on finishing

Well, I did it. I turned in my next to last assignment today, and the last is one of those essays that has practically already written itself. I will take care of that by this weekend and just wait for the grades to come in. Barring a disaster of some kind, I will be awarded the MLIS.

This blog was a class exercise. As you recall from my first post, I was a bit skeptical about the whole thing. I did enjoy it, though I'm more convinced than ever that not everyone needs a blog. A couple of people have expressed a desire that memedonkey continue. While I am grateful for those votes of confidence, I don't intend to keep going at this time.

Since I went back to school I have been neglecting the rest of my life. My house is in a frightful state of disrepair, my kids are growing up, my dog needs more frisbee time. I don't think I am finished with blogging forever, but I intend to catch up with some other stuff first.

keep your friends close...

I try not to make enemies, but this is so hilarious it makes me wish someone would offend me just so I can use it.

ambient findability and targeted advertising

We all know that $ makes the web go round, and the great big pot of gold everyone is trying to find is targeted advertising - the ability to deliver custom ads to a very narrowly defined base. Advertisers have figured out that most people don't care about what they have to say - which means that traditional media that are supported by advertising are in trouble. The key is to get your message to the few who might reasonably care. Facebook recently announced it would sell ads to be delivered to users based on their interests.

Email providers have been trying this for a while. For example, I recently got an email from my mom regarding her recent treatment for kidney stones. At the top of my gmail page, very unobtrusively, was a small ad for an anti-kidney stones diet cookbook or some such. Google, whose stock goes for $600 even though most of their products are free and who may soon be the target of an EU anti-trust investigation over their acquisition of Double-Click, is widely recognized as the leader in targeted web advertising.

The next big thing for Google, of course, is their anticipated entry into the mobile phone market next year. In preparation, Google recently acquired Jaiku, a strange little service combining elements of blogging and IM. The key for Google, however (suggests Google Operating System), is Jaiku's ability to identify the location of its users when they post (by triangulating with the nearest cell towers).

So when you get your gphone next year, look for messages directing you to nearby restaurants and other attractions wherever you happen to be. Now that's ambient findability...

if you aren't fed up yet

I personally am going to unsubscribe from at least 3 of 4 of my current feeds when I get out of school, keeping only the "really important ones." I have whined since the inception of this blog about too much information. However, if you just can't get enough of that RSS goodness, try FeedCrier, which sends your feeds right to the IM client of your choice. Find a great website with no feeds? Page2RSS monitors any URL for changes and sends the updates to your feed reader. Count me out for now, but I did bookmark them.

create a custom browser plugin for your library

Over 220 public and academic libraries have already used Libx to create a custom Firefox plugin that users can install to give them direct access to catalogs and any number of web resources. Building a plugin for my library system would have been a great project for my class in Web-based Information Services, if I had learned about this a couple of months ago.

i'm a sucker for smoothness, ok

Try these three impressive new web services. What do they have in common? Super-smooth Flash-based applications. Yeah, I know, Flash isn't exactly open source, but it looks great!

NPR Music - The site has something for everyone. Click "add to playlist" to activate the fast loading player.

Buzzword - Virtual Ubiquity's online word processor recently acquired by Adobe. Head and shoulders above any other web-based word processor I have tried.

SearchMash - Google's next user interface? Displays large thumbnail of results for web pages, play videos right from video results page.

and some people think technology is making them go away

Fiction has made its first appearance on my reading list in a great while, one of the best signs that I am almost finished with school. Yes, I know I still have two classes to pass before it is official, but things are clearly winding down, and I feel I can read for fun again. This is not to say I don't read non-fiction for fun, I do! But I could always rationalize a little extra-curricular reading if it was "educational."

Wouldn't an online book club for librarians be a great idea? Or how about a social network for book lovers? I know: A web 2.0 readers advisory service!

I first noticed Library Intersections (the book club) on Blog Junction, but it appears that I missed it almost a month earlier on Tame the Web. goodreads and What Should I Read Next via Lifehacker.

on outsourcing our brains

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.

~ David Brooks

In the last two weeks I have reached a tipping point of sorts. Two weeks ago Friday, I took my comprehensive exam for my MLIS. Naturally I was relieved to have this hurdle behind me - the more so when one week ago, I learned that I had passed. I had no troubled conscience over taking things easy the week immediately following the exam. Of course, I had let some things slide while I was preparing for the exam, and I let a few more things slide while I was recovering. I had planned to plunge headlong into my remaining coursework last week, catching up with what I had neglected, even (so I hoped) picking off a few small written assignments ahead of their due dates so that I could concentrate on the remaining major projects which are all that stand between me and my destiny as a professional librarian.

