Feed Poisoning

I, like, totally read the first 50 pages and thought, “This so big sucks.”

So I went to Princeton Public and checked out the audio version, downloaded it to my iPod and now it’s tolerable. It’s even kind of cool to hear “the feed” in the audio version, but I can’t really say that I’m a fan. I don’t really care for dystopic fiction and this hasn’t changed my mind, at least so far. And I think if there’s one thing that annoys me to no end, it’s teenspeak. Totally! Omigod! Whatev dude. The audio version really exaggerates this and I’m pretty sure my blood pressure is spiking and if I’d been exposed to massive amounts of gamma rays in my past I’d be going Hulk in my one bedroom apartment.

But to the point—is this where we’re headed with so much of our lives taking place online? I don’t really think it’s too much of an exaggeration to think that the ability to write, both the physical ability and the need to, are slowly eroding. Anyone recall the commercials on TV where the family is having a verbal IM conversation? I think this is a cell phone service commercial. My point is that kids are slowly starting to think in an abbreviated fashion.

And it’s not so far fetched that conversational skills are eroding because of technology. I think Titus’ fumbling attempts to converse with Violet are telling of this. Violet seems the most enlightened because she didn’t “get” the feed until she was 6. The rest have never known anything else, also eerily prescient. Kindergartners with cell phones—are you kidding me?

Do I think Anderson’s take on the future is possible? Definitely. Desireable? Definitely not, dude. I mean, like, da da da, information overload, da da da, art is dead, da da da, cockroaches, da da da, whatever.

BL vs. GR

I’ve had a GR account for awhile and this is my first exposure to BL. I think in terms of their functionality they are very similar. A slight difference I noticed was that BL immediately offered the option of where to place the new feed, in an existing or new folder. Google requires that I arrange my feeds after the fact. BL also allows for after the fact reorganization.

Like MichelleW indicates there doesn’t seem to be a big difference, so it comes down to how the consumer interacts with the product. GR seems familiar, though as indicated in the homework review, it seems that I’m turning over all of my online life to Google. Probably intentional on Google’s part and I’m at least glad that Google is providing an excellent product and not taking the Microsoft approach, which seemed to be “we’ve got ‘em, so they’ll take what we give ‘em—doesn’t have to be great.”

I think my only minor beef is the name. “Bloglines” seems to imply that only blogs can be subscribed to, whereas “Google Reader” has a more wide open sounding name. I have to admit that how a product sounds affects my consumer choices. BL may not have been my first choice as I’m not a huge blog reader. I currently use GR mainly to maintain my entertainment sites, especially movie reviews. I must say though that as I’ve investigated BL I like it’s navigability and how easy it is to organize things.

New to me 2.0

I was recently introduced to Delicious (del.icio.us) and it was a “eureka!” moment for me. I realize that social bookmarking and tagging has been around for awhile but I didn’t realize it would address a real need for me.

At work I often use computers other than my own and can never remember certain internal work urls, which are often long, opaque and code driven. I have them all bookmarked on my own computer but I was handicapped whenever I went into our other studio and I needed to check something.

I feel a bit ashamed that this was new to me—I realize I couldn’t be the only one going through this and that somewhere the need had been addressed. Of course now I’m able to bookmark all of these sites through my new and now heavily used Delicious account, which I access when traveling back to Denver to visit family or on the road at a conference--bit of a work junkie I guess. Or maybe a control freak?

I wonder what the Firefox/Delicious relationship is? In recent upgrades of Firefox I had to reinstall some of Delicious’ functionality. Other Firefox installs, such as the Google tool bar, automatically make the transition to the new version. Or is this simply a unique situation based on how my computer is set up?

Blogger and LiveJournal

I think both of these blogs offer good services to both the casual and “semi-pro” blogger. Both offer easy sign-up, clean, easy to use post tools as well as templates to personalize the look of your blog.

• An obvious difference is that Blogger only has one type of service while LiveJournal offers both basic (free) service as well as an enhanced (fee) type of service. Personally I find that the templates in Blogger are fewer, but more attractive, which of course is a subjective observation.
• On both Blogger and LiveJournal, I find that writing my posts in Word, then copying and pasting the entries into either blog yielded odd results. Blogger had trouble taking my Word 2003 document, at first indicating that there were html encoding errors. This happened while I was on my PC (XP). A later post from a Mac went smoothly. LiveJournal posted without errors, but note how the font looks different in LiveJournal near the end of the post—this despite selecting all and trying to assign a font and point (small) size. Blogger was also fickle with fonts.
• LiveJournal has much more advertising attached to it while Blogger has a much more clean look, focusing strictly on blog posts.
• Blogger is associated with Google thus signing into Google (gmail, etc.) means you’re able to go right into your Blogger account.
• LiveJournal uses reCAPTCHA, a technology that puts the public to work making corrections to OCR (optical character recognition) errors for various text documents scanned and run through OCR software. Basically, one of the words you saw when typing in the obfuscated word to eliminate automated computer sign up for accounts was a word from a text document that OCR couldn’t correctly assess. Last year alone, people exposed to reCAPTCHA have transcribed with 99 percent accuracy the equivalent of over 17,000 books. Cool! Here’s an interesting article about it from NPR.

Brown and Duguid

I think what struck me most about reading this chapter was the account of the failure of the hot desking experiment at the ad agency Chiat/Day. The details of how and why the experiment failed should be a cautionary tale for librarians who believe that technology should drive the direction of libraries.

Brown and Duguid relate the postulation that hot desking was the future. Wired magazine followed the attempts of Chiat/Day to enact hot desking, but the experiment failed to take into account the social aspects of office work. While the technology was new at the time it was believed that the existing technology would revolutionize work habits.

Instead, Brown and Duguid relate the “productivity paradox”. While technology has grown by leaps and bounds, productivity hasn’t. Perhaps this is an indication that society advances arithmetically while technology grows exponentially. Perhaps the lesson here is that technology can’t overcome society but society can harness and use technology in a supplemental way. Therefore, libraries shouldn’t be too goggle-eyed at the possibilities of technology. E-readers will never replace books but may be an interesting alternative. Digital libraries aren’t meant to replace brick and mortar libraries but are meant to be complementary to them. I think this realization will help bridge the generation gap that exists in libraries. Some “old-school” librarians are threatened by technology while some right-out-of-library-school technology geek thinks “old-schoolers” are out of touch. It’s most likely that these two types of librarians actually need each other.

Princeton Public's blog

Library Lounge

This blog is from the Princeton Public Library. PPL is a great public library that has successfully made itself into a community hangout. One of the ways it’s done this is through this blog, which acts as a bulletin board for information about library events. The blog also has reviews of new publications. Since I’ve been in the MLIS program at Rutgers (almost 3 years!) I’ve been compiling a list of books I want to read when I’m through with school and have some spare time. Much of what I’ve got is based on library blogs. And this one in particular. Check out the review for “Bridge of Sighs”—it made my list.

Additionally this blog has an open feel, making it easy to navigate. The blog posts are archived by month and searchable. The blog also allows for subscribing via rss for those truly interested in the most recent updates, which often provide information on noteworthy events such as author events or performance art.