Tag: google

Categories
Digital Culture Personal Writing

Writing, ownership, and blogging

I don’t remember the last time that I went an entire month without writing something here. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that my blogging here at Pattern Recognition has suffered as a results of many things. Some of those reasons are simple;: I’ve got other platforms that I’m using now, including other social networks (Twitter, Google+, Friendfeed, Tumblr) and other blogs (ALA Techsource and American Libraries’ Perpetual Beta). I use some of these because they are easy, some because I like the conversations/community, and some because they pay me.

What I don’t like is that my writing, thoughts, interests…the comprehensive set of my online self, really…are distributed and scattered. I was ok with it for a long time, and I’m becoming very much not ok with it anymore. In the past, I’ve dabbled with pulling things from those other networks back here, but that doesn’t actually bring any of the reasons I use them here….it just brings the content. Which isn’t always what it’s about.

When I started writing here at PatRec back in 2003, none of those other networks even existed. It’s possible that if I were to start writing online these days, I wouldn’t even think of hosting my own blog, and one of the possibilities is that it’s time to let PatRec die a natural death. It may be that a distributed presence is the future of personhood on the ‘net….except I don’t think that’s true. I believe strongly, more than ever, that it’s important to own and control your own words, both in presentation and in regards to copyright/legal control. So I’m confronted with this tension: I like the tools that I don’t own, but I want to own the stuff I make with those tools.

I’ve been thinking a LOT about this. And I’m going to start experimenting with some ways to change things, starting with a post that I’m working on now about iCloud and Lion and the future of the filesystem. I would love to start a conversation about this, and see how others are dealing with this tension. Because I think I’m going to start reeling things in, reducing my contributions to other channels, and try to re-center my online presence.

Categories
Digital Culture Gadgets Technology

Google ChromeOS Cr-48 Review

Cr-48

I ended up writing about 2000 words over at Perpetual Beta on my experience with the Google ChromeOS Cr-48 laptop thus far, and see no reason to duplicate all that info here at PatRec. Here’s the review, linked up in 5 parts:

Categories
ALA Books Perpetual Beta

Contest over at Perpetual Beta

Just in case you follow me here, but not over at my American Libraries blog, Perpetual Beta: I’m holding a contest where I am giving away a copy of my newest book, Mobile Technology & Libraries. All you have to do is create a Google Search Story about libraries, and post it in the comments over at PB.

Free book, people! Show me your creativity!

Categories
ACRL ALA presentation

Wave upon Wave

In a little more than a week, on March 2nd, I’ll be doing an online webinar for ACRL entitled Wave upon Wave: Navigating the New Communication. The goal is to explore and explain Google Wave, and look at use cases for libraries. Wave lost a lot of luster immediately after the launch, but I still think there’s a ton of promise and potential there. Here’s the learning outcomes that we’ll be trying to get to:

Participants in this webcast will come away with an understanding of the basic functionality of Google Wave. As well, they should be able to envision multiple communicative uses for Wave within their library, including both internal and external communications.

We’ll probably also talk a bit about Buzz, and the ways in which the various Google properties relate to one another. I hope to see you there!

Categories
Books Legal Issues Media

Shut up and get out of the way

Google, on the Book Settlement, from arstechnica:

“Approval of the settlement will open the virtual doors to the greatest library in history, without costing authors a dime they now receive or are likely to receive if the settlement is not approved,” Google’s filing reads. “Nor does anyone seriously dispute, though few objectors admit, that to deny the settlement will keep those library doors locked while inviting costly, fragmented litigation that could clog dockets around the country for years.”

Or, in other words: Shut up, and get out of the way.

Categories
Apple Gadgets Media

Is this new on the iPhone?

I’ve been testing a new Google Reader app over the last few days called Reeder, and noticed a UI piece that I hadn’t seen before on the iPhone. Check these pics:

Reeder Reeder

On the first one, check the small dot in the upper right. If you swipe it, it folds to the left and shows the text on the second pic. Swipe back, and it goes back to the standard connectivity/time message. This is the first time I’ve ever seen an app take over the title bar…some make it go away, but this is the first I’ve seen with this behavior.

Are there any others that do something similar? It says something about the tyranny of the Apple UI guidelines that this shocked me so much.

Categories
Personal

Google Voice Mobile Browser edition

I didn’t actually expect my “Death of the App” trend to move this quickly, but seems like Google is determined to prove me right. đŸ™‚ Google says “we don’t need an app” to Apple, and provides nearly exactly the same functionality via HTML5.

Categories
ALA Writing

Google Explosion

I blogged over at ALA TechSource earlier this week about the explosion of Google services that happened in 2009, and picked out the top 3 or 4 that I think libraries should be watching. If you’re interested, I’d love to know what you think about Google’s growth, and how Libraries are keeping up.

Categories
Technology

Google Chrome OS on a Dell Mini 9

Google Chrome OS running on a Dell Mini 9.

Chrome OS on Dell Mini 9

Chrome OS on Dell Mini 9

It looks like most everything works (touchpad, including tap-to-click, sound, video at full rez)…except the wireless. Hardwired connectivity works fine, though. Maybe in an updated build they’ll add drivers for the mini 9 wireless.

Anyone else out there having success getting it running on a Dell Mini 9?

Categories
Digital Culture Media

Google Wave and Igor

For the BIGWIG Showcase this year, I talked about and put together a presentation on Google Wave, and what I think it will do to library services. One of the things I talked about was the ability for software robots to watch the Wave, and alter it in specific ways. Well, it looks like we’ve got our first bibliographic example of this, with Igor. Stew over at Flags & Lollipops has put together a robot that will watch a given Wave for mentions of citations, and then query and automagically fill in footnotes from PubMed, Connotea, or CiteULike (for now, I’m sure that Zotero and other coverage is easily possible).

I’ve got no idea how he did this, given that Wave isn’t public yet…but the demo shows what’s going to be possible with Wave. Take a look, and get ready….Wave might change everything. You may need to click through and enlarge the player to really see what’s going on.

Igor – a Google Wave robot to manage your references from Stew Fnl on Vimeo.

Igor is a robot for Google Wave written in Java and running on Google App Engine.

It allows users to pull in references from PubMed & personal libraries on Connotea or CiteULike by querying services with keywords that they supply inline with the article you’re writing.