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MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

Denver Nights

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/maisonbisson/153439791/" title="Photo Sharing">El Chapultepec</a> is a little jazz club on <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=1962+Market+St,+Denver,+CO&om=1&ll=39.753228,-104.993334&spn=0.018245,0.058494" title="1962 Market St, Denver, CO - Google Maps">Market St</a> in LoDo, and one of a number of finds in Denver. » about 100 words

Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

| <a href="http://www.innopacusers.org/iug2006/">IUG 2006 presentation</a>: <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/misterbisson/Presentations/IUG-2006May21.mov">Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0</a> (also <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/misterbisson/Presentations/IUG-2006May21.pdf">available as a PDF</a> with space for notes) This is an update of <a href="http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11096/">my ALA Midwinter presentation</a>. » about 400 words

And We’re Discarding This?

I read <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/maisonbisson/149529625/" title="Photo Sharing">enough of this to get a good laugh</a>, but not enough to understand if it was serious or not. Some of it reads like satire, but other parts as are dry as, well, they're dry (who really needs a simile anyway, they're just dry, okay?). » about 100 words

Whiskey Blanket

I just bought Whiskey Blanket‘s It’s Warmer Down Here (2004) on the basis of a few tracks they offered on MySpace. It’s hip hop, socially critical hip hop (crit hop?), set atop a well constructed downtempo trip hop music bed (yeah, I’ll cut it with the hops already). It immediately brought to mind MC 900 […] » about 200 words

Flickr Goes Gamma

Just when we started wondering how much longer flickr would be beta, they announced gamma.

The new design had me scratching my head for a bit, but I’m coming to like the changes. The menu/toolbar in the header has direct links to a lot more stuff, while the stuff in the footer has many fewer links. I can’t really tell if there are any links missing there, or if they’re just organized better, as I really only used one or two of them anyway.

Searching is improved, and now there’s a fancy menu that pops up when you mouse over a buddy icon. Go take a look at it all.

Overall, it’s a nice improvement to my favorite online application.

Better Business Bureau Pulls One Out

I gave up on Hostgator a while ago, and I thought I’d cancelled my account until I noticed they were still charging me monthly (yeah, I should pay more attention to what’s on my CC bill). When I contacted them about it they claimed I never fully cancelled. Here’s a copy of the form I […] » about 400 words

Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities

It’s hard to know how Fuzzyfruit found the WPopac catalog page for A Baby Sister for Frances (though it is ranked fifth in a Google search for the title), but what matters is that she did find it, and she was able to link to it by simply copying the URL from her browser’s location bar.

The link appears among her comments in the discussion about her post on an early letter she’d written to her mom. Fuzzyfruit’s comment spawned more comments about the book from Sarahq and Coffeechica.

We talk here and there about how “libraries build community,” but how does that work in the online world? How do our systems support or inhibit community discussions online?

Stonehill Industrial History Center (aka the shovel museum)

Most travel guides simply call it the “shovel museum,” but it’s really the Stonehill Industrial History Center. Much more than shovels, curator Greg Galer tells us the collection reveals interesting facts about what we were building and how we built it over the past 200 years. Located on the campus of Stonehill College in Easton […] » about 300 words

Blogging From Basements

My buddy Cliff emailed me excited about the following quote he found on the Yahoo Finance message boards: Sun vs Dell All you need to know about Dell & Sun was predicted 8 months ago by some blogger in his parent’s basement. The draft ads are cool: http://spiralbound.net/2005/09/15/sun-talks-some-smack/ How come the big brokerage house analysts […] » about 100 words

Pretty Soon Everybody Will Have It

This isn’t as funny as it used to be. Every time I read about or hear of somebody talking about autism, I recognize some many of the behaviors as my own. First it was this rather amusing comparison between “eccentric” and autistic behaviors, then it was an interview on Fresh Air, and just this weekend […] » about 300 words

