Write rhymes

With handy "Write rhymes" at your fingetips, you can craft a paean to Knowbodies
with robot ease.

Collecta

Collecta says....The web is alive with real-time information. So why search a stale archive? Collecta monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, so we can show you results as they happen. Give it a try.

And some impressive testimony in Wired last month:

In the age of Twitter, there’s fierce competition to be the quickest indexer on the net — a feature even Google co-founder Sergey Brin admits his company can improve upon. IceRocket, OneRiot and Scoopler are typical of the trend.

The smartest one we found is Collecta. It scours the net for the most recent blog posts, news stories, tweets and comments and displays them in a continuous waterfall. It’s a torrent of information to keep track of, but if you are worried about your company’s online reputation or want the latest news on Iran, it’s indispensable

Nothing wrong with Kansas

(via Andrew Sullivan)a new paper posits a counter-intuitive relationship between national identity and acceptance of economic redistribution. Conventional thinking presumes that stronger identification with our countrymen means more solidarity and acceptance of economic redistribution as a tool  to spread the wealth. This paper argues the opposite; that that strong national identity goes together with high income inequality and low desire (among working class voters) for redistribution. The reasoning is that when working class voters identify more strongly with their class, they are likely to push for redistribution (which will favor their class interests), but often they will identify less with their class (perhaps because that class is ethnically heterogenous), and more with their nation, and are then less likely to want redistribution. The graph shows a clear negative correlation between economic redistribution and degree of national identity.

Two reflections on reading and mobility

Government by the people

This report from Accenture, Web 2.0 and the Next Generation of Public Service: Driving high performance through more engaging, accountable and citizen-focused service makes sense in the "government by the people" sense. The web2.0 savvy government, according to this report,
breaks down silos, improves citizen service and opens up the possibilities of collaboration and broader participation among agencies and by citizens themselves. In effect, Web 2.0 represents another step in the inexorable move to more citizen-centric and participatory government. New citizen-sponsored governance initiatives led by electronic, online, mobile and social networking technologies are augmenting, but not replacing, the traditional controls and value of governments and public service agencies.

Writing about reading 3

Nobody covers more ground in the liblog landscape than Walt Crawford, who offers a new survey of current writing about reading in Cites & Insights 9 (Writing about Reading 3)! This time he leads with a declaration of his beliefs and biases on the issue (first among them "I do not believe print books and the long narrative form are endangered—not by aliteracy, not by attention deficit preference, certainly not by ebooks."), and moves on to a discussion of ebooks and ebook readers. This issue of Cites and Insights also revisits the Library 2.0 discussion, and a memorable (from September 2007) quote from the Gather No Dust blog - The difference between library services provided with current tools (like strategic planning) and ones that provide services in a 2.0 type model is the difference between benevolent despotism and a democracy. I still  think there is a place for benevolent despotism within a democracy...

We're all writers now

Few make that claim today. I would hazard that, with more than 200m people on Facebook and even more with home internet access, we are all writing more than we would have ten years ago.
Hard to argue with Anne Trubek here.

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com (via Flickr)

The Story's Story

Just discovered  The Story's Story - if  you're interested books, writing and culture, this blog  has much to recommend it. Concise writing, engaging topics, updated every few days, and lots of interesting links, e.g. to a James Wood interview in the L.A. Weekly which yields this quote: “My true enemies skulk in a deep Dostoevskian Underground called the Internet, and never see the light of day — that is their punishment for hating me so much; it matches the sin, as in Dante.”

Dogs and reading

I know that my hoary conception of librarians as shepherds for sheep is no longer de rigueur; today's librarians lean more toward precepts like the Librarians 2.0 Manifesto, so I've reluctantly abandoned my sheep simile and begun looking for middle ground. That's why a Boston librarian's tweet about a visit from Lucy the Reading Dog made my ears prick up - a new market for public libraries! This was something different though, as I learned from the Massachussetts Pet Partners page.  For several years now, READ dogs (Reading Education Assistance Dogs) have been helping kids learn how to read. In a nutshell, the dogs are trained to "listen" while children read to them; the dogs attentiveness boosts the child's confidence. More importantly, teacher Pat Howe points out, "The dog listens without making any comments, judgment, or criticisms". Very much like what humans used to do in the classroom, before the advent of backchanneling.

