Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Is that I knew exactly who she was talking about. And I bet everyone who reads this will too.

Posted by Jane at A Wandering Eyre:

I Am Destroying the World

By Jane

Little did I know that the internet and its online "amateurism... was challeng[ing] the basis of our civilization..."

Where is the duct tape when you need it. Seriously, does anything this man says make sense anymore?

OK. You get three guesses as to who "this man" is.

| posted by Simon at 9:26 pm

 
Steven Cohen has another article going over his dislike of email, and quoting a Business Week article for support. I'm not sure I agree with the original article: people receiving 250 emails, only 15% of them relevant? 60% of email being spam? I get precisely zero spam in my work email account. I also get hundreds of emails, and way more than 15% of them are relevant - even though most of my emails are either off mailing lists or part of a current awareness service. If someone's getting hundreds of irrelevant emails per day, there's something wrong with their organisation's internal practices - or they have some very annoying external contacts. The Business Week article does suggest some alternatives - blogs, wikis, RSS, instant messenging. These certainly have potential uses, but I still don't think email is dead. We use it for internal and external communication that just wouldn't work over IM - we need to be able to express involved and complicated ideas, and we need an audit trail to show what decisions were made.

Techdirt says that email won't be dying any time soon.

| posted by Simon at 9:07 pm

 
A good companion piece to Jakob Nielsen's article, which I posted a little while ago. 'Pinyo' at the GreatNexus Webmaster Blog lists the seven deadly sins of blogging.

Sigh. I'm still committing most of them. And they aren't even as fun as gluttony or lust.

| posted by Simon at 12:40 pm

 
A roundup of news stories that caught my eye recently.

Amazon is selling books by the page
Google wants to rent books online - you pay 10% of the cover price and get access to the digital book for one week.
The Washington Times has an article by two Congresspeople, who manage to massively miss the point of Google Print/Book Search: "If publishers and authors have to spend all their time policing Google for works they have already written, it is hard to create more." All their time? How long does it take to email Google and say 'please don't include me in Google Book Search'? (And it's funny how two 'professional authors' seem unable to use correct spelling or grammar).
Forbes carries a rebuttal of the Washington Times article.
BoingBoing quotes a Salon article saying that publishers' criticisms are a smokescreen for greed. (Original article requires subscription or viewing an ad).
Tim O'Reilly has a roundup of articles (via BoingBoing).
The New York Times covers a debate on Google Book Search (via John Battelle). The best line has a publishers' representative complaining that people might find books on Google, and then loan them from a library, rather than buying them. Google's response? "Horrors".
Google is providing funding for a World Digital Library, in collaboration with the Library of Congress (BoingBoing).
In InfoToday, Barbara Quint analyses the 'fee vs free' debate for books online.

| posted by Simon at 6:41 pm

 
Depressing news, via BoingBoing: the Royal Society is criticising open access publishing, saying "journals in some disciplines might suffer. Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?".

Good question, to which the answer can only be: why should you? The whole point of OA is surely to allow scientists and libraries cheaper access to other scientific literature, and to enable scientists to have their work more widely distributed. If existing journals fail as a result, well, that's really their problem.

| posted by Simon at 9:37 am

 
Slate reports on problems for academic bloggers; the article links to an old Chronicle of Higher Education article, whose author, an employer at a small US university, is unhappy with job applicants who are also bloggers:

The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum....Worst of all, for professional academics, it's a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor.....

But the site quickly revealed that the true passion of said blogger's life was not academe at all, but the minutiae of software systems, server hardware, and other tech exotica. It's one thing to be proficient in Microsoft Office applications or HTML, but we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job...

Professor Shrill ran a strictly personal blog, which, to the author's credit, scrupulously avoided comment about the writer's current job, coworkers, or place of employment. But it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process....we agreed a little therapy (of the offline variety) might be in order....

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

Depressing stuff, and a sobering reminder that some people still have strong anti-blog feelings.

On a similar theme, Forbes published a virulantly anti-blogger article, Kurt Opsahl posted a hilarious reply on EFF (via Boing Boing).

Wellington blogger Che Tibby has an account of how he negotiated with his public sector employer about what would be acceptable and unacceptable in terms of his blogging. This seems like a sensible approach. Says Che:

Pretty much the first thing I did when I got the full-time job was to make an appointment with my manager and let him know exactly what it was I had been writing. As it was I had it confirmed that I had been turned down for one job specifically because of Club Politique, so I wasn't prepared to have it become an issue at my new place of work.

Also, if you have a blog of any profile at all, make sure you put a big mention of it in your CV if you intend to continue writing to it. It would be a foolish workplace indeed that tried to reprimand you retrospectively for something they must surely have taken into consideration when hiring you.

| posted by Simon at 10:04 pm

 
Via Librarystuff comes a short list of 7 things RSS is good for (New Media Musings).

The seven things?

• saving time;


• convenience;


• access to a richer pool of material;


• zero in on the information you want;


• to serve as an alert service;


• levelling the playing field (between micro-publishers and major news sites);


• to drive conversation;

On the off-chance anyone has been wondering where I was, I moved flat and had a lot of trouble getting internet access hooked up.


| posted by Simon at 5:51 pm