Kathy Gould at The Palos Verdes Library District blog has a very interesting post (which I’m proud to say was kicked off by something in my book) on the role of librarians as catalogs are enabled to sort themselves based on why someone is searching for something. The post grew out of a conversation with Betth Jefferson at Bibliocommons.

“So what happens when this role of helping people find the information that meets their particular needs is transferred from the librarian to the user community at large?” Kathy asks. The answer she gives presents librarians as creators and maintainers of the systems (an information architecture role, as I’d call it), as guides to and through the system, as voices in the system, and as facilitators of the library’s role in the community. But she puts it better than I just did.

Sounds right to me.

[Tags: libraries kathy_gould bibliocommons librarians pvld everything_is_miscellaneous information_architeture ]

1 Comment »

The switch from Movable Type to WordPress has gone pretty well, but some of you have pointed out a huge bug in my implementation. If you know CSS well, you’ll probably be able to spot it quickly. I don’t and I can’t. So, I’m asking for your help…

in IE 6, the page is loading some style other than the default, making the left column appear blank. If you click on a comments link, the text is centered, even if you click on the “default” style in the “Hard to Read?” list of links.

I don’t know why it’s not loading the default style in IE. I don’t know where it’s getting the center alignment. Do you?

Thanks!

10 Comments »

Jeneane writes:

The Award for the best tagline goes to Skype for “take a deep breath.” Why? Because it’s the only tagline I’ve seen that ISN’T about the company at all, but about ME. It’s something that’s good for me. Has nada to do with chatting or videofoning or the internet. It’s about: hey, we’re people too. Let’s all take a deep breath. Wait. Don’t jump into the next thing. Stop clicking. Wshew. Ok. There. Good.

I like it, too, but I’ve never quite understood it. Are they saying we should take a deep breath because what’s about to happen is breathtaking? Because we’ll need the breath for all the talking we’re about to do? Or is Jeneane right, that Skype is reminding us to pause in the hyper-flurry of life on the Web? I’m not sure, which is the main reason I like Skype’s tag line.

Jeneane suggests tag lines for other Web sites. Here are some more, assuming Skype’s tries to remind us of the bigger picture:

Wikipedia: Go outside. Engage. Come back neutral.

eBay: The best things in life are free aren’t for sale.

slashdot: 6 – Moving

[Tags: marketing jeneane_sessum ]

3 Comments »

John Edwards answers Mike Arrington’s tech policy questions, and some questions from readers, at TechCrunch. Edwards has been aggressively pro open Internet. Yay! (Disclosure: I sometimes get to talk with the Edwards policy folks about tech policy.) [Tags: john_edwards politics net_neutrality ]

2 Comments »

Amazon’s ebook, Kindle, looks great. But as far as I can tell, it doesn’t browse. You can only receive the materials Amazon chooses to provide.

Too bad. I was about to buy one.

If I’m wrong, please let me know…

8 Comments »

I just published a new issue of my free newsletter. The main article is, entirely by coincidence, about ebooks and libraries — a coincidence because Amazon just announced Kindle, its ebook hardware.

November 19, 2007

By the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous is available for Kindle. Cluetrain is not.
Also by the way, I just got a link from Urs Gasser to his contribution to a recent conference on the future of books.

[Tags: books ebooks kindle amazon libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

4 Comments »

This site is now officially under construction as I switch it from Movable Type to WordPress. So, pardon the glitches, and, no, I haven’t finished moving my blogroll over yet.

Why am I switching? It comes down to no good reason. I like MT as software and admire it as a company. But, I have it configured for maximum host churn. So, I could work on configuring it better or I could try something new. I’ve been using WP for my Everything Is Miscellaneous blog, and have been enjoying it. I’m also fairly comfortable with it now. So, I opted to try something new.

My only regret comes from mt sense of loyalty to MT. The company is a good contributor to the community and I recommend MT wholeheartedly. In fact, if bradsucks weren’t doing the WP install for me, I’d absolutely fail at it; WP is easy to get up in its default state, but much harder to configure and personalize than MT, at least in my experience.

So, now for the tweaks, the fixes, the general annoyance, and the post-installation regrets…

1 Comment »

Aargh. Steven Levy‘s excellent article on the new Amazon e-reading device came out a day before I was about to send out the new issue of my newsletter, the main article of which is about the future of books. I hate when that happens!

Well, I’ll send it out anyway, and will link to it here tomorrow. Damn the pace of human events! [Tags: books libraries steven_levy amazon ]

4 Comments »

The Times They Aren’t a-Changin’ explains itself this way:

It is the conceit of newspapers that each morning there are new stories to tell. Using the New York Times’s own archives, unchangingtimes.com sets out to prove that everything news is old.

So the blog takes a current story from The Times and finds stories on the same theme in its archive. The result is a list of the mythic narratives of our culture.

This so reminds me of the feature that Spy magazine (I believe) used to run that rounded up all the tiny filler-ish NY Times stories headlined “Bus Plunge.” [Tags: media newspapers narrative nytimes ]

Be the first to comment »

Dave’s convinced me. I’m going to ask for my family to contribute toward buying me a Chumby for Chanukah. Using it simply as a (rather small) digital picture frame practically justifies the price by itself. Add in its openness and general coolness, and I want one! [Tags: chumby dave_winer gadgets ]

5 Comments »