear their own Assoc. Dean Charles Prober describe them as "extremely tech-savvy" in a press release from the School earlier in the year:
Because the population of new students is extremely tech-savvy, it makes sense to teach them through the use of the electronic devices they're familiar with, Prober said, adding, "We can either say, 'That's silly. They have to learn the old-fashioned way.' Or we embrace where they are."
Yup, 'embrace where they are'! That's the spirit!
Only they didn't. And you're entitled to ask where exactly 'they' -- in this case the extremely tech-savvy incoming class -- where exactly 'they' are.
Well, wouldn't you know, Stanford provides us with an answer! Every year the University conducts a survey of incoming students as to their computer use and in 2009, for example, they found that "90% have a Windows or Mac laptop".
So basically an overwhelming majority of students already have a computing device. It's called a laptop.
Of course the notion that a laptop might be more useful to students than an iPad, even in this day and age, never seems to dawn on the administrators. Instead they seem to be afflicted with a serious case of 'techno-infatuation disorder' or 'TID' for short. This is where the desire to be seen buying the latest tech gizmo overrides any consideration of whether the intended audience might actually want to use it.
Now if the administrators at Stanford's Medical School truly believed their students were 'extremely tech savvy', they might have left the decision of what to bring into the classroom up to the students themselves. But again, we're talking techno-infatuation disorder here and considerations such as what our users might actually want fade in comparison to what we might want for them.
Some shots on the way to work today.
Wonderful! Look what Amazon is recommending to me. Not only do they think I'm a vegan but an overweight vegan at that. I'm devastated.
Boy this is a classic: I email one of the IT people at MPOW asking how I can get access to the directory '/usr/local/' on one of the local servers here and he replies:
"You likely need to use: 'sudo -s' to access a root user shell first."
No, really? I'm thinking of returning the compliment and replying to him in Hoch Deutsch.
From Magill's Medical Guide:
"Meanwhile, Spanish physician Michael Servetus published a treatise in 1553 describing how circulation of blood to the lungs and back (often called the lesser circulation) might occur. Unfortunately, because he also included religious views, all copies of his writings that could be found were destroyed, and he was burned at the stake. Eventually, in 1694, a copy of his book was found; his circulation theory matched later findings." [6th ed., v. 1, p.369]
So Apple thinks it's okay to download and install commercial links to itself -- not just anywhere but on the taskbar no less, all under the guise of 'Software Updates'. If MS had done this back in the day, the Justice Department would've already been after their sorry a*ses by now.
As if I didn't have enough to do over the holidays (see below), I redesigned the website template for UIC's Office of Admissions & Records.
Basically what I did was to bring the thing into compliance with the University's new top-level website which they changed at the beginning of the school year.
The holidays are always a great time to do something like this (since basically no one's looking) so you can believe I worked my butt off to get this done on time.
I think I’m going to jump off a cliff -- the lords of platitude have won: http://tinyurl.com/3yndb62
So I'm reading about 'Reembedding Fonts in a PDF':
"In a perfect world, all parties which contribute to a regulatory filing would properly embed fonts. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world . . . there are times when you may need to embed fonts as a post process."
Hey, San Diego and Tampa: Eat your hearts out! (Corner of Fullerton & Kenmore, just outside of DePaul's Richardson Library).
I remember the ceremony out in front of the Reichstag very well. The flag was raised and they played 'Deutschland, Deutschland'. It was the culmination of events that had started a year earlier with the opening of the Berlin Wall (11/9/1989) and the upheaval all over Eastern Europe.
This date has always had personal significance for me. I had been in Europe by that time for 10 years (Paris, Rome, Berlin). The reunification of Germany represented a new beginning. I had known the old way: the two Berlins, the Wall, the crazy lovable nut-house ('Bonnie's Ranch') on one side and the police state on the other.
That was coming to an end -- and thank God it was -- but the new beginning prompted me to think about what I was doing and where I wanted to go.
I got into an airplane and flew back to the United States the next day.
