I have a new post up on ALA Techsource regarding my take on the Kindle, and what I think of it after living with it for 6 months.
Click on over and take a look, and leave a comment, especially if you have a Kindle as well!
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Category: Media
So in a pretty convoluted story with a straightforward beginning, Amazon has announced that it will be purchasing the social book network Shelfari. Just last month, Amazon also purchased AbeBooks…which is a minority investor in LibraryThing.
*boggle*
So Amazon buys a competitor to a service that they, in effect, already own part of. I can see them wanting Shelfari for the interface, especially as part of a “next generation” Kindle device. But Shelfari doesn’t have much else for Amazon to want, honestly…Shelfari relies on the Amazon book data to begin with, so they don’t have any data that will improve Amazon in any way (except the little bit of social data that can be scraped from the site).
There’s a long discussion about this over on LibraryThing, where Tim is talking the thing out in his open and transparent style. I don’t think this is going to hurt LibraryThing at all…they have better book data, for one, and Amazon now has to fit Shelfari into its systems, which will take a looooong time.
Has anyone seen a value given for the Shelfari acquisition? I’m curious what Amazon paid for them.
Here’s hoping this doesn’t cause Tim too many sleepless nights.
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iPhone template for WP
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.
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UTC Library video
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.
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.
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BIGWIG Showcase – Video 2.0
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.
Over the weekend, I was honored to participate in the very first LibraryThing podcast. Tim really pushed me a bit, and I had to think on my feet (not very well, to be fair, but lmk what you think).
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George Carlin
Resquiat in Pace, George. The world was better for you being in it.
If I have to tell you this is NSFW, you don’t know much about George Carlin.