Homophily

Homophily - an important concept and a significant part of our web experience.

Zoomii.com

If you prefer a real-world look and feel for your online book browsing/shopping, Zoomii.com might be of interest. It features some 21,000 thumbnails arranged on bookshelves according to category. Personally, I don't find it to be a very charming bookstore, but de gustibus etc.

Firefly

See over on the right where it says Firefly? Slide the button to turn the service on, and you can chat directly, anywhere on the page, with hundreds of other visitors who congregate at knowbodies.blogspot.com at any given moment. Or, if nobody's around, see the demo at the Firefly website. As users enter their remarks, Firefly assembles a chat thread that can accessed from the bar at the bottom of your browser. I bet few of knowbodies readers 20 years ago could have imagined anything like this happening!

Funology

I wonder if TV producers have a technical term for that sickening fake cheerfulness these breakfast-TV folks are indulging in? You'd think they'd have a word for a thing so instantly recognizable and ubiquitous, deliberately scripted (?) into thousands of breakfast shows broadcast around the world each morning. I'm reading Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason",  an indictment of the dumbing down of America, and one of the things it makes me wonder about is where all the idiocy comes from.  Take this breafast cheer mannerism, how did it take root? Did it just evolve, or was it the fruit of conscious effort?  The way newscasters tilt their heads as though trying to peer inside the camera, is that a way to deal with glare, or is it wisdom from a journalists handbook? And that demeaning silly banter that even the crustiest - or most dignified - old reporter must engage in when shuffling notes and transitioning to the sports reporter or weather forecaster - is that a contractual requirement, or just comme il faut in the news business?  I know, these are trifles, but along with a million other artifacts of popular culture they bring humankind down a good many notches.  Jacoby drove me back to Postman's prescient (1985) "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and a very timely reminder of the important distinction between Orwell and Huxley's dystopias; Orwell's is imposed from without, while Huxley's - and ours - is self-inflicted, a much more irresistible threat!  Resist it!!! To encourage me in these thoughts, I've also been looking at  Ed d'Angelo's Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism ThreatensDemocracy, Civil Education and the Public Good. Although I probably qualify as a postmodern consumer, I would like to see a revival of the notion of libraries as an institution to foster civic education and the public good and a little less scrambling  to keep library patrons entertained and happy with games and web2.0 attractions.  I suspect what brought on this rant was my recent encounter with a word I'd not heard before: a Norwegian library announced a new website that would be rich in "funology." Trembling with indignation, I googled, and discovered that a whole book had in fact been written on the topic as early as in 2003! (Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment) Amazon describes funology thus:



the move in Human Computer Interaction studies from standard usability concerns towards a wider set of problems to do with fun, enjoyment, aesthetics and the experience of use.

Traditionally HCI has been concerned with work and task based applications but as digital technologies proliferate in the home fun becomes an important issue. There is an established body of knowledge and a range of techniques and methods for making products and interfaces usable, but far less is known about how to make them enjoyable.

Perhaps in the future there will be a body of knowledge and a set of techniques for assessing the pleasure of interaction that will be as thorough as those that currently assess usability.



Nothing wrong with injecting fun into learning and usability I suppose, but before you know it "fun" will be a prerequisite for everything we do. Goodbye pleasure deferment, and the quaint notion that drudgery is sometimes required to get your reward.

fun

1685, v., "to cheat, hoax," probably a variant of M.E. fon "befool" (c.1400), later "trick, hoax, practical joke," of uncertain origin. Stigmatized by Johnson as "a low cant word." Older sense is preserved in phrase to make fun of and funny money "counterfeit bills" (1938, though this may be more for the sake of the rhyme); sense of "amusement" is 1727. See also funny.

Baker on Shea on 59 million words

While I have noted (with indignation) that many reviews of books by Nicholson Baker - particularly the last one - are bad,  any review BY Nicholson Baker is a thing to savor indeed. I still have a photocopy of his wonderful 1994  NYRB review  of J.E. Lighter's Historical Dictionary of American Slang "Leading wth the Grumper" lying around for levity in gloomy moments.  In Sunday's New York Times, Baker treats us to another review of a word-related (aren't they all?) book, Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, OneYear, 21,730 Pages. For me, every Baker review is followed by a purchase.

