Monthly Archives: January 2006

Minding our own business

We need no special issue of Techne to tell us that digital technology comes bundled with a host of political implications. We know that we’re newly vulnerable to tracking, that Google is noting our every search; we know that hackers and spies skulk through networks; we know that access, permissions, and digital rights policy is

Teen creators

The latest Pew Internet & American Life study of teenagers and their online habits (“Teen Content Creators and Consumers”) has been out since November, so in our speedy echosphere it qualifies as old news. But I see that this report is getting cited at ALA Midwinter, particularly during the OCLC-sponsored meditation on library “extreme makeovers.”

s.tag.gering towards

If the idea of faceless hoards organizing the web’s pro/con/fusion in absolutely uncontrolled fashion gets you hot, or bothered, or both, this article on folksonomy by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin in the latest issue of D-Lib is worth a look. It’s a nice rundown of behavior on those 900-pound gorillas of social tagging sites,

Monocles, manacles, and yes, The New Yorker

When I unwrapped The Complete New Yorker this Christmas, I was so grateful to my sister. Here was a complete, 80-year archive of one of the few magazines I’ve subscribed to and avidly read down through the years. There is something so irrationally satisfying in knowing that you have full access to a treasure-trove like

Patronage 2.0

My attention shifted today to a site guaranteed to warm — nay, torch — a librarian’s heart: Superpatron. This is a blog written by Edward Vielmetti, an energetic and tech-savvy patron of the forward-thinking Ann Arbor District Library. As outlined on Superpatron, the courtship went this way: he suggested that the library build RSS feeds

It’s about time

Something about the enormous endless novel … I can’t quite figure out its spell. There’s the comfort of inhabiting (or being inhabited) across seasons and locations. There’s the marvel at Sisyphean endeavor. There’s the irrational exuberance of pushing through to four-digit pages. Whatever the causes, I rarely get through a short story, but give me

Looming clouds

Last summer (yes it was once summer) I wrote a bit about TagCloud — a nifty folksonomy visualization tool. When the MetaMuser mentioned this app recently, I took another look and decided to see how websites I visit might cloud together. Which is a convoluted way of announcing ClayfoxClouds – wherein three groups of RSS