One of my all time favorite novels, recently re-read. Heinlein certainly had his problems…his portrayals of women especially should raise a few eyebrows, but the theme of the book is still a powerful one. One of the first pure sci-fi books I was able to convince Betsy to read, and it even won her over.
There’s a new wordpress plugin called Structured Blogging that I’m checking out, and that might be interesting to a few of you out there (esp. the librarians). The basic concept is explained on the site Structured Blogging…here’s an excerpt:
Using structured blogging means it’s easy to create, edit, and maintain these different kinds of posts. In fact, for most purposes, structured blogging won’t really seem like a big deal at all – it’s just another edit form on your blog. The difference is that the structure will let you add specific styles to each type, add links and pictures for reviews, and so on.
Once structured blogging is in place, you can start building applications on top of it. Because it’s an XML format and embedded in both the HTML blog and the syndicated feed, applications can run in web browsers (like a firefox plugin for comparison shopping which reads product reviews); aggregators (like an aggregator that adds your friend’s calendar entries to your datebook); or web services (like a feed for everyone who’s attending the same conference as you).
So, effectively, it’s a way of wrapping XML Metadata around the content of blog posts in specific ways that relate to the content of the posts. Review posts will have fields that are common to reviews, and can then be manipulated in specific ways by aggregators/datamining that wouldn’t be possible previously. It’s a really interesting idea, and I’d been searching for ways to incorporate something like this in my blog. Rather than having a “currently reading” sidebar, including my current reads inline with the rest of the blog, thus maintaining the calendar of my reading for myself, and putting it into the metadata of my blog for future perusal.
I’m gonna try a “Review” post next just to see what it looks like, but this could be a great, great tool for specific types of blogs (Jackson has been doing a series of reviews on his blog…this would be perfect for that).
Well, we’ve already seen what Gorman (the President-Elect of the American Library Association) thinks of blogs and the blog people. Now we get his comments on Google and the Google Digitization Project in the latest issue of American Libraries.
*sigh*
To the quotes!
Since scholarly books are, with few exceptions, intended to be read cumulatively and not consