Ballad in Plain E

One blog I’ve been reading a lot lately is Meredith Farkas’s “Information Wants to be Free“. She does a great job of bringing to light what other library bloggers are talking about, which is great for me, since I discovered long ago that I can’t possibly read all the blogs I’d like to read. What got me hooked on her blog was a very thoughtful response to a Library Revolution post on overachievers, underachievers, and motivation – which had me thinking about the debate all day. That’s the sign of a great blog! Meredith seems to be level-headed with a good sense of humour, and her writing is a pleasure to read.

In today’s post, she describes a “Library 2.0 idea adoption spectrum” that she and a colleague devised, which ranges from “Twopointopians” (awesome term apparently coined by Annoyed Librarian) to “Alienated”. It was an interesting exercise to determine where I fit into the spectrum. According to Meredith,

“I think most people who are into this stuff, me included, fall into the “Pragmatists” category. We are big technology fans, but we understand that these tools should only be used in libraries to fill needs. We realize that not all of our patrons are tech-savvy and that many of them have needs that can’t be filled by 2.0 technologies. We know that any time we focus on a 2.0 technology, we take time and resources away from something else, so we must carefully prioritize our technology use at work. Pragmatists manage to be both excited and skeptical.”

[my emphasis]

I guess I must be a pragmatist, but I suspect I may be headed towards becoming a grazer, because my excitement is wearing thin. Some days, I think I’ll scream if I read about one more new 2.0 application – library-related or not. I think it’s silly that it even needs a name anymore, which I guess it why I find the term “Library 2.0″ so ridiculous. For me, it comes down to one main thing. Either an application is useful, or it is not. I like Meredith’s assessment of why some uses of new technologies work, and others don’t:

“And a lot of the initial things I tried to implement failed. Why? Because I put the tool before the need, I didn’t consider the fact that my colleagues may not want to use these tools, and I didn’t really consider the maintenance burden these tools have.

…

[W]e’ve been successfully providing IM reference now since January 2006. But it’s mainly because it was done right, putting the need before the tool.”

[my emphasis]

Another aspect that comes into play here, I think, must be a generational divide. Had these new sorts of user-generated, AJAXy applications not been given a name and given the cool factor, I don’t think anyone my age (26) would have batted an eye. For my generation, “the next thing” has always been an inherent feature of the internet. I think when it comes to the internet, “progress” is a neutral descriptor – it’s just time marching on. The internet isn’t necessarily improving with all these allegedly 2.0 applications.

It just occurred to me, right now, that for me, keeping up with changes in web technologies has never really been “keeping up”–it’s just been the way it’s always been: finding out about new things, trying them out, using them if they’re good, and not if they’re bad. Maybe I’m biased because I’m the kind of person who enjoys reading about this sort of stuff — I know that not everyone does. Maybe for them, keeping up is an active effort.

It’s like this: when I was in high school, I had a couple of Tripod and Geocities homepages dedicated to assorted musicians and actors (and okay, yes, some bad teen poetry). In college, I had a Livejournal. Now in my working life, I have this blog. It’s just one thing replacing the other. But did people 20 years older than me have this experience? Or are they now looking at the internet with all these crazy things you can do and feeling totally overwhelmed – and either thinking “I have to master every single thing out there” or conversely, “I got along fine for ages without these, so why should I bother?”. I don’t know – I’m just speculating. Maybe what I’m wondering is whether you would find these types of “Library 2.0 – boon or bane?” discussions at all in a strictly under-30 set? It’s just interesting to ponder.

I know I’m all over the place here. I’m just trying to figure out where I stand in all of this. I guess I’m also a little worried that my growing wariness of this hype is going to turn me off of the internet–and that would probably not be good for my career. I’m already a curmudgeon in many other aspects of my life–and work is one area where I can’t afford to be!

Anyway, thanks, Meredith, for giving me a lot to think about and the fodder to break out of my blogging rut!

My colleague Steve Matthews, who is the president of VALL this year, recently left Clark Wilson, the law firm where he’d been the Director of Knowledge Services for almost ten years. He’s just launched a new company called Stem Legal, which helps law firms develop and deploy web marketing strategies. And of course, he’s writing a blog to go along with it: Law Firm Web Strategy.

If Steve’s first blog, Vancouver Law Librarian Blog, is anything to go by, Law Firm Web Strategy will be a stellar resource, too. He’s already got some good posts up on managing web properties and law firm website demographics.

While I think the Vancouver law library community will feel somewhat at a loss with Steve not being “one of us” anymore, his drive and leadership in his VALL position will continue to inspire and motivate us. Steve was one of the first people who encouraged me to start a blog, and has been a great informal mentor to many of us library techs who are passionate about technology.

New and future Stem Legal clients are luckier and wiser than they know. I’m so excited for Steve, and wish him success and fulfillment in his new venture!

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.