Categories
libraryblogging Media Personal Writing

1500

This post is the 1500th here at Pattern Recognition, a monstrous amount of content by any measure, and easily the longest writing project I’ve been a part of. The first post to my blog was on February 10, 2003…2858 days ago. That’s better than 1 post every two days, or conversely, half a post a day, every day, for almost 8 years.  I decided to dig in and see how many words this thing has. The number left me gobsmacked: 189,299…at least 3 decently sized novels worth of text.

Blogging has been very, very kind to me over the last decade. From the early days when a post about my Master’s Paper was picked up by BoingBoing, to being asked by Karen Schneider to take part in a panel about library blogging at ALA Annual 2006 in New Orleans. Another member of that panel was Karen Coombs, and it was after that presentation that she and I were approached to write Library Blogging. Being introduced to Karen C. and working with her on the book was how I met Michelle Boule, and the three of us joined forces to create the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase in 2007. The vast majority of any success that I’ve had in my career, I owe in part to these three amazing librarians.

So happy 1500th post to this crazy blog. It’s been on BoingBoing 4 times, made the Digg homepage once, and has generally been the place I’ve gone to vent, to think, to critique, and to speak my mind on all sorts of things. My attention may have wandered to other pastures (thanks, ALA TechSource and Perpetual Beta) but the home for my writing is here.

Thanks to everyone who has ever read my writing, and thanks to those for whom Pattern Recognition was my introduction. I hope that I can write another of these at 2000, 2500, and 3000 posts.

Categories
libraryblogging presentation

Blogging Workshops at TxLA 2010

I had the pleasure of doing two different hands-on workshops at the Texas Library Association conference this past Thursday and Friday: one entitled Blogging Basics, and one called Extending Your Blog. Doing hands-on at events like this is remarkably difficult, as without very carefully setting up expectations with the participants, it can fall apart fast. I’m happy to say that I don’t think either of these fell apart…although I was personally happier with the Basics session. I way, way over-prepared for the Extending session, and the fact that we had 3-4 different blogging platforms in the room made giving instruction for something as simple as adding Google Analytics code to the template caused us to bog down more than I had hoped.

Overall, I got the feeling that people were happy with the information they got, which is the goal. I’d love to hear from anyone who was in the workshops in the comments, and I can’t wait to see the evaluations.

Here are the slides I used for each session. For the Extending Your Blog workshop, we only covered like 60% of the actual slide content, but I knew that would happen.

Categories
ALA libraryblogging Perpetual Beta

Perpetual Beta

Since this seems to be the week of announcements, I’ll announce my new experiment with American Libraries:

Perpetual Beta

From the introduction post:

This space will be a place where you will be able to find the very edge of new technologies, as well as tips and tricks about how you can do interesting things with existing technologies. I’m going to try and introduce technologies that libraries and librarians should be paying attention to, and at the same time give you tips and tricks to make better use of the technologies that you may already be playing with.

I”m very, very excited about being a part of a new part of American Libraries…this is the first official American Libraries blog that’s not written by staff members, and I’m thrilled that they are allowing me to be a part of it. Please check it out, and let me know over the next few months what you think!

Categories
libraryblogging

Online Information 2008

I had the pleasure of presenting for Elsevier at Online Information 2008 in London, England this past week, and have had some requests for my slides and such.

Here is my presentation, in a few different formats. Up first: video of the slides, with audio of me talking. This was recorded live, and the levels are a bit weird because of my walking to and away from the mic. I never really learned how to hold still and talk. You can listen here, or click through to Blip.tv and download the quicktime if you wish to listen to locally.

Next are just the slides, as a PDF from Slideshare. If you want to download the slides, this is the way to do it.

Categories
Books Digital Culture Images Legal Issues Library Issues libraryblogging Media Music

How broken is copyright in the US?

copyright symbolHow 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.

Categories
libraryblogging

WordPress 2.6 is out

WordPress 2.6 was just released…if you’re interested in the details, here’s a video overview:

https://videopress.com/v/mARhRBcT/fmt_std

Categories
Books Library Issues libraryblogging Media Personal

Library Blogging

IMG_4271.JPG

It’s here! It’s really here! For more news about the book, and general updates and such, visit the blog for the book: Library Blogging. I’ll talk more after I’ve had a chance to review it again, but so far it looks great.

For those going to ALA, Linworth Publishing is booth #2553, if you want to stop by and pick up a copy of the book.

Categories
libraryblogging

WordPress 2.5

For those that use WordPress, just a note about the upcoming 2.5 release: it rocks on toast. I’ve been using the Release Candidate 1 for WP2.5 for a week or so now, and the improvements in the admin interface are enormous. Better organization, more ajax interaction, just much, much smoother. Every time I’ve gone to do something in the last week I’ve been surprised at the ease.

This isn’t to say that you won’t have to update your plugins, as always…but WP2.5 finally has one-click automagic updating of plugins. This isn’t quite ready for primetime, but it’s very close.

I haven’t dug into the hardcore coding changes yet, but if the things I have noticed are indicative of the things I haven’t yet, I’m really looking forward to this release.

Categories
Books Library Issues libraryblogging Media

Library Blogging Tag Cloud

Library BloggingHere is a tag cloud for Library Blogging, the upcoming book from myself and Karen Coombs…this is the top 100 terms, ignoring common English words. If you’re wondering what the book is about, here’s a good sampling:

created at TagCrowd.com