The Future of reading

Digital Versus Print

This is the first in a series of articles that will look at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read.

Useful reference sites

Laura Milligan at Teaching Tips.com offers an assortment of "100 unbelievably useful reference sites."

Google tips

If you'd like to try some variations on the display of your Google search results, try appending view:info to your search string (view:map, view:timeline, and view:list are other options). Notice that when you use one of these options, the others appear as menu items at the top of the page...and you're also invited to peruse the Google experiments overview.

EveryScape

One limitation of Google Maps streetview that really annoys me is that you can see people's houses, but not inside them. For example, here is the house a friend of mine grew up in during the 60s and 70s. I have no idea who lives there now, but from the outside, the house doesn't look much different from when he lived there.  I'm not a snoop, but it's seeing the interior of the house and, if possible, unobtrusively observing the current residents in their natural habitat, that interests me.  Help may be on the way with EveryScape, which describes itself so: EveryScape isn't an online world, it's the world online. EveryScape takes you from the streets to the sidewalks and through the doors of the world's cities and towns. Letting businesses organizations and consumers build and share their world the way they see it.

But,  building the world is a BIG job!  EveryScape admits that, and wants your assistance; you can help out as a Scape Artist:

Do you want to drive the streets with EveryScape's special roof-mounted camera? Photograph the inside of your favorite shop or restaurant? Give us the scoop on a local business? Or just make sure that your community and your world is represented the way it should be? Then join our team and become a Scape Artist, and help us create something that means something. Help us change the way people see the world.

Or, if you fancy something less grungy than driving the streets as a ScapeArtist with special roof-mounted camera, they can offer ambassdorships: two kinds, Destination Ambassadors and Local Business Ambassadors


Most of EveryScape's world is currently located in the U.S, and I couldn't find any residential homes to scope out ..not yet, but I bet that's only a few years away.  I did go to Poland though, to see the gorgeous St. Mary's Basilica in Krakow.

This is definitely the future though: see the world from the comfort of your own home! And in a bit, the world can visit you too, also in the comfort of your own home.
 

PD bibliography

A 15 page bibliography on public diplomacy (May 08) from the Clingendael library of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations.

Collaborative search

One (small) drawback of the librarian profession is that one rarely gets to be a part of those exciting search parties and posses that one sometimes sees on television and in films. However, as Greg Notess points out in a recent Infotoday article (SearchTogether: A Tech Preview of Social Search Programs), librarians may soon be able to get a taste of that excitement without leaving their terminals. Notess focuses primarily on Microsoft's Search Together, which requires IE and a plugin and Live Messenger accounts on both the searcher and collaborator side. Collaborative search seems to me to be a very interesting concept for any consortium of librarians, and though I'm not ready to migrate from Firefox to IE, I'm looking forward to other download-free applications of the concept. Three products that incorporate aspects of social searching are Yoople (human ranking of search results), Delver (refines results according who the searcher is - e.g. teenager or senior citizen - and what social group has created and referenced the information), and Wikia Search (allows you to add sites, related terms, and images to search results)

100 useful niche search engines

Laura Milligan at College@Home offers a  list of 100 niche search engines. Particularly useful for college students, as the name of the site suggests. She organizes the search engines sorted in the following niches:
Extracurricular|Quick Answer Guides|City Guides and Travel|Shopping Search Engines|Business|Academic and Reference|Social Media and People|Multisearch|TV, Video and Radio|Medical Students and Health Search|Law Students|Metasearch and Megasearch Engines|Photos, Images and Visual Search Engines|News Searches|Jobs and Real Estate

Genealogy resources by state

Genealogists and family historians, see USA.gov's list of links to state genealogy resources.

