Very cool news report from the future, chronicling the rise of our ‘net overlords, and the subsequent social issues. Choose a mirror:
WARNING: Flash needed.
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Author: griffey
Jason Griffey was most recently the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he worked to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise was useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of Library IT and a tenured professor at the University of TN at Chattanooga.
Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently a chapter in Library 2035 - Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries by Rowman & Littlefield. His latest full-length work Standards - Essential Knowledge, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, was published by MIT Press in March 2025.
He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.
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So very cool
From BoingBoing, I so want one of these. I don’t even wear a watch, but I’d make an exception for any one of these:
From TokyoFlash, home of incredibly cool watches from Japan. Who knew such watches even existed? For reference, $1US = roughly 100 Yen….so you’re looking at from just over $100 to nearly $200 depending. That’s nuts, but they are beautiful.
So I was riding in to work, listening to a little Metallica, and noticed that James stole lyrics from himself in order to write the theme to their latest album, St. Anger. I give you:
Lyrics from Damage, Inc., off the album Master of Puppets (1986)
Fuck it all and fucking no regrets
Never happy ending on these dark sets
Lyrics from St. Anger, off the album St. Anger (2003)
Fuck it all and fuckin’ no regrets
I hit the lights on these dark sets
Have no idea why I only just noticed that. Or even why it is particularly interesting. 🙂
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Exciting news
As of last night, I’m officially a moderator for Ourmedia.org, the new collaboration between the Internet Archive, Bryght, Creative Commons, Socialtext, and TuCows (among possible others). I’ll be helping them identify copyright/fair use issues in uploaded content, and contact users and such regarding those issues.
I don’t know if I can adequately express my excitement at helping out with such an ambitious project! With an advisory board composed of the biggest names in digital IP and online culture (Lessig, B0yle, Kahle, Rheingold, Gillmor, Searls) this is going to be huge.
I’ll blog more as I find out more about my role.
Found this on my trek around the intarweb today…an absolutely insane resource for 622 different music videos. I’m especially fond of the Perfect Circle video for Counting Bodies Like Sheep.
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Eating the ice cream…
Had a really interesting weekend, with more play than work. Friday was poetry night with the Spanish Club at Sewanee, where Betsy read some wonderful stuff by latino/chicano/puertoriqueno/ poets, while I read a couple of pieces from Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is a person that doesn’t get enough credit in the library world (other than the ubiquitous quote in all libraries “I have always imagined that heaven is a type of library”). He invented the an idealized, infinite library (The Library of Babel) that has been a very influential metaphor in literary circles. In addition, of course, he was a librarian at the National Library of Argentina.
The title of the entry is from one of his poems, where he opines “I’ll eat more ice cream, and less beans” in thinking on how he would change his life. This weekend was, as I said, all about ice cream.
Saturday we had drinks with friends Andrea and Will, and then more snacks and discussion with Ruth, Jason, and Nicky. Sunday we spent the afternoon on Tim’s Ford lake at Angela and Paul’s house, with an international crowd of Spaniards, Canadians, Columbians, and Americans. With cava flowing, amazing food, and perfect weather…well, it was the first of what I’m hoping is many wonderful spring days.
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More Tarheel Celebration pics
More pics from the madness on Franklin Street, this time from Fred.
And even MORE pics. I’m especially fond of this one (you crazy kids!). Via Justinsomnia.
EDIT: and yet even more pics. I love all of these! Makes me wish that I was still at SILS so that I could have taken part in the celebration.
Here’s my post from the MTSU IT Conference blog, announcing the audio download of my blog presentation. Listen at your own risk.
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I’ve normalized the audio of my blog presentation at MTSU, and uploaded it as an MP3, available here (WARNING: ~ 40 Meg MP3). It’s still too big for an MP3 (the OGG is only 17 megs) but I’m not sure what I should do to optimize it. Couple of quick notes on the audio:
After listening to it again, looks like some of the numbers I came up with were a bit off, and I thought I should correct them here:
- Actual number of articles in wikipedia: 518000, which turns out to be just about 6 times the amount in Britannica, not 5 as I claimed.
- Technorati lists, at the time of the presentation, 7.8 million blogs. I rounded up to 8 million during the talk…no harm there, I think.
- I claimed that there were more than 45 languages represented in the Wikipedia. While technically correct, the number of active languages is over 90.
More corrections if I find them. Also available in Ogg Vorbis, for those that prefer that format.
EDIT: One of the blogs & wikis attendees used the blog that we created during the presentation to take notes on the presentation itself. How very meta!!
This audio is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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Testing new look
I ask for your patience…I’ve been looking for a 3-column layout that I liked for awhile now, and I’m partial to this Journalized-Blue template. Going to take some work customizing it, but we’ll see how it goes.
EDIT: So…any thoughts? I’m going to be tweaking the colors for a bit, I think…not sure if I want to go back to the brighter orange/crimson look from long ago, or stick with the muted black/blue look I’ve got now. Reasons I changed:
- I had been manually dealing with my links, and wanted to swap to the native WP link handler.
- Wanted a mini-blog area where I could do Justin-like Neatlinks.
- Wanted a better integration of Pages links.
- 3 Columns gives me more room for experimenting with sidebar tools.
- Can isolate metablog content, and link content in seperate bars.
Things I’d like: anyone out there know how I can get the content div to automagically size images to fit? Any thoughts on the new look? Better? Worse? Should I go back?
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Color me surprised
Walt Crawford has a blog! Welcome to the blogosphere, Walt…I’ve been a reader of Cites & Insights for some time now, and (like many, many others, evidently) asked you at one point about why you weren’t blogging. Now that you are, I look forward to adding you to my daily reading list.