"Engineers and computer scientists are not the only ones who have played important roles in building our new digital economy; students of the humanities and social sciences have played an equally significant role."
It reminds me of the time when two Business librarians asked me what it takes to become a programmer and I replied, a knowledge of English poetry.
That said, I've never been a fan of 'all one way or all the other'. I've seen too many ambitious initiatives go sour because the people implementing them simply lacked the technical chops to figure out whether they were headed in the right direction or whether the product just recommended by their vendors was worth its high price.
So although I still think a knowledge of English poetry is perfect preparation for programming there still is the part about learning the programming -- or the systems development or whatever technical aspect is required. Hearing that you don't need one or the other is probably a sign that you should go elsewhere for advice.
It's near the end of classes -- in fact, we're in finals week -- and I always like to go around campus taking pictures of students -- which I can then use for the UIC OAR website. Here I am on the West Side in the Medical District -- looking for someone, anyone, in scrubs or a white jacket.
In the piece, the author describes two approaches to meeting user needs:
...[To] wait for someone to tell you what they want (which assumes they know their needs and the solution possibilities clearly) or to know your customer and the solution possibilities well enough to provide a useful solution that would likely never have occurred to them.
So which, according to the author, should we pick? Why the latter, of course, which the author calls "opportunity-driven" and characteristic of Steve Jobs:
As trained information specialists who are also dealing daily, upfront and personal, with the changing information environment, I believe we are particularly well positioned to develop the insights and perspectives that allow us to see opportunities and possibilities that are not as clear or as obvious to our patrons.
The obvious, almost classic problem with this approach is that it moves the focus from our users to ourselves and while that might make for applause lines at library confabs where we're basically talking to ourselves, it risks ending up with solutions more suited (surprise, surprise) to our own needs rather than to those of our poor 'benighted' users.
The fact is, the library doesn't exist in a vacuum. Sure, we're in the information business but so are a lot of others. When our users come to us, they don't want a "19th-century library" as the author jokes. They want everything online and easy to find -- just like they've come to expect on every other site that seeks to attract their business.
To do this, we don't have to reinvent the experience. We don't need Steve Jobs even if we could afford him. All we need is to do our homework, to keep the focus always on our users, seeing what they prefer and how they prefer to work, melding our own wares to their requirements. Our users have already told us what they want. It's in the usage statistics of the most popular websites. Now all we need are librarians smart enough and sharp enough to listen to what they're saying.
Do people designing for the web need any special skills beyond a knowledge of Photoshop? The question comes up every once and a while. Here's what CSS Guru Eric Meyer has to say:
Designers need to know mark-up. They need to know HTML5. They need to be able to write CSS and understand web layout. And they need to have at least a decent grasp of what JavaScript does. I don't necessarily insist that everyone who ever touches the web be able to write their own web app by hand, but designers should understand how JavaScript works.
There are a lot of people who call themselves web designers who are really just designers who put their designs on the web. And there's nothing wrong with being just a designer. But they're not necessarily web designers. They're visual designers. There's a difference.
Daddy had good tastes. The apartment at 155 W. Burton Pl. was his 'bachelor pad', designed by friend Sol Kogen, where he lived in the Fifties. At the time, he was owner of United Film & Recording Studio on Erie & St. Clair and producer/announcer of the German-language radio show, The Germania Broadcast.
I remember seeing a short film of the place. It was a duplex with my mother and grandmother waving from the 2nd floor. That's about all I remember -- by the time I was two we had already moved further north to Barry Ave. near Pine Grove. Note on the Kogens: One of the Kogen brothers was our first pediatrician. Another was our dentist.
[h/t mommy]
"Happy 13th Birthday, WebDesign-L" -- that's how "List Mom" Steven Champeon titled his post reminding us that the hallowed Listserv for web designers and web developers that originally started way back in 1997 is now celebrating its 13th Birthday.
