Reader's block

Wonderful essay by Geoff Dyer on reader's block. Didn't get through all of it, will finish later.

Correspondent Rowley Birkin on the events in Cairo

Keen strikes again

Andrew Keen, author of the much ridiculed and reviled - in blogger circles -  "The Cult of the Amateur" (I thought it was good, though) will publish Digital Vertigo: An Anti-Social Manifesto in 2012. For a preview, see his essay Your Life Torn Open in this month's Wired(UK).

I think he's mostly right...but what's the point.

A survey of books about the obsolescence of books

NYT on spate of Q&A sites

Are libraries finished? 5 arguments pro and con

Better World Flux

Another impressive data visualization tool (see also this 2009 post for a review of some others):

Better World Flux was created as an entry for the World Bank Apps for Development competition. The site aims to raise awareness for the UN Millennium Development Goals by letting users visualize and share stories that are hidden in the World Bank Open Data.

Better World Flux is a tool that could be used to:

• build an ideal composite of what you think matters in life by selecting the indicators
• track the progress of countries and the world over the years and find interesting trends and patterns
• save and share your most compelling visualization and discover what others are sharing and have a conversation
• see which countries need the most help and find the ideal country to live in based on your preferences
• see which countries need the most help
• find the ideal country to live in based on your preferences
• explore and easily navigate the raw data for each country

Wartime library propaganda

War Against Ignorance propaganda posters

What's worth saving

Here's a nice passage from Ingrid Rowland's post Saving Alexandria about Egyptians surrounding the Alexandrine library to protect it against vandalism: 
Blind rage cannot understand anything as complex or beautiful as Rome, or a library, or even a person, an animal, a book, a tree, a work of art—but blind rage can make these intricate systems stop, and the ability to make things stop has served many of our kind since time immemorial as a fine substitute for learning, experience, scientific method, artistic creation, philosophy.