Ballad in Plain E

I admit it: I’m a completely delinquent blogger this summer.

But anyway, there’s a hilarious article on PC Magazine website that was mentioned in SLA Connections today. Entitled “MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed“, the article paints a good picture of how ridiculous these sites are, comparing MySpace in particular to the thousands of “all about my dog” style personal websites from the first internet bubble. I wonder if there will be any reaction from the library blogosphere. I think the guy’s comments about these web 2.0 sites are bang on. Between this and my refusal to join Facebook, maybe I’m turning into a bitter Luddite!

Over at XKCD, a map of “Online Communities” reminds me, in some strange way, of the Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Only with a Sea of Memes. Check out the comic’s alt text, while you’re at it.

I’m so excited that I will be going to the SLA annual conference after all! My sweetie gave me an early birthday gift: funds to cover the costs of going to Denver. Luckiest girl ever!

I’ve been spending the last hour or so mapping out potential hotels and must-visit places on Google’s very cool “My Maps”. Have you seen this yet? It was mentioned on Slaw a couple weeks and I’ve been mucking around with it, creating maps for various purposes. You can mark up a map with your own placemarkers, route diagrams, annotations (including photo & video), etc., and then keep it private for yourself or those with whom you share the URL, or publish it for the world to see on Google Maps & Google Earth.

I can see tonnes of potential uses for this. Imagine making a map for your client with placemarkers for the office, hotel, transportation, etc. Or a map for friends visiting from out of town, listing your favourite restaurants, shops, and landmarks. The possibilities are many.

But…you can’t print off a “My Map” with the placemark data intact. Well, you can print some of the data by File>Print but it doesn’t look very good. A screenshot might be ok, too, but not perfect.

I searched Google Groups to see if maybe I was missing something, but it looks like lots of people are having the same problem. Hopefully Google’s pros will get on this soon.

Ty Yates, whom I went to school with at SAIT, sent me the link to this hilarious video on Youtube, in which a dude learns how to use a revolutionary new text storage device called a “book”.

I don’t know what it is, but it seems like this is the week that YouTube hit some sort of critical mass — I got about 15 different videos by e-mail (the best was “Promiscuous Firm“, a take-off of Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous Girl, produced by U of A Law students) and kept hearing IRL near-strangers mention watching videos about totally random stuff.

By the way, Ty’s just started a blog at digitalholepunch.com, where he plans to “discuss topics of interest in the information managment world, and hopefully generate some dialogue and collaboration.” Welcome to the blogosphere!

The, um, internet is abuzz over a video posted at Torontoist about “the growing phenomenon of Internet”. Taken from an early ’90s CBC news report, the video is hilarious mainly because it’s so darn earnest, and comes complete with sweetly novel-sounding dial-up and a gripping explanation of two emoticons (FYI, :-] means “I AM KIDDING” and :-[ means “I AM SERIOUS”). Of (not “the”, just) Internet’s growth, it is reportly “growing like an embryonic brain at a rate of 10% per month”. When asked “What does Internet mean to you?” one Canadian replies “It has more soul than any human being I know”. Those were the days, eh? For more command line than you can shake a stick at, check it out. Internet is waiting for you! Snaps to Robyn for directing me to this story at Qwantz.com today.

P.S. In honour of this great video, Ryan North will be selling “I AM SERIOUS” t-shirts after Christmas. I can’t wait!

How cool is this? The University of Winnipeg has a library toolbar, from which you can search for materials in various media, initiate live help, and quickly access search tips and library tutorials. I know it’s not the first library to offer one, but it’s the first I’ve ever come across while using a library’s site. While I couldn’t get it running for Firefox (they’ve not updated it for 2.0), it’s working fine in IE6.

I generally don’t use toolbars at all - I don’t like how much space they take up and prefer to visit an actual website to do my searching - but judging by how much time my friend Aaron spends at the UBC library website for his coursework, I can see how this would be a huge timesaver for students.

Actually, the whole U of Winnipeg library site is pretty sweet. They’ve got a Flickr widget featuring random slides from their “Library Tour” slideshow, CBC headlines via RSS, and they’re using a blog to publish news, events, and new titles.

Serious props to the U of W library team!

Well, Steve beat me to blogging about the new Google Co-Op Custom Search Engine, but I couldn’t let that stop me. Needless to say, I am pretty stoked. I’m not sure if anything will compare to the day that I discovered Rollyo, but this was pretty exciting.

Rollyo had been out for about five months when I heard about it - five months too many, if you ask me! The first time I visited the site, I quickly rolled my own vertical search comprised of the websites of big BC law firms and some of the major ones from across the country. (When I say quickly, I really mean it. All you do is paste in a bunch of URLs and you’re more or less good to go.)

This particular “roll” is invaluable for searching only these sources for a couple reasons, the biggest ones being:

• Simplifies searching for an “expert” in a particular practice
• Cuts through irrelevant sources to find very current (and usually authoritative) commentary on new legislation, caselaw, etc., especially when only results from our jurisdiction(s) are desired
• (I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but…) finding out what topics other law firms/lawyers are writing about is a breeze

I use Rollyo probably once a week to do one of those searches. Eager to see how it stands up to Rollyo, I created an identical engine in Google Co-Op CSE and ran a few test searches. The results? Not surprisingly, they were comparable.