As he remarks, "the Web was smaller and the field of Web design smaller still". Anyone with even a passing interest in web development was a member of that list. That's where the original arguments about design, usability, web techniques and web standards were waged. Our skills and knowledge have progressed infinitely since then but part of the learning process was helped immeasurably by the community created on that ListServ. The good news is, that it's still going strong today.
The best definition of a trade or skill that I can think of is being able, through your 'expertise', to make a significant improvement either in people's lives or in how they get things done. This applies to many things; it even applies to Content Management.
I remember the website I did for a relatively large non-profit organization. The original site consisted of nothing but a drab collection of web links and PDF files. It didn't take much work to automate the site and in that way to fundamentally change how people in that organization approached online content -- to the extent that the energy and dynamism of their activities "on the ground" finally were reflected in their web presence as well.
I was reminded of this again today at UIC. A number of people from Classroom Scheduling were looking at an application I had put together for students to find what room their final exam would be in (see page here). Since it's getting close to the end of the Semester, something like this might be kind of handy.
The demo went well. I had promised that the application would be easy as hell to maintain and it was. But what really impressed them were the feeds. These were formatted not as RSS files but as MS Word and Excel files (thank you, Views Bonus Pack module). This meant that every time they had an edit, they no longer had to distribute or print out for the entire University a completely new Word or Excel file. They could just point to the feed which like all feeds is updated on-the-fly. This they really liked!
Anyway, the time it had taken me to put this feature together wasn't much. In fact, the whole project didn't take me more than a day or two. So what's most gratifying then is the positive effect it produced in others -- almost sinfully out of proportion to the amount of effort I put into it. And that's a good thing!
Current Cites for March 2010 is out! You can find the issue here...
Unfortunately, I missed the deadline by a mere few seconds so the following review of the article, "Engineering the Web's Third Decade" will have to wait till next month's issue. Here's a sneak-peek:
As we enter the Internet's 'Third Decade', it's only natural to speculate on what 'Web 3.0' will look like. One of the characteristics, at least judging by this article, will be a healthy dose of 'modesty'. Development will be "more evolutionary than revolutionary". We can expect a "more dynamic, pervasive, and perhaps even more human experience". The focus will be on semantic mark-up and how this can be used to bring together an unprecedented amount of data, fashioned specifically for the particular needs of the individual user. Probably more attention could have been paid in the article to the role of individuals not simply as consumers of content but as creators. That said, it presents an interesting portrait of the work and thinking behind the much anticipated 'third generation Web'.
10:30am: What do you do as a reference librarian when you're the only one who showed up for work (hello Circulation)?
11:00am: The person supposed to be at Circulation just called saying he was stuck at the Airport in Minneapolis.
11:26am: Problem: A student came by wanting to charge out a book. I explained we didn't have anyone with access to the system. He said he'd come back later in the day.
11:35am: A female student wants to make some copies. Problem is, the copy room is normally opened by whoever opens up at Circ -- and as the world now knows, that person is trapped at the Airport in Minneapolis.
11:42am: The security guy came over to open the copy room. He says he's going to Minneapolis next week. Is there a pattern emerging here?
11:46am: Yea, hallelujah! Jim the Circ. person just came in. He's the back-up guy at Circulation. We have lift-off.
Way too long ago -- about a 100 years ago -- I asked people on the Drupal4Lib ListServ to send in links to their Database page(s) or Research/Subject guides that use Drupal.
I got a couple of very good responses which I've now finally posted as a Wiki Page on the Drupal Library Group: http://groups.drupal.org/node/58423
I just sent a follow-up message to the Drupal4Lib ListServ asking people to have a look and to post their own pages if they want.
I guess the goal is to develop an idea of just what the possibilities are using Drupal in this way.
We're all relieved to know that Bubba's going to be okay but I couldn't help notice that the guy's only 63. That's still two years till Medicare kicks in. Imagine if he didn't have health insurance.
Pass. The. Damn. Bill. Now.