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service

Ryan Eby got me excited about S3 a while ago when he pointed out this post on the Amazon web services blog and started talking up the notion of building library-style digital repositories. I’m interested in the notion that storage is being offered as a commodity service, where it used to be closely connected to […] » about 200 words

Reputation Management At Applied Dreams 2.2

Ryan gave me the drop on this presentation by Dave Chiu and Didier Hilhorst where they do an amusingly effective job of explaining the concept of reputation management. It all went down at the conclusion of the Applied Dreams 2.2 project at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milano. The project brief begins: Our identities are […] » about 200 words

Who Makes These Decisions Anyway?

Brian’s comment at RemainingRelevant should resonate with many of us: Something to consider about why libraries end up with bad interfaces (at least as far as catalogs go) is that it might be that the people who use the interface (and help the public use it) are not the people who decide which interface to […] » about 300 words

George Bush And Cognitive Dissonance: “Evolution Is A Lie” And “Bird Flu Will Evolve To Threaten Humans”

Alpha Liberal reminds me that Bush somehow gets his head around the following: “the jury is still out on evolution” and “the bird flu virus could evolve to a form that can be spread easily from human to human” eh, I’ll take any excuse to point to Michelle Leeds’ photo and bash Bush’s stupidity. bird […] » about 100 words

Used Brains And Black Plague, On eBay

He he. Chuckle, chuckle. Thanks to Kris and Brett for these pics. They ads are still there now when I search Google for used brain or black plague. My question is: does eBay just submit bulk lists of terms they want to buy, or do they have a deal with Google to just link ’em […] » about 100 words

I don't need an excuse to drink tequila, but I'll eagerly take one

Ian Chadwick’s In Search of the Blue Agave begins: “Tequila is Mexico,” said Carmelita Roman, widow of the late tequila producer Jesus Lopez Roman in an interview after her husband’s murder. “It’s the only product that identifies us as a culture.” No other drink is surrounded by as many stories, myths, legends and lore as […] » about 200 words

Q: Why Do Some Things Suck?

A: Because we compare them to the wrong things. I’m in training today for a piece of software used in libraries. It’s the second of three days of training and things aren’t going well. Some stuff doesn’t work, some things don’t work the first (second, third…ninth) time, and other things just don’t make sense. At […] » about 600 words

WPopac Gets Googled

A discussion on Web4Lib last month raised the issue of Google indexing our library catalogs. My answer spoke of the huge number of searches being done in search engines every day and the way that people increasingly expect that anything worth finding can be found in Google. There were doubts about the effectiveness of such […] » about 800 words

Higher Ed Blog Con (and other things I should have posted about last month)

I meant to post about this weeks ago, but HigherEd BlogCon has now come and gone. It had sections on teaching, libraries, CRM, and web development. (Aside: why must we call it “admissions, alumni relations, and communications & marketing” instead of the easier to swallow “CRM”?) The “events” are over, but everything is online, and […] » about 200 words

Linkrot? We Don’t Have Any Steenking Linkrot!

Allen asked, via the web4lib list:

I’m interested in how others handle linkrot in library blogs. Do you fix broken links? Remove them if they can’t be fixed? Do nothing?

Michael answered:

I deal with link rot on blogs as I would with any other publication, print or otherwise: do nothing. The post is dated and users should be aware that links from two years ago may no longer work.

We need to understand that the web is a living, breathing, and sometimes dying organism. The forrest will renew itself.

Dropping the metaphor, link rot is frustrating, but deleting links is deleting history. Fixing links (if possible) or adding updates is another matter, but it’s really only something I’d do for active content.

Frank Rich on Bush’s Last 1000 Days

Frank Rich’s New York Times op-ed column today was full of the kind of easy one-liners that repressives conservatives usually like to use against honest people progressives. I got it from my friend Joe, but because The New York Times thinks their content is golden, they won’t let me link you to the full-text. Eh, […] » about 400 words