Open ended ratchet wrench

You might think Knowbodies is my only "get rich quick" scheme, but that would be wrong. I also devote quite some time to pondering inventions that might propel me upwards in life. For instance, recently I was wondering why nobody sells an open-ended ratchet wrench or snow tires with retractable studs. I went to Google Patents, and ended up spending the day; not only do they  have multiple versions of open-ended ratchet wrenches and retractable stud tires, they have lots of other stuff that you wouldn't even suspect existed. And illustrations galore!!! A particular pleasure is the clarity of language that is typical of inventors. In 1933, for example, the optimistic Joseph De Merolis and Alexander di Lizio, probably struggling to contain their excitement, introduced their illuminated shoe with this pithy preamble: "Our invention relates to improvements in electrically illuminated shoes, and particularly to dancing shoes." Google Patents is truly an amazing site. (and if this particular shoe is not to your liking, there are many other illuminated shoes to choose from)

World Wide Science

From DOE

June 12, 2008

DOE Announces International Agreement on Global Science Online Gateway

WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the establishment of a multilateral alliance to govern the rapidly growing online gateway to international scientific research information--WorldWideScience.org. Officials from organizations representing 38 countries formalized their commitment today in Seoul, Korea, by signing a WorldWideScience Alliance agreement to sustain and build upon joint efforts to provide a single, sophisticated point of access for diverse scientific resources and expertise from nations around the world.

"WorldWideScience.org is already a wonderful tool for communication, bringing scientific databases from many countries to the fingertips of those advancing the frontiers of knowledge across the globe. It is well on its way towards becoming a complete, comprehensive, international source for scientific inquiry," DOE Under Secretary for Science Dr. Raymond L. Orbach said. "Unleashing global scientific discovery, through WorldWideScience.org, will accelerate scientific progress. That is why we are so excited about this alliance and the global access to science it will provide."

WorldWideScience.org is the result of an agreement—signed in January 2007 by Dr. Orbach and Chief Executive of the British Library Dame Lynne Brindley—to partner on the development of a global science gateway to accelerate scientific discovery by giving people faster and more convenient access to online scientific databases.

Arrested for blogging

(from beSpacific)
"The World Information Access 2008 Report presents important trends in the distribution of information and communication technologies around the world. The 2008 WIA Report explores information access by looking at trends in the blogger arrests worldwide, diversity in the ownership of media assets in the 15 largest media markets in the Muslim world, and the ideological diversity of political content online in 74 countries with large Muslim populations." Howard, Philip N, and World Information Access Project. World Information Access Report - 2008. 3. Seattle: University of Washington, 2008.

Wordle

For the modern reader, there is wordle. Paste in the old-fashioned linear text, and out comes a word cloud. The foregoing post is rendered thus:

7 things you should know

A few months ago I posted about Common Craft, where you can find short pithy videos about things you might be wondering about...or struggling to explain to others (rss, wikis, Twitter, etc.) Common Craft's style is - how shall I put it - lighthearted. For the bilious, who do not suffer breeziness gladly and perhaps prefer reading to watching, an excellent alternative is Educause's "7 Things You Should Know" series. Here is how they present themselves: 7 Things You Should Know About pieces provide quick, no-jargon overviews of emerging technologies and related practices that have demonstrated or may demonstrate positive learning impacts. Any time you need to explain a new learning technology or practice quickly and clearly, look for a 7 Things You Should Know About... brief from ELI. The briefs are professional looking 2 page pdfs, and make a very nice 1 sheet handout. Check it out! (and many other valuable resources at www.educause.edu too!)

Is Google making us stupid?

In this article from the Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr ponders how the internet may be affecting our brains. Sven Birkerts - much reviled and dismissed as a luddite by the digerati - covered some of the same ground more than a decade ago in his Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Perhaps a rebellious slow reading movement, prodded forward by technology, is finally gathering spee..momentum; for testimonies from readers about how hard it is to read these days, see Carr's blog Fortunately, even those of us with hardly any attention span left can still enjoy a good picture, if it's not too big.

(Sign next to reader being ticketed reads Minimum Speed, 186 282 397 MPS)

Wake up and take a nap

Feedsweep

FeedSweep is yet another rss feed aggregator. It's very easy to use, requires no programming, and provides many options for customizing the layout and appearance of your feeds. Below is an aggregate of feeds from some library/technology sites. The aggregate uses the "peach melba" color theme, is set to show the 5 most recent posts from the aggregated blogs, and to display them in 600px width.