When I ran a search for “Apology Act”, Google beat Rollyo by one hit. On a search for “tax on legal services”, Rollyo beat Google by one hit. Tests of more complex searches yielded different results, though neither set was clearly better or worse than the other. Since Rollyo is powered by Yahoo and Feedster, and Google Co-Op CSE is powered by, well, Google, it’s only natural that that results will differ.

Just as it’s a good habit to use more than one search engine, I think applying the same logic to a vertical searches powered by different engines is probably a good idea, too.

By the way, if you’re not scanning headlines at the Official Google Blog, I recommend checking it out. There’s a certain amount of fluff on there, but there’s a lot of good stuff too. The posts are made by the people who work there, so even if it is a little Kool Aid-y, it’s cool to read the description of a project written by someone who actually worked on it.

Some interesting things I saw this weekend:

Spam: The Documentary aired on the Ceeb’s “The Lens”, a program that features Canadian independent filmmakers’ documentaries. I missed the first few minutes of the film, but what I saw opened my eyes. I mean, obviously, spam is a problem: they’re always on about enacting laws to combat it, so it’s got to be a bigger deal than just how annoyed I get by it magically multiplying inside the fertile breeding ground of my Gmail spam folder. (Although you’ve got to love the spam recipes that appear as sponsored links - who could resist savory spam crescents or vineyard spam salad?)

I learned about Spamhaus, an international non-profit team of spamfighters. They track down spammers and publish information on them, and maintain a list of spam rings that have been terminated by at least three ISPs (Register of Known Spam Operations). This information, along with their database of spam IP addresses, helps ISPs to identify and get rid of spammers who are already on their networks and keep more from getting on. According to the Spamhaus website, 80% of spam comes from 200 known operations. Yuck.

Investigatory journalism high jinks ensue as the documentarian tries out products he’s bought from spam, and buys a “Father of Spam” trophy for Gary Thurek. The documentary was both entertaining and informative - watch it if you get the chance!

Douglas Coupland’s Blackberry Pearl ad
I noticed it in Maclean’s - the issue with the cover story that proclaims “THE INTERNET SUCKS”. A quick visit to the Blackberry Pearl website (www.blackberrypearl.com>Life>Douglas Coupland) reveals more on Doug’s use of the smartphone. At first, I was disgusted. And then I thought to myself that it’s actually perfect. Reviewers love to say that Coupland “has his finger on the pulse of a generation” and to some extent, they’re right, so the fact that he’s hawking one of the hottest toys around is completely fitting. Good on him.

Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival
Aaron surprised me with tickets to Memory Lane, a program that featured readings and discussion with four authors who’ve recently published memoirs. All the authors were great, but I especially enjoyed Ryan Knighton’s reading, which was actually a memorization. Knighton is blind, teaches writing at Cap College, and is really funny. His new memoir, Cockeyed, is about going blind. His other books look pretty good too, and the pulp page has props from Don McKellar and Christian Bok. Sweet.

I listen to Z95 in the morning while I’m getting ready for work. For me, one of the more entertaining segments is Battle of the Sexes - not because I really care who comes out looking smarter, but because it’s interesting which questions they think will be challenging for each sex. The guys get questions about soap operas, cosmetics, and baby products. The ladies get questions about cars, sports, and Maxim magazine (the questions usually remind me of the classic SNL sketch Food, Sex, or Cars, but I digress). The other day, they asked the woman this question:

Where would you find an RSS feed?

a) In an army mess hall

b) On a farm

c) On the internet

I was rooting for her, really I was, but perhaps not surprisingly, she chose the wrong answer. I think she chose “mess hall”. Anyway, whether or not the ladies clean up on those tech questions, RSS is creeping is slowly but surely making its way into the vernacular.

Knowing that in coming weeks, my boss and I are holding several hands-on RSS workshops for the members of our firm, our research lawyer handed me a copy of the crappy commuter daily 24 Hours with the Buzz Bishop column circled. The headline read “Tap into the news feed” and he pointed out that it was about RSS, which made our upcoming sessions quite timely.

Fortunately, I didn’t get too out of hand with the mocking that anyone who admits to reading 24 Hours deserves, and actually read the column. Good thing, because lo and behold, ol’ Buzz was talking about about a service I’d never heard of, called Feedwhip. Feedwhip allows you to generate makeshift feeds for sites that don’t offer RSS. I did a little looking digging and found out that Feedwhip has been around for quite a while. I’ve set up a couple feeds to see how they compare to monitoring from WatchThatPage, which I’m fond of but would love to get out of my inbox. We’ll see how Feedwhip works - I’ll report back on that in a few days.

In other RSS news, I came across Jason Eiseman’s RSS Tutorials for Law Librarians (although as Jason says, they’re not limited to law librarians - they’d be helpful to anyone starting out with RSS). We watched them today, as inspiration for our upcoming sessions, and they’re extremely well done. Way to go, Jason!