Tag: Digital Culture

Lately I’m really digging Tag Clouds as information sources of their own, and not just a reflection of a source. For instance, check out the tag cloud for the President’s State of the Union from last night, and see what’s important at a glance…note the difference in frequency of “war” and “security” or “terrorists”.

Well, I’m an admitted fanboy, but holy christ on a pogostick, Apple has pulled one out this time.

The iPhone is far, far more than anyone expected.

I, like everyone else, will have to wait until June, but I want!

Linden Labs, the proprietors of the MMORPG Second Life have done what many thought impossible: they’ve released the code for Second Life via GPL.

This is beyond huge. I have difficulty explaining exactly what sort of watershed moment on the ‘net this is, frankly. Second Life was the first online environment where there were clear property rights….what you create, in game, is yours, and is treated more or less like physical property. This allowed the residents of Second Life to create a vibrant economy that paralleled the real world, instead of being solely virtual like so many other MMORPG’s (WoW, etc).

This release now allows anyone to set up a Second Life server, giving avatars options as to where to set up camp. It sets up a situation of unlimited emigration/immigration in-world, and the ability to hop from “state” to “state”. I can see a natural evolution now of different Second Life states that appeal to different user groups (instead of the current “areas” in the single state) which will allow for much more customization and play from the residents.

I wish I had more time to play around in SL. I’ve got an avatar that lives there, but just don’t have the time to devote that I’d like to fully explore the SL world. It’s an amazing place, though, and this move could very well make it the defacto next stage towards the metaverse.

Just to confirm a possible need: I’ve spent all day today trying to gather information on library conferences that might be of interest to me over the next year. This is surprisingly hard to do, especially when you don’t know what you’re looking for…google is amazing for search but terrible for browse, which is what I want to do. Entering something like “library conferences” is obviously useless, and I haven’t had any luck finding a good listing of stuff that librarians might be interested in attending. The ALA has a page, but that only lists ALA conferences (naturally). There’s a decent list over at Douglas Hasty’s page from Florida International University, but it only lists the biggies…no love for some of the small national conferences, and certainly nothing on local ones.

So, having found an information need, I seek to fill it. If I were to set up a wiki installation for this purpose, draft some basic organizational rules….would you use it? Would anyone out there help me seed the thing with information and links to the conferences that might otherwise go unnoticed?

Thoughts? I could have a wiki running within the week, I think. Would this help anyone plan the upcoming year’s travels?

So a friend from Immersion wrote it up for CRL News.

He asked to use a couple of my photos.

After a few back and forths with CRL because my photos are Creative Commons licensed, we came to an agreement to use them.

They asked how they wanted my credit given, and I sent them this blurb:

Photo by Jason Griffey, www.jasongriffey.net, reference and instructional technology librarian, UT-Chattanooga.

So they publish it, and guess what gets printed?

*sigh*

I’ve asked for a correction, but haven’t heard anything yet.

Police tasered a student at UCLA yesterday after he was unable to produce his Student ID card. The video above is raw but powerful, especially the reactions of the other students. Throughout the recording the audio is the most jarring part, with a female in the background screaming in fear while the police repeatedly ask the male student to “stand up” after they tased him. At 6:35 in the video, a student in a white tshirt is asking the police for an explanation while other officers are removing the tasered student from the building, and a police officer tells him to “Move over there.” After the student challenges him to explain why, the cops response is “Move back over there or you’re going to get tased too…”.

Wow.

From The Daily Bruin:

At around 11:30 p.m., CSOs asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately.

The CSOs left, returning minutes later, and police officers arrived to escort the student out. By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.

The student began to yell “get off me,” repeating himself several times.

It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition.

What I’m interested in, though, is…where are the librarians? All of the reaction shots and voices appear to be students…where is the librarian asking WTF the police are doing to their patron? That’s what I’d like to know. Anyone at UCLA have an answer?