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.