Woot! WordCamp kickoff party at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher (no doubt selected in part because homophone to Automattic), at the ferry Building.
But does it make up for missing Wikimania, the LibraryThing Bar-b-Que-Thing, and Napoleon Dynamite night at The Twig?
While we’re still waiting for flying cars (or even just fuel efficient cars) I’m keeping track of tiny helicopters like the GEN H-4 and this one, the AirScooter II, pictured above. The company, AirScooter Corporation of Henderson NV, introduces the new craft with a tip of the hat to Igor Sikorsky‘s earliest designs featuring counter-rotating […] » about 500 words
Wikimania is about to start, but here, the ever-topical Onion folk are poking fun at Wikipedia. What is there to say when “America’s finest news source” casts aspersions on the world’s newest encyclopedia with the headline Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence? Extra: watch out for Meredith Farkas‘ panel presentation on wikis and enabling […] » about 100 words
Will pressed Joe, asking him to name his top ten favorite books. Joe pressed back, saying such lists were ridiculous, but still, sometime later he emailed with the following:
Okay, here are the books that got to me at certain points in my life. Not sure I would view them all the same now, but this is a list of sorts.
I found this an interesting challenge, and of course impossible…I have more lists but I stuck to novels…
Top ten novels by female authors
- The Golden Notebook
- Cross Creek
- We Took to the Woods
- Pride and Prejudice
- Member of the Wedding
- Secret History
- Middlemarch
- Song of the Lark
- The Fountainhead
- The Good Earth
Top ten novels by male authors
I really need to keep better tabs on Michael Fagan, as his June 11 OpenSearch Update is full of goodies.
Quite a while ago now, stepinrazor asked people to do some self-censorhip in a post in the Flickr Ideas forum. FlyButtafly quickly joined the discussion, noting that she’d encountered some material she found offensive in pictures from other Flickr members: “as I’m going through the pictures, one shows up of a protestor holding a sign […] » about 1300 words
When a gossip site has a picture of Mel Gibson that looks more like Ted Kaczynski, and a story about drunken, anti-semitic ravings, I think “eh.” But somehow I get more interested agitated when I learn the cops might have sanitized the police report of the whole affair.
update: ooh, what about his endorsements?
Bob, the occasional cultural affairs correspondent here, took me to task:
how could you not?
no link to Dooce.com??
nor to BlogHer.org???
What can I say? My immediate reaction was that he’d found proof of Danah Boyd‘s point that male bloggers only link to male bloggers.
Anyway. The BlogHer conference just wrapped up, but as Ryan notes, I don’t know of any library folk who attended. Still, Marianne Richmond is on-blog, raising our awareness of DOPA just like a lot of librarians are trying to do. Meanwhile, over at Dooce I found the kind of smart, funny writing that I expected from Bob’s recommendation.
I just got a heads up on an Advertising Age story that Wal-Mart is trying to be MySpace (and, yeah, I aped their headline, too). Here’s the lead: It’s a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to “express their individuality,” yet it screens all content, tells parents their kids have joined and forbids […] » about 200 words
Arthur Schopenhauer is suggested to have said: Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is violently opposed, in the third is regarded as self-evident. If the reaction to Karen Calhoun‘s report to the Library of Congress on The Changing Nature of the […] » about 300 words
Richard Cheese‘s lounge-core renditions of pop favorites (and some not-so-favorites) have been cracking me up every time they chime into the mix on random, but I didn’t know what the guy looked like until I spied Beatnikside‘s photo of the man in among his Vegas people set. “Cheese,” of course, is a pseudonym for LA […] » about 100 words
Matt Mullenweg announced WordCamp in San Francisco, then ten days later Abby announced the LibraryThing cookout in Portland (Maine). Both are set for August 5. The LibraryThing event promises free burgers and potato salad, while WordCamp attendees will enjoy both free BBQ and free t-shirts. I’d like to go to both, but rather than have to make some decision about which one I’d most like to go to, I’m leaning on the fact that I’d already bought my flight to SFO when the LT event was announced.
Anyway, it’s casual Friday here, so this post is really just an excuse to (again) link to the funniest BBQ-related video I’ve seen in a while.