But my plans have been thwarted by my own overloaded brain. It has often been observed that technology sometimes mitigates against concentration. (The banner on one of my favorite blogs reads "Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right." Or listen to this entertaining podcast by Cory Doctorow on the monkish self discipline required to get things like reading done with a computer.) Indeed, information overload would appear to be one of the most serious and genuine threats confronting us in the age of ubiquitous computing and innumerable information channels.

What really pushed me over the edge last week was the weird convergence of ideas in the two courses I am trying to finish. For Web Based Information Services, I added an article to LISWiki on a cataloger who in the first half of the 20th century created her own relative classification for theological works. By complete coincidence, the topics under discussion for both that class and Theological Librarianship were variations on the theme of metadata and classification schemes, with assigned readings from either course overlapping in interesting ways with the other, including one by that very cataloger. Also by complete coincidence, during my post-comps layoff I finally got around to finishing Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. (Yes, I am such a geek I read mostly non-fiction for fun!) The fact is, I ended up with so many ideas and trying to participate in so many discussions that I locked up just like a Windows PC does when it tries to multitask.

The gist of the David Brooks essay quoted at the top of this post is that we now have the ability to "outsource" our intellectual capacity to technology. Gadgets now organize and remember stuff for us, and can use the metadata associated with our own choices (ala Pandora & Amazon) to guide us in new decisions.

Lifehacker recently featured new products, Exploratree and Mind42 which promise to help me sort out the jumble I have created in my brain and think through my projects more clearly. I think I will give them a spin as I try to get myself back on track.

blog action day stats

The blog action day site has preliminary stats from Monday. Over 20,000 bloggers posted on the environment and reached at least 14.6 million RSS subscribers and as yet-uncounted others who access blogs by visiting sites directly. At the bottom of the page is a roundup of some of the day's notable posts.

a unique green library design for blog action day

I haven't fully recovered from comps yet , but I have been looking forward to participating in blog action day. I have been saving this item, which combines two of my primary interests (theological librarianship and green building) just for the occasion.

10 days

I am supposed to be preparing for comps! I really shouldn't be reading all these blogs (but I found a really good one, new to me anyway), listening to podcasts, downloading new desktop backgrounds, organizing my bookmarks, trying to figure out how to change permissions for a USB hard drive in KDE, etc. Today is the last day I'm staying home to "study!"

a classic love hate relationship

Here's an interesting item from, of all places, Christianity Today. It cites a survey which shows that over half of all bloggers have abandoned the practice, over 200 million of them, while at the same time, 3 million new blogs go live every month.

You underestimate the power of the dark side...

Siva Vaidhyanathan's new book-blog, The Googlization of Everything, is now online. Do you love Google or hate it? One thing seems clear: Librarians and other information professionals can't afford to ignore it.

I happen to be a fan of Google. I use their products daily, and I'm not just talking about search: I think gmail is the best web-based email out there, and Google Documents has all but replaced my local office software. I increasingly use Google Book Search at work, too, because it links to my own library's catalog and OCLC at the same time, saving me several steps if I end up having to request an Interlibrary Loan for a customer.

I also admire the Google Foundation's philanthropic efforts. They aim to fight poverty by bringing tech training and real jobs (not exploitative "cheap labor" jobs but management positions) to Africa. And they are investing heavily in various green technology projects targeting global warming.

Google's founders claim to want nothing more than to make the world better, and believe they can do so and turn a profit at the same time, everybody wins. Is this possible? Is the skepticism they have drawn from Vaidhyanathan and others healthy or unwarranted? Is it so bad for everything to be googlized?

I look forward to following this one closely.

Anyone heard him read the UK Harry Potter audiobooks?

Via O'Reilly Radar: The world's newbiest blogger is none other than the fantastic English comic actor Stephen Fry, who in his first post reviews every smartphone ever made. In terrifying detail.

Reed Richards I am not!

My brain is feeling a bit overstretched these days, and now the Other Librarian thinks I need to learn programming! Not really, but here is an extremely useful list of programming concepts he thinks we would do well to wrap our minds around.

google as bank

This is an interesting concept. Data is currency in economy 2.0 and companies like Google are the new banks. The Economist article cited is surely talking about grand-scale corporate data storage, access and flow control, but I observe that, just as I am not a Fortune 500 company but I still use the same banks they do for my checking and savings accounts, I too use Google Documents (along with some other companies like zoho, box and omnidrive) as an all-online solution for document creation and storage. In fact, I have not opened a local word processing application or saved a document to my own hard disk for the past two semesters. No matter where I find myself, I can create new stuff, access, edit and share it. Not only is it convenient (moreso than an ATM machine for those who still use cash), it it does feel safer. I don't have to worry about what to do if my hard drive crashes or my computer is stolen.