The People have spoken and 'Harvey' has edged out 'Irene' by 4 tics to 3. So ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, members of the press, horticulturalists and bibliographers the world over, I give you:
Harvey the Reference Plant
Thanks to Mick for organizing the Chicagoland Library Drupal Meeting in Oak Park. The presentation on "Top 5 Non-Obvious Drupal Modules" by Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing from CRL was excellent (see slideshare). My presentation on implementing WYSIWYG is below. I'll have the audio up shortly. [link to earlier version of write-up].
I missed this article on ways to save money on college textbooks when it first came out. Most of it your average college student would know by heart after the first quarter or semester -- they'd know it that is, if they wanted to avoid bankruptcy. But what really caught my eye was this final warning from 'textbooks advocate' Nicole Allen about e-books:
The one option Allen warned students against buying was e-book versions of texts. A number of publishers offer online books for purchase, she noted, but they are one-year rentals.
By and large, the e-books are available only through an Internet connection, and many restrict the number of pages you can print at one time.
In this case, the calculus e-book cost $100, about $40 more than Chegg's rental and only about $20 less than buying a used hard copy. And you have nothing to resell. [Kristof, Kathy M., "Turning the Page on Pricey Textbooks", Chicago Tribune (9/4/2009):1,29.]
Basically they're saying, why should you rent it for a limited time when for just $20 more it can be yours forever? I think this kind of calculation is absolutely de rigueur not only for students but for institutions thinking of investing in these potentially ephemeral yet costly products.
It's for a great statewide organization that's very active in health care reform among other things.
Basically I took what they already had -- essentially a site consisting of links and pdf files -- and completely automated the thing so that in-house staff can add content themselves rather than sending it out to a web specialist.
The thing's running on Drupal with Panels for the front page. My focus was on automating as much of the site as possible including all the navigation and menus -- so that again, in-house staff could manage these things.
I went with WYSIWYG for the first time for content creation, including IMCE for managing stock photos and of course, ImageCache for pretty much everything else. Since the in-house staff was more comfortable with MS Word, going this way made sense.
Style-wise, I pretty much worked off the design of the previous site. This allowed me, again, to focus on the automation side, while leaving the option, further down the road, of coming up with something a bit more snazzy.
For the moment, it's totally serviceable and meets the needs of the organization. And that's what ultimately counts.
There must have been another copy of the site settings (from like say, 2005) that Dreamweaver grabbed when I upgraded from the admittedly ancient Dreamweaver 8 to a still shamefully retro CS3*.
There still were a number of sites in the "Manage sites" window which is why I didn't notice right away. Then when I started looking for anything I'd done in the past 2 years -- MPOW, a couple of other sites I'm working on -- denada. I had wiped them.
Thank God for TimeMachine. I was able to export the site settings from the deleted old version and then import them into the new version.
This Thankgiving I'm thankful for TimeMachine.
_____
* And no jokes about the version -- I'm just waiting for CS5 like the rest of humanity.
Actually they didn't but you'd think they would have right after their library director made the following comment to CNET:
[Library Director Ken] Frazier added that a suitable device would include better "accessibility, higher-quality graphics, and improved navigation and note-taking. I think that there will be a huge payoff for the company that creates a truly universal e-book reader."
Hmm, "accessibility, higher-quality graphics, and improved navigation and note-taking"? When, oh when, will we ever get a device like that? [/irony]
Of course, he forgot to include, a device 'already owned by 93% of the student body'.
We'll be having a get-together of the Chicagoland Library Drupal Group on Mon., Dec. 7 (9:30-12noon) at the Oak Park Public Library.
I'll be doing a presentation that's been near and dear to my heart recently: incorporating WYSIWYG into Drupal. It's called, appropriately enough, "The Joys & Sorrows of WYSIWYG".
Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing from CRL (who recently launched their site in Drupal) will also be presenting.
Announcement from organizer Mick Jacobsen (Skokie Public) after the jump...
