(CNN) — A lone gunman is dead after police said he killed at least 21 people Monday during twin shootings on the Virginia Tech campus — the worst school shooting incident in U.S. history.
As I’m sitting here at Computers in Libraries, I’m wondering if there are librarians here from V Tech, and how they can possibly continue to be here with this happening on their campus. I don’t know how I would deal hearing something like this about UTC from afar.
Presentation and handouts available at librarian.net
Firefox is open source, standards, compliant, cross platform
NB: Jessamyn is a great speaker…you can get some from the presentation, but she’s great in person
Demos how to install a Firefox add on: Google Favicon
Adding a keyword to a search field, allowing you to search the form/site from the address bar using only a keyword
Greasemonkey! Does as sorts of fun scripty stuff including removing ads and pressing buttons for you.
Our heirarchical organizations may not survive the web 2.0/library 2.0 shift.
2.0 tech is changing the way we think about when we work, where we work, and how we work
We have become more distributed in our tools, more collaborative, etc…but not in our expectations or work hours.
Organizational change: nothing is more difficult. it is fundamentally about making choices and changes, and both are scary
Org. Structure
Stability signals staleness and death
Clarity dissolves conflict
Authority and power is increasingly associated with the people that know and understand the 2.0 principles
2.0 Leadership
Make the invisible, visible
Make the intangible, tangible
Most of the time, most of the people do what they do best.
Lee Raine from the Pew Internet & American Life Project
Web 2.0
Asked by the Pew American Life to not advocate for anything…simply collect information.
“I adore librarians”
What is web 2.0? Show’s the “Ask a Ninja” Podcast episode. “That is web 2.0”
6 Hallmarks of Web 2.0 that Matter to Libraries
1. The Internet has become the computer
2. More than half of teenagers have profiles on social sites like MySpace or Facebook: The social comes to the virtual.
3. Even more internet users are accessin the content created by others
4. Many are sharing what they know and what they feel online and that is building conversation and communities
5. People are sharing their expertise and resources online
6. Online Americans are customizing their online experience
5 issues libraries must struggle to address
I got fed up with trying to keep fixing the theme I had, so I decided to go ahead and move to a new one. It’s very different, but I hope that everyone likes it. This is a variant of Sunburn, heavily modified to my liking by a bunch of spacing adjustments, changing the sidebar to be absolutely positioned and swapping in a bunch of content, and adding my “pulse” to the header/footer.
So: whatcha think?
Seems that something in my adding Podpress to the blog to try and handle the previous post led to my right sidebar going wonky.
I’ll fix tomorrow. I’m tired now.
Here is the Quicktime of my presentation from last night to the Chattanooga Area Library Association on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0. While a small crowd, they were very interested in what we’re doing at MPOW to try and move ourselves into a more 2.0 mindset and process.
Thanks to Jessamyn, from whom I borrowed the kitty scared image and the general “Don’t fear the user” concept. I briefly considered just using her slideshow and talking over it, because she puts things together so well.
Warning: this is the full-size QT, so be warned.
Next week I’ll be heading out to Crystal City, VA to attend CiL 2007. It’s the first conference in many moons that I don’t have a presentation or other formal commitment to attend. This means, of course, that I have completely overbooked my time in sessions, because there is so damn much good stuff. Plus, I’ll get to catch up with lots of good friends.
But, if you are attending, and you want to catch up with me, take your pick as to calendar format:
BoingBoing reported today that the US Treasury Department has begun circulating a 250 page list of names of people who MIGHT BE related in some way to terrorism. Not that they are, or have been convicted, or charged with a crime or any of the things that due process might bring. Just a list of thousands of names (1955 names of individuals, by my count, but many more businesses) that, according to BoingBoing:
If your name could conceivably be bent to fit that list, get ready to spend a long, hard time convincing some terrified bureaucrat that you’re not actually Saddam Hussein’s deposed lieutenant, snuck into America to buy a Toyota.
As the Washington Post describes:
Yet anyone who does business with a person or group on the list risks penalties of up to $10 million and 10 to 30 years in prison, a powerful incentive for businesses to comply. The law’s scope is so broad and guidance so limited that some businesses would rather deny a transaction than risk criminal penalties, the report finds.
“The law is ridiculous,” said Tom Hudson, a lawyer in Hanover, Md., who advises car dealers to use the list to avoid penalties. “It prohibits anyone from doing business with anyone who’s on the list. It does not have a minimum dollar amount. . . . The local deli, if it sells a sandwich to someone whose name appears on the list, has violated the law.”
Bruce Schneier, as always, chimes in with some reason:
This is the same problem as the no-fly list, only in a larger context. And it’s no way to combat terrorism. Thankfully, many businesses don’t know to check this list and people whose names are similar to suspected terrorists’ can still lead mostly normal lives. But the trend here is not good.
Thankfully, the Treasury has put the list (dubbed in typical government jargon-talk as the Specially Designated Nationals list) online in multiple formats. So I grabbed it, and started looking. The list of individual names seemed odd to me as I started reading them, so I decided to do what I always do when I want to visualize a text list…off to TagCrowd!
This cloud is just the top 100 names of individuals from the SDN list…take the names, do a frequency count, rank the top 100, and size them according to number of times they appear.
So what do we notice here? The first thing I noticed was the overwhelming number of Spanish/Hispanic/Latino names, as compared to, oh….Iraqi. You know, the people with whom we are at war.
Anyone have any guesses as to why there are so many Hispanic names listed? After initially being boggled and outraged at the way the list is being used, now I’m just confused by the contents of it.
The last part of my day was spent whipping up a couple of newspaper ads for the Student newspaper here on campus, the Echo. Since I’m pretty happy with them, I thought I’d share:
The survey is for faculty and students here on campus, so don’t go running trying to win the iPod, gang. 🙂