But at what cost? Notes the author, Ben Vershbow at if:book, "Google is swiftly becoming a new kind of monopoly: pervasively, subtly, intimately attached to your personal data flows. You—your data profile, your memory, your clickstreams—are the asset now."

And I can't wait for this.

But does this mean I can't have iTunes anymore?

Library Computer Guy and I have been having a good conversation about open source software. It's been on my mind a lot recently. This story caught my attention this week, though the document it refers to has been around for a while. I signed it and suggest you do to.

A few months ago, I installed Ubuntu Linux my laptop with fantastic results. Everything, including the built-in wireless network card, worked perfectly with the new OS. Inspired, I took an old ThinkPad 1200 (64 MB RAM) that had been handed down to my kids by their uncle and which was basically inoperable, and revived it with a special lightweight installation of Xubuntu. An ugly paperweight was converted into a useful computer again. It is obviously still limited in what it can do, but my son can use it to check his email and do basic schoolwork tasks, even writing and creating slideshows with OpenOffice.

Now, I had decided to try Linux myself simply because I had become fed up with how poorly Windows XP was working for me. The last straw was when I was forced to pay for an upgrade from Microsoft Money 2004 to 2007 because certain online banking features just quit working in the 2004 version, as I learned, because they were no longer supported. When I started having the same types of errors in the 2007 version, I screamed (literally), "Enough is enough!" and set about plotting to overthrow Windows World, at least the little outpost of it that existed within the four walls of my home.

Little did it occur to me then that the decision I was making had real political, philosophical and environmental implications.

In my household, I met the most resistance from my 13-year-old daughter, an eighth-grader. She did not object when I installed a Linux OS on her computer, which had become nearly as slow as the old ThinkPad, but soon began to miss certain things being in the same place they were before and worrying (not unreasonably) that the open source programs would not be compatible with work she might do in the Windows/Office-based lab at her school. She began to lobby hard for me to put Windows back. Some interested parties think I am a mean and cruel dad for refusing (thus far) to do so.

But last June, just as this conflict was starting to rear its head, I came across a great article* which really helped me to articulate the reasons I wanted to hold the line, and also began to open my eyes to a side of open source I had not considered. The author, Jay Pfaffman, seemed to anticipate most of the arguments that were raised against my forcing my child to learn something other than Windows and Microsoft Office applications: that free software must not be as good, that kids need to learn the programs everyone is using, etc. But mainly he raised serious and excellent questions about whether it is good for schools (and libraries, I thought) to depend so heavily on proprietary software.

See, if all the library and school labs and training curricula are built around Windows and Office, then most people will only ever know Windows and Office, thus ensuring a perpetual market for newer versions of Windows and Office. Just as I was forced to do with Money, when the next version comes along, you will have to buy it or effectively lose the ability to use what you have already bought.

I want my daughter to have real computer skills when she enters the workplace: Not just a working knowledge of one suite of programs, but the ability to figure out for herself how things work; the ability to adapt to whatever system is in place wherever she goes.

*at the time, freely available, now behind Springer's paywall at Tech Trends.

Do we really need 25 more library blogs?

Yeah, I know about blogs. I subscribe to a lot of them. In the past I tried to keep up with well over 100 feeds. I recently cut it down to about 50. I am a librarian and library school student, so naturally, many of the blogs I read are in the field of librarianship. I am also interested in technology, religion, cooking, sustainability, and a whole lotta "misc." If I don't keep up with my feeds for a day or two, there are too many to ever catch up with, and I have no choice but to, with a distinct twinge of guilt, "mark all as read."

So, no, I am not anti-blogging. I'm still not convinced that blogging isn't a passing fad. (Until a couple of years ago I wasn't convinced that the Internet was more than a passing fad, and some days I still wonder about that.) The title of this, my first post, was actually the first thing that crossed my mind when I learned that I would be required to start a blog for a library school class I am taking. As a creative form, blogging may or may not stand the test of time, but either way, I have great doubts that my contributions to it will achieve anything but to give my classmates and any other hapless subscribers a heightened sense that they are drowning in way, way too much information.

How did I name my blog? I went here to get some ideas. This site suggested I combine a 2.0 concept of the moment with the name of a critter. Considering how I came up with it, I can't tell you how tragic and humorous I found it that my first choice was taken. If you haven't guessed yet, I am more than a bit of a contrarian.

Since this is a student blog, please consider it a work in progress. Feel free to comment your suggestions for improvement. And I promise I will never, ever take it personally if you mark all the posts as read or unsubscribe altogether. Believe me, I've unsubscribed from way better blogs than this!