Web-Related Networking Group http://j.mp/zUCZ0
When: Monday, December 7, 2009 (9:30 AM - 12:00 PM) Where: Oak Park Public Library (In Person) (Oak Park, IL) Cost: FreeJoin us for a discussion about content management systems. Learn from brief presentations by veterans and share your own stories, issues, and successes. Beginners welcome!
Two presentations have been scheduled for this meeting.
The Joys & Sorrows of WYSIWYG
A discussion of how and why to go WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and what Drupal can do about it.Presented by: Leo Klein, Reference PT, DePaul; OAR, UIC
University of Illinois Chicago
chicagolibrarian.comTop 5 Non-Obvious Drupal Modules
Learn which modules proved to be important in building our new site.Presented by: Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing The Center for Research Libraries www.crl.edu
Open discussion will follow the presentations.
I was in Berlin when the Wall came down. In fact I had been living there since 1984.
I had just woken up from an early evening nap when one of the people from the Wohngemeinschaft where I was living told me the Wall had come down.
This seemed strange since it looked perfectly intact only an hour before when I had gone to sleep.
Of course my room-mate was exaggerating. In fact, the Wall hadn't come down -- it had simply opened up. You still had to show your ID to get through. There was one or maybe two cross-points. These are important distinctions which I'll get back to in a moment but at that point it really didn't matter. I like everyone rushed out to welcome the incoming East Germans at Checkpoint Charlie, buying a bottle of Sekt (German sparkling wine) along the way.
East Berlin up to that point had principally been a source of cheap booze and tyranny. It was drab beyond imagination. Other than official communist exhortations plastered on walls here and there, there was absolutely no advertising -- or color of any kind.
Of course, the people living there knew what was going on. They had access to the same radio and tv we did. The Wall surrounded West Berlin but it was the 'Ossies' as they were called who were trapped.
By the time we got to Checkpoint Charlie that night, there already was a huge number of people. It seemed like the East Germans were being processed in lots. Every time a group came through, people would cheer.
Some that night came over just to have a look. They clogged the buses and U-Bahn. It was extremely difficult for the next three days to get into the center of the city. In front of all the banks, there were huge lines of East Berliners waiting to pick up their Begrüßungsgeld (Welcome Money) of 100 DM. They used this money to buy oranges and radio-cassette players -- things they couldn't get in East Berlin.
Everywhere there was this extraordinary sense of euphoria -- summed up best by Walter Momper, mayor of West Berlin, when he called Germans "das glücklichste Volk auf der Welt" (happiest people in the world).
When the Wall Came Down for Me
As days turned into weeks, more and more entry ways were opened between the two parts of the city. The Brandenburg Gate was opened in December. You still had to show your ID to get through but the level of scrutiny became less and less.
I remember one particularly sunny day several months later -- it may even have been summer -- when I was going through the new entry point at Mariannenplatz and there didn't seem to be anyone around. I kept waiting to be stopped at some point as I moved further across -- first through the West Berlin side, and then through the East Berlin side -- but again there was no one. I simply walked through! It was the first time I had been able to do this. That's when the Wall truly came down for me.
Postscript
I never got into taking a hammer to the Wall. It was something I was glad to leave up to the tourists. And I don't really know what I'd do with a chunk of the thing any more than I'd know what to do with a pair of handcuffs from the Stassi or a uniform or hat.
I don't need those things. It's enough to remember what the people I met back then had to endure and that no matter how free-wheeling and wild we were on our side of the Wall (west), that there was a fully-certified police state just a block away (east).
That was the Berlin I knew. By the time of the unification, it was clear that the city and country were embarking on a new chapter.
It was time for me to leave. I had been in Europe for more than ten years, six of them in Berlin. I witnessed the unification ceremony near the Reichstag and flew back to the United States the next day.
It's nice to see Drupal mentioned in the context of "cool thing to do" but I don't think Cindi Trainor in her piece on Sacred Cows in Library IT gets exactly what you can do with it:
Experimenting with low-cost or no-cost tools like Twitter will only cost staff time, but implementing expensive (think federated search) or complex-but-free technologies (think Drupal) because it's the cool thing to do can be a very costly lesson for a library to learn, in terms of budget, staff time, morale and user satisfaction.