The Library News

The Library News.com describes itself as "a collection of RSS feeds of various Library related blogs and websites.  Here you’ll find the latest information about what is going on in technological realm of Libraries. We also have a finely tuned Google search engine to search through all those blogs."
Very nice! A similar though more modest tool is the Knowbodies Library&Technology Metagator, which I monitor feverishly many times a day to find stuff to blog about.

LongURL

With the prevalence of shortened urls on Twitter and mobile media these days, a good url expander is an essential "look before you leap" precaution. LongURL works great, and is compatible with Firefox 3.5.

Diary of a Nobody 2.0

If you loved Diary of a Nobody - which was web2.0 a century before its time - you'll also enjoy DrKissingerPhd on Twitter. Hilarious!

fefoo

FeFoo is a handy multi-search engine with a neat and orderly interface. There is an option to add Fefoo to the list of search engines in the Firefox dropdown search, but I couldn't get it to work...nor can I imagine how it's supposed to work, since fefoo is not a search engine, but (like the Firefox search window itself) merely an interface that coordinates access to many search engines. When installed among the search engines in the Firefox dropdown, fefoo simply defaults to Google...and sticks to Google, even if you go to fefoo and select a different engine. The best way to use it, as far as I can see, is to pull it up via a bookmark.

p.s. - re my remarks about Firefox addon above, see helpful comment by Vivek Jishtu about using commands in the Firefox dropdown window to specify search engines, e.g. ":bing libraries" will search bing for "libraries."

TwitterSearch to track people or topics

This TwitterSearch is not the one at search.twitter.com or twittersearch.com (due for launch in July, 2009....exciting!), but the gadget designed by Robert Arles at 32hours, which you can view in action over there on the right side of this page. You enter a search term - e.g. #libraries - and TwitterSearch will update every 60 seconds to display tweets about the topic. If you want to change the topic, go ahead! Here's how  Arles presents it:

TwitterSearch will let you set a search term, and it will update every 60 seconds to let you know what is going on in the Twitter universe. You can simply put in a search word or term, or be a little more tricky.

Try setting one of these as your search:

    * "#hashtag"  to track a topic of interest. I like to follow #ubuntu to see the latest topics on my favorite Linux distro.
    * "@username"  to follow all mentions of someone. You could see what people are saying to @ev, or about him!
    * "to:username"  You can see what people are saying ONLY to a specific person.
    * "from:username"  You can track what a specific person is saying.

My favorite: Just enter a username without the "@" You'll get to see the combo of what someone says, what is being said to them, and anything anyone says about them.


The application is free and can be embedded in any blog or website.
For searching twitter, you can always go to search.twitter.com, but even better is Mark Carey's GreaseMonkey script Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google. I've been using this for a couple of weeks now and find it extremely useful. When you use Google to search for a term, it adds the 5 most recent Twitter search results at the top of the list, like so:

Alice Hoffman loses readers, gains followers, falls out of Twitter

A glaring lack of social skills can be a big liability on the social web. Take Alice Hoffman, for example.

The future of news

I’ve complained before about the stealthy injection of entertainment into just about every facet of human discourse these days; personally, I find the fake jokey manner of newscasters and breakfast show hosts  particularly offensive. I would much prefer a more straight-forward approach, like this one;  here is the future of news, and it's danceable! (see the whole Auto-tune the news series)

Twitter, 1935 "Yesterday's Tomorrow Today!"

From Modern Mechanix (with the excellent slogan Yesterday's Tomorrow Today!) via Boingboing, this 1935 preview of Twitter. See also Wikipedia article about the Notificator

The future of the book

Spray for Kindle and other handheld reading devices

A handy spray for your Kindle or other portable reading device...

Medium is not the message

A kind retweeter directed me to Ann Kirshcner's article in the Chronicle about reading Little Dorrit in 4 different media (paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone) She asks herself whether its books or reading she loves, and decides on the latter...the medium is not the message. Interesting article that examines the respective merits of each medium, with iPhone rated a "Kindle-killer." 

tombours a'beggars, the blog and turfs

And what does Finnegans Wake have to say about blogs?
lairking o' tootlers with tombours a'beggars, the blog and turfs and the brandywine bankrompers

Twattering of bards in the twitterlitter

Finnegans Wake has to be read out loud to be enjoyed fully. Listen, for example, to Joyce's eloquence regarding Twitter...