This photo from Tsunaminotes appeared in Ende’s photo stream and reminded me instantly of all the cool things I’d never done because I was born too late and cool stuff is what I saw in black and white photos from years past. Of course, Flickr says the photo was taken July 5th, and the photographers […] » about 200 words
Fink‘s Pretty Little Thing is this week’s free download at iTunes, and I have to say I like it. Pretty Little Thing is not usually what I would listen to but i found the song to be new and interesting, very “fresh”! Fink‘s Pretty Little Thing gets a 7.5 on pies listening pleasure scale.
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I was honored to join the conversation yesterday for the latest Talis Library 2.0 Gang podcast, this one on folksonomies and tags. The MP3 is already posted and, as usual, it makes me wonder if I really sound like that. Still, listen to the other participants, they had some great things to say and made […] » about 600 words
As noted here, I’m going to WordCamp in SFO in early August.
Matt describes it as a BarCamp-style event (where “’BarCamp-style’ is a code phrase for ‘last minute’”) with “a full day of both user and developer discussion.” I’m just going for the free t-shirt, of course, but I can imagine a number of folks will get a good value out of the sessions and discussions that will likely run, especially all the developer stuff.
Also, if you’ve got some suggestions about what else I should be doing in San Fran, leave a comment or contact me with any suggestions.
Not A Pretty Librarian has kicked things off well with a first post titled “It Is Not A Tool,” covering an argument about which has more value to a teenager: a car or a computer.
On one side is the notion that “She can’t drive herself to work with a computer.” While, on the other side is the growing likelihood that she won’t drive to work at all, but instead simply work at whatever computer she has available. But then, this is a teenager, and maybe practical matters like work don’t top the list. And that’s where Not A Pretty Librarian (who are you?) asks:
Can you imagine being nineteen right now without computer access?
Indeed, when college students are spending so much time on AIM and logging into Facebook daily, is a car really as important as a computer in a teenager’s social life? When 89 percent of students start their research in a search engine, isn’t the computer more important than a car to get to the library?
Contentsbsuite FeaturesFixed/Changed/AddedInstallationUpgradingCommandsOptionsTag SupportUsing bsuite FunctionsKnown BugsUpdate: bugfix release b2v7 available. It’s been a while since I released a new version of bsuite, my multi-purpose WordPress plugin. I’d been hoping to finish up a series of new features, but those have been delayed and this is mostly just a collection of bugfixes. This update is recommended […] » about 500 words
WPopac, a project I started on my nights and weekends, is now officially one of my day-job projects too. We’ve been using our WPopac-based catalog as a prototype since February 2006, but the change not only allocates a portion of my work time specifically to the development of the project, but also reflects the library‘s […] » about 200 words
The music has been on random for weeks now, but 33.3‘s “Joanne Will,” from Plays Music played this afternoon as soundtrack to the summer rains. Brent Sirota may struggle to tell us how bad it is (while also giving it a 4.5 rating), but this “easier to listen to jazzy than to listen to jazz” […] » about 200 words
In yet more geolocation news, beermapping.com‘s maps to breweries will make my travel planning easier, and my travels boozier. Hey, it’s casual Friday, take off early and go find a new brewpub for lunch. beermapping.com, brew maps, breweries, brewery, brewpub, casual friday, geolocation, mapping, maps » about 100 words
Wearing the badge “still beta,” Plazes, the free, network-based geolocation service, now sports a new coat of paint. Among the improvements is the Flash-based badge (above) and a much improved frontpage/dashboard that combines the map of known locations with the map of active users, formerly two separate screens. On the downside, I sort of miss […] » about 300 words
It’s hard to be angry with Flickr about unexpected downtime when they post funny things like this. For my part, this is more than just an excuse to link to DJ Ted Stevens’ Internet Song (yeah, “the internet is a series of tubes”), it’s an excuse to point out how Flickr apparently knows how to […] » about 100 words
OpenSearch is a standard way of querying a database for content and returning the results. The official docs note simply: “Any website that has a search feature can make their results available in OpenSearch format,” then adds: “Publishing your search results in OpenSearch™ format will draw more people to your content, by exposing it to […] » about 300 words
While listening to my favorite radio station 92.1 FNX, I discovered my new favorite band. The Arctic Monkeys is a new band that comes from the UK, and their popularity is rocketing. Their new album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, has sold more than 360,000 copies which makes it the fastest […] » about 200 words