First, there's no impediment to 'experimenting' with Drupal any more than there is to experimenting with Twitter. The first implementation I ever dealt with was on my own laptop. I didn't even need a network connection!
Also, as far as complexity goes, what are we comparing it to? I mean, you can't run a website on Twitter so that's not an option.
It just so happens that an institution's website is a fairly complex organism. It's going to involve a considerable investment no matter how you choose to go about it.
The fact that Drupal can potentially make it less costly in terms of budget, staff time, etc. -- while being far more effective as a tool -- that's what makes it "cool" and why people choose it. Not the other way around.
P.S. It's kind of ironic that the above quote fell under the Sacred Cow, "Cutting-edge is better; bleeding-edge is best" -- considering that the piece grew out of a discussion on the oh-so-bleeding-edge "Google Wave".
Talk about potpourri, this week's DePaulia, the student newspaper of DePaul contains the following highlights:
Bookmark/Search this post with:
You know it's bad news when the FAQs start with:
"The budget for the state of Illinois is in a shambles."
I came upon it fresh from an article on Library Journal with the ominous title:
LJ's 2009 Placements & Salaries Survey Shows Tough Library Job Market
Anyway, back to the Illinois site. The FAQ continues:
Regional library systems received a 16.5% cut resulting in layoffs and cessation of some library support services.
They've got a badge (which you can download here) as well as a Facebook Page.
If you're in Illinois, you can use their 'Take Action' page to contact your state legislator.
Wow, the big Drupal Convention for North America is coming to Chicago in 2011. Here's the announcement from the Drupalcon North American Regional Organizing Group:
"...the [Drupal Association] Board has preemptively made a decision on the location and team for the 2011 North American Drupalcon, tapping Chicago for Drupalcon 2011."
You can follow them on Twitter by going to: http://twitter.com/drupalchicago
I'd like to thank Scott Dixon and his class from the Biomedical Visualization program at UIC for their eager reception and interest in my talk on 'Web 2.0 - Origins, Directions & Methods of Evaluation'.
Slides from the presentation are available below or from GoogleDocs directly here...
The sticker reads, "I Got My Flu Vaccine! Did You?"
Normally I don't bother but this year, it seems like there's a heightened awareness. Judging by the larger crowd even at 10 in the morning, I'd say a lot of people were feeling the same way.
Citizen Action-Illinois had its Annual Dinner yesterday evening. The emphasis, not surprisingly, was on health care reform. The situation for hotel workers also got attention.
Award-winner this year was Gov. Pat Quinn who arrived late due to his attendance at a service in the suburbs honoring an Illinois veteran killed in Afghanistan.
I was out on the prowl for articles for this month's CurrentCites, when I came across an interesting article called "Libraries in the Cloud: Making a Case for Google and Amazon" in this month's 'Computers in Libraries'.
Maybe I'm being too picky but I don't think the author gets off to the best start with this definition of the subject:
"Many definitions exist for cloud computing, and a uniform definition is hard to find. In its most basic form, cloud computing is the availability of IT-type needs offered as services, often through a third-party vendor."
I 'spose that's right but frankly you could say the same thing about the guy who comes in and fixes our HP printers when they're on the fritz.
The missing ingredient of course which admittedly the author gets to a sentence or two further down, is 'hosted through the web'. I think I'd have put that in a bit earlier.
In any case, besides that, the article is a good introduction to the subject from a library point of view.
UPDATE: While I'm at it, CiL also has an interesting article on an almost DIY approach to archiving websites called, "Web Archiving for the Rest of Us". They look at "donation-ware" SiteSucker for harvesting and then Apple's Time Machine and FileMerge for version control. Quite resourceful!
I've posted this before but every year at this time I'm reminded of the incredible tragedy that happened while I was living in New York and its aftermath.