[1:2 37.17] in his secondmouth language as many of the bigtimer's verbaten
words which he could balbly call to memory that same kveldeve,
ere the hour of the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter between
Druidia and the Deepsleep Sea, when suppertide and souvenir to
Charlatan Mall jointly kem gently and along the quiet darkenings

[1:4 95.31] whosebefore and his whereafters and how she was lost away
away in the fern and how he was founded deap on deep in anear,
and the rustlings and the twitterings and the raspings and the
snappings and the sighings and the paintings and the ukukuings
and the (hist!) the springapartings and the (hast!) the


[1:6 193.14] Anklegazer! Cease to be civil, learn to say nay! Whisht! Come
here, Herr Studiosus, till I tell you a wig in your ear. We'll do a
whisper drive, for if the barishnyas got a twitter of it they'd tell
the housetops and then all Cadbury would go crackers. Look!
Do you see your dial in the rockingglass? Look well ! Bend down

[4:15 600.23] soreen seen for loveseat, as we know that should she, for by
essentience his law, so it make all. It is scainted to Vitalba. And
her little white bloomkins, twittersky trimmed, are hobdoblins'
hankypanks. Saxenslyke our anscessers thought so darely on
now they're going soever to Anglesen, free of juties, dyrt chapes.

In defense of distraction

Sam Anderson's article in New York is a reflection on the nature of distraction. Curiously, he begins - preemptively I guess - by saying that all criticism of tech-induced social change is really kind of pointless. First, there's really nothing new under the sun; remember old Socrates (the fool!) complaining that the advent of writing would cripple memory and the mental faculties? And second, you can't do anything about it anyway, so why rail against these things? [But then we'd be without without Thoreau, Orwell, Huxley, Hofstadter, Postman,  etc., and besides, there's so much to rail against, and more all the time!] Interesting tidbits are the phrase "continuous partial attention" to describe our modern kind of focus, and the importance of randomness in keeping us pecking at the reward bar; "As B. F. Skinner's army of lever-pressing rats and pigeons taught us, the most irresistible reward schedule is not, counterintuitively, the one in which we're rewarded constantly but something called variable ratio schedule, in which the rewards arrive at random." Does that ring a bell - or drop some pellets of feed on your desk - as you're checking email, twitter, and rss feeds?  Incidentally, a nice  compendium of writings on such issues is the Library Leadership Network's  LLN Multitasking page .

A play about web2.0

These theater students were instructed to "Act out the genesis and development of web2.0." Well done!

Poignant about aging

Here's a poignant film about the onset of old age and diminishing mental & physical faculties

Men follow men

Findings of a Harvard Business School study of Twitter:

• Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.
• an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman
• On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know
• Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one
• the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets
  

The study has generated some interesting discussion about whether Twitter is primarily a broadcast or conversational platform

New from the CIA

A spanking new look for the CIA World Factbook website; here's from yesterday's press bulletin:

June 08, 2009 - Completely redesigned website - presenting a cleaner look, improved navigation, and a host of added features - launched on the World Wide Web. Among the major enhancements are downloadable and printable photos for nearly 100 countries, a "Did You Know?" section explaining the impact of the Factbook around the world, and built-in world rankings for many of the Factbook information fields. Government sections reflect the results of recent parliamentary elections in Kuwait - where women were elected for the first time - and India, as well as presidential elections in Lithuania, Mongolia, Panama, and South Africa.


There used to be the notion that the CIA was populated by scholarly/literary types with Ivy League educations, but verbiage such as "The World Factbook is a unique reference in that it is updated continuously - on average, every two weeks" suggests that this is no longer the case. On the other hand, "a host of added features - launched on the World Wide Web" has a helpless ring to it, as if penned by a bookish sort miserably and cluelessly adrift in a new age.

I was curious about the Did You Know? section promising to explain "the impact of the Factbook around the world."  As a librarian, one is naturally curious about the impact of a particular reference book on the world around us. How do they measure it? Turns out the impact assessment was this: [The World Factbook] presents the basic realities about the world in which we live. We share these facts with the people of all nations in the belief that knowledge of the truth underpins the functioning of free societies. Let it not be said that the CIA hides its light under a bushel...

Library promotion idea

Can we get this guy to do one for libraries?

Google squared

Google squared describes itself thus:

Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify.

• Facts about your topic are organized as a table of items and attributes (we call them "Squares" for fun).
• Customize these Squares to see just the items and attributes you're interested in.
• See the websites that served as sources for the information in your Square.
• Save and share Squares with others. 

You can save squares and share them....here's a square of British composers

I've not discovered anyway to rearrange the order of rows and columns, but presumably that will come...

God texts 10 commandments!!!

A text message from JHWH via McSweeney's