Firefox 3

Firefox 3 is due for release tomorrow, June 17. I've been using the beta for a couple of weeks, and really like it - it's noticeably faster than Firefox 2.x, and has some nice new features. Naturally, not all of the add-ons I've come to rely on have been upgraded for Firefox 3 compatibility, but I expect that will come with the official release. For a preview of new features, see Walt Mossberg's review.

Google Ajax API feed

Over on the right, where it says "Google Dynamic Feed - Libraries & Technology", you see an example of an rss feed courtesy of Google's "Dynamic Feed Wizard." To create a feed, you enter the names of some feeds, or type in some search terms (in this case, "libraries and technology"), and the Dynamic Feed Wizard makes an RSS feed of the search results, then generates some javascript so you can channel the feed to your website or blog. The default is 4 results, but if you sign up for a Google API key, have some programming ability, and do a little tweaking with the code, you can change that and many other parameters by following the instructions in the Dynamic Feed Control Programming Guide. For an example of an rss aggregator built with the Google Ajax API, see Smashing Feeds.

Interesting Pile

How CharlieRB manages to compile his mighty interesting pile I do not know (and would like to), but if you like lists, and enjoy being distracted, this is a great place to spend some time.

Open Government Guide

The Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press (which is itself a very interesting site!) has created the Open Government Guide, "a complete compendium of information on every state's open records and open meetings laws. Each state's section is arranged according to a standard outline, making it easy to compare laws in various states." This a good place to check whether something is even worth looking for!

Good news

The pleasure of reading news is sometimes tainted by a) the news being bad and b) the news being true. Here, at last, is a site that provides news that is at least good, if not true.

Confessions of a bibliophile

Luc Sante in the Wall Street Journal on "The Book Collection That Devoured My Life"

Government Data and the Invisible Hand

This is a draft of an article that will appear in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology in Fall 2008. (it kindly asks us not to cite the draft, but - since it's out there for everyone to read - I assume a little quoting in a blog post like this is in order) The article argues that federal agencies should stop dabbling in webmastery, and leave to the pros the important job of providing government information to the people. The authors make some very resonant points; e.g., "Today government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use...It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility." This reminds me, with a piercing scream, of our age-old pleas for re-purposable information. The authors also argue that "the federal government has shown itself consistently unable to keep pace with the fast-evolving power of the Internet" - couldn't help thinking wistfully of bleeding edge technology like the Google toolbar when I read that. And a third point - and I don't think any article has ever made me nod furiously and smile grimly quite so much - is that "an online compliance checklist for designers of government websites identifies no fewer than 24 different regulatory regimes with which all public government web sites must comply...But the stultifying cumulative effect of these rules has not been, and probably would not be, endorsed by anyone." (a bit of touching naivete there...) And finally, "as long as government has a special role in the presentation and formatting of raw government data, certain desirable limits on what the government can do become undesirable limits on how the data can be presented or handled." Yes! And, I would add, "retrieved." The authors are David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Edward W. Felten of Princeton University. God preserve them.

Paper Cuts, a NYT blog about books

Paper Cuts describes itself as "a blog about books and other forms of printed matter, written by the editors of The Book Review. Look here for book news and opinion, interviews with writers, regular raids on the Book Review's archives, and other special features."
(Paper Cuts rss feed)

Nicholson Baker and indecency

I'm not talking about his book Human Smoke, for which he's taking such a terrible, terrible beating (Anne Applebaum in The New Republic is just one example of the fury Baker's pacifist revision of WWII history hath wrought - among some very heavy hitters!), but of his delightful review of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle and Helen Lekfkowitz Horowitz. There's a fundamental decency about Baker that I see in all his books and reviews, including Human Smoke, though I'm not sure I accept his (implied) argument there. I believe it springs from his respectful wonderment about the world - that's what enables him to be a scholar and a Wikipedia enthusiast - and I'm so glad he hasn't lost the spirit, despite the roasting Human Smoke has occasioned. Nothing like a Baker review to march me off to the library... "thanks to the meticulous research of these three scholars, we once again have a way of looking through a tiny, smudged window into New York's long-past illicit life." Keep up the good work, Nick!