It's strange but maybe understandable: my initial reaction immediately following the attack that morning -- after the shock and confusion -- was simply to go to work, show my face and help in any way needed.
In November, we'll be celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was there and it easily has to be the most significant public event I ever personally witnessed in a good way. By the same token, 9/11 had to be the worst.
It's only on weekends and public holidays that I catch up with my readings.
Anyway, I had a look at yet another post on the Twitter v. RSS conundrum. Here are a couple of others (1, 2) that I've read in the past couple of days.
I guess initially my reaction was, if you're depending on Twitter as your aggregator, you're in trouble because it pretty much sucks for that purpose. I mean, I'd sooner try to navigate the credits as they stream by of a feature film.
But that was only my initial reaction. From a practical standpoint, if a significant portion of your potential audience is going somewhere, then whether it sucks or not really doesn't matter.
The whole purpose of our current approach to the web is, to borrow a phrase, 'Write once, read many'. The number of outlets through which we're able to deliver our content -- free of redundancy or duplication of our efforts -- is a measure of success in this digital survival of the fittest.
The question then should never be whether a particular tool sucks but whether the content we're providing can fit into the framework. In other words, it's all about syndication.*
The moment this brilliant conclusion dawned on me, I had a look at Drupal's Twitter Module and opened an account on TwitterFeed. So yes, I've drunk the Koolaide.
-----*Note: happily enough, syndication works both ways. We syndicate our own content and then turn around and reuse the content of others. So even Twitter may suck less depending on how we access it, whether directly or through some value-added intermediary.
This is so unfair! 'The Great Slump of 1930' by John Maynard Keynes which goes for the outrageous price of 'free' at Project Gutenberg Canada is being offered by Amazon to Kindle users for a mere $4.25. How does Amazon get away with it?
So I'm listening to NPR's 'All Things Considered' and they start talking about an old pal of mine from my days in Berlin, Stew. The segment is called, "Wondrous 'Strange': Spike Lee Makes A Musical" and it's about how Spike Lee produced a film version of Stew's musical 'Passing Strange' which won a Tony last year (see my write-up).
The musical is about Stew's experiences growing up in L.A. and then going to Amsterdam and Berlin. Since that's when I knew him (we were in the same group called the 'Wonderful Guise'), I look forward to seeing the film. Here's the trailer.
I liked the article in BusinessWeek on the 'Real-Time Web'. It being BusinessWeek, they naturally devoted a significant portion to speculation on how to make money from this emerging trend and I had to laugh at the illusive precision of there being "at least $5 billion to be made on the real-time Web". What, just $5 billion?
Anyway, to give them their due, they correctly identify the trend:
In just the past couple of years, several developments have come together to make the Web more of a real-time experience: ubiquitous high-speed Internet connections; a growing number of mobile devices such as the iPhone with full Web browsers; and new Web technologies that enable instant transmission of messages and data. That mix has made always-on, real-time communications easy and addictive.
Okay, that sounds pretty 'real-time' to me. What I can't understand though is the focus, bordering on fixation, on Twitter in this and other articles. I mean, here it is, we've got an emerging technology that's giving us real-time group communication both in text, voice and video and the most impressive thing they can think of is a text stream limited to 140 characters?
You can't be serious. Off the top of my head, the number of possibilities include:
And yes, I've seen the video introducing Google's ambitious Wave Project. It's nice but I'm most optimistic about initiatives that build on past successes and move forward by incremental steps. The kind of technology we've become familiar with as hallmarks of Web 2.0 (YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc.) has prepared us well for this next step.
[h/t ReadWriteWeb]
I kind of like the idea of "Augmented Reality" (AR) and consider it the next logical step in GPS applications, but I found it strange that the food listings advertised on the iPhone App for London Transit consist almost entirely of U.S. fastfood chains. I mean, it's nice to be fitted out with the latest in technology but you'd hope it could do more than simply direct you to the nearest McDonald's or KFC.
Because I'm sick and tired of their ads popping up on every other website I visit.
