….I’m giving a presentation called Blogs and Wikis: One of these words is English for MTSU and their 2005 IT Conference. Wish me luck! Oh, and check the blog out if you’re curious about the conference. At least, I hope the blog gets a workout…we’ll see. This is all new for MTSU.
Last night, our Tarheels beat Michigan State to move into the NCAA finals!
Mitch passed away a couple of days ago, but I hadn’t had a chance to talk about it yet. He was a fabulous comedian, and I feel sad that I just discovered his stuff months ago. Another brilliant mind gone away due to heroin. How many comedians have we lost to that?
Quick roundup of the geek April Fool’s tradition for the year…posting fake articles/sites.
Bit of a buzz around the wordpress forums and such today regarding Matt Mullenweg (the originator of WordPress) and his psuedo-ethical adword scheme to help pay for wordpress hosting. From the waxy.org link above:
I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting at least 120,000 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here’s a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Here’s an example of some results in MSN.)
Ok, so…scamming the adwords in google seems a tad slimy, but understandable. Hiding the adwords articles with odd CSS positioning tricks lends even more oddity to the issue.
As someone on the waxy thread says…why didn’t he just do a straightforward ad-words column on the page? WordPress.org has enough traffic to make that worth his time, I would think.
In any case, we’ll see what Matt has to say when he returns from Italy.
EDIT: Google and Yahoo have both already removed these from their results. MSN still lists them, and here’s a direct link showing what Matt did. Load the page, then view: source and check the last DIV.
Just days after Jessamyn’s post regarding DRM, my good friend Catherine emails me this DRM Rights statement from an e-book that she was helping a patron with.
———————————————————–
Adsorption: Theory, Modeling, and Analysis. By: Jozsef Toth
File Size: 6825KB
Published: 05/10/2002
E-ISBN: 0824744497DRM Rights:
Copy 25 selections every 1 day(s)
Print 25 pages every 1 day(s)
Reading aloud allowed
Book expires 150 day(s) after download
Note that Adobe eBooks cannot be shared.
———————————————————–
I think the insanity speaks for itself. Oh how I hate thee, DRM…stupid, stupid media companies. I know that eventually the reasonable, intelligent media will overcome the stupid, dinosaur media, but I’m no longer confident it will happen in my lifetime. DRM does nothing to stop theft of IP, nor to delay or dissuade those who would traffic in media in infringing ways. It only prevents the average user from using media in the ways they wish.
I had a conversation with my good friend Barron just the other day about why it was that he couldn’t listen to his Velvet Revolver album on his shiny new iPod. After I explained to him that in order to do so he would have to break the law, his response was basically: That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
Indeed it is.
Note: I am giving explicit permission for the reading aloud of this post.
I just discovered this a few days ago, but Audible has downloadable files of the Library of Congress Digital Future series. If you have a music player that supports audible, these are free downloads! I listened to Lessig today, and have Brewster Kahle on tap for my monday drive to work. Tons of good info here, and again…it’s free.
In a recent interview, Cory Doctorow discussed ontology, so I feel ok about pulling out some philosophy for this particular discussion.
One of the thoughts that’s been rattling around in my head lately is for an article related to the issues that librarians have with digital sources, specifically things like Wikipedia. The cry of most librarians is that digital sources (things like wikis, webpages, blogs) have no authority, no one standing behind them that lends them credence. Wikis are created by the masses, and can often be changed by anyone, and so, the argument goes, will simply devolve into the least common denominator of information.
But that assumes that knowledge is best judged by it’s origins, which is a highly debatable position. My favored epistemological position is a coherence theory of knowledge that is grounded in ontological realism. Knowledge (or Truth, as philosophers like to talk about it) is judged real when it is supported by a network of like facts. That is, if I were to attempt to convince people that I was 25 years old (by posting it on my website, putting an entry into the Wikipedia, etc…) that would only last so long as the surrounding pieces of knowledge weren’t known (no one checked my birth certificate, no one asked my mom, or many other ways of checking my claim). As soon as you start checking the coherence of my statement with other statements, it falls apart (and is thus now neither Truth nor Knowledge).
This speaks to basic information literacy skills. Blindly trusting one source, even if that source is the Oxford Dictionary of Biography is probably not a good idea, and why authority would naturally lend itself to information evaluation as a central criterion has always been beyond me. A criterion, certainly, but no more or less important than the other things surrounding the positited knowledge.
At some point all of this will come out in a nice academic article relating coherence theory to information evaluation as it pertains to reference work and library instruction. But that will take work and research. So for now, just the basic idea, captured and (hopefully) commented on.
I must have this shirt.
Edit: Boooo..why is my animated gif not animating?
Edit^2: ahhhh…thanks guys. Browser issue, not gif issue.