Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is 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 IT 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 AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.
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.
Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.
Just added the WPTouch template to Pattern Recognition, and Brand New World…very, very nice implementation, and really easy to use. Now checking out BlipIT, from the same group…blip.tv mobile!
Anyway, those of you with iPhones/iPod Touch…check it out, and let me know what you think. I also added an iPhone favicon, so if you add me to your homepage you should get a custom icon for both blogs. I’ll be doing this for LITABlog soon, I think.
Yet another Web 2.0 video site, this one with the Twitter-like limitation of only 12 second per video: 12seconds.tv.
Take a look at the Fall 2008 UTC Library video that we’ll be pushing out to students and new faculty this Fall. Created by a grad student, now adjunct professor, at UTC, Justin Lewis, with direction from me (who basically just said things like “Make it cool. Slow that down”). The vision was all his. I think it came out remarkably cool.
This is a test post from my iPhone, using the new wordpress app. So far very slick…have four blogs set up in it already!
How broken is copyright in the US? So broken that if you look at two different books, both published by the same publisher (Dodd, Mead & Co.), in the same year (1940), both with copyright notices, and neither with a copyright renewal…one is currently protected by copyright, and the other is in the public domain.
An amazing article by Peter B. Hirtle entitled Copyright Renewal, Copyright Restoration, and the Difficulty of Determining Copyright Status outlines this case, and others that are equally frustrating. Fascinating stuff, and shows how truly broken intellectual property laws are in the current market, with the necessity of international reciprocation and ever-increasing ridiculous time limits. Not to mention that the very model is now shattered with the digital revolution…even without the digital, copyright needs an overhaul. With it? It needs cleansed with fire.
Pick a random book in your library that was published between 1923 and 1964, and check this chart, and see if you can tell if it’s still protected. Now multiply that by a few ten million books, and see what kind of crazy legal situation our legislatures have gotten us into.
WordPress 2.6 was just released…if you’re interested in the details, here’s a video overview:
A really interesting spam hack popped onto my radar today. Here’s the post from the LITABlog, as seen in browser:
Here’s the bottom of the post. Nothing unusual, right?
Here’s the same post in Google Reader:
Spamolicious! Where the hell did all that come from? From this little piece of code in the post:
A hidden bit of code in the bottom of the post. I hadn’t seen this before, but Joshua M. Neff told me it happened to him as well. In the comments there was a link to the wordpress developer’s blog about a similar issue…but not an identical issue. I don’t think this is necessarily a SQL injection issue.
So: anyone have any thoughts? How did that code get put into an existing post? LITABlog is running the latest version of WordPress, so it’s not that. I don’t see any more of them, but I won’t unless I look through the code manually or whip up some SQL-fu that greps for the hidden css string. Which I will do if I must, but I thought maybe someone out there had a better idea. 🙂
To say that I am disappointed in both AT&T and Apple would be putting it mildly. I understand the need to pump up anticipation, as well as moderate supply in order to maintain a certain marketing illusion for the 3G, but the experience of standing in line was so remarkably poorly managed that I find it hard to believe that AT&T has any idea what dealing with customers should be like. They clearly didn’t exhibit any customer service skills on Friday, July 11 during the global launch of the iPhone 3G.
First off: You know how many iPhones you have, and what type. The proper way to handle the line is to print up vouchers for the available stock, walk the line asking people what type they are planning on buying, and give them a voucher. You can tell people without a voucher to come back in the afternoon and place an order…but there is no excuse for letting people stand in line for 3 hours when you know that they aren’t going to be able to buy the thing they are in line for. I’m talking to you, AT&T of Chattanooga: big fat failwhale for your customer service! The minute that your exclusive contract is up with Apple, expect people to bail with their phones like mad…way to think short term.
The BIGWIG Social Software Showcase got a very nice writeup in a recent Library Journal Insider blog post by Josh Hadro. Josh said:
In stark contrast to the LITA Top Tech Trends was the fun and functional chaos of the LITA BIGWIG Social Software Showcase. Though the listeners numbered an order of magnitude fewer, the room hummed with the buzz of their excitement, mounting to a near frenzy following BIGWIG chair Jason Griffey’s introduction when the audience’s attention was released into the wilds of small group discussions. This was the infectious frenzy of mostly librarian associates and assistants genuinely eager to identify new ideas, wrap their brains around the source code, and carry it home with them to bolster their own library’s services. This was a beautiful thing.
Nice! He picked up as well on the difficulty of scaling the Showcase (which we’re talking about already) and the fact that everything we discussed is up online (including the recorded live stream, up on the Showcase page now).
Thanks, Josh, for such a great writeup…glad you enjoyed it.
My presentation for the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase on what I called Video 2.0, all about the new video sites and how they change media as we know it. The presentation turned out really well…let me know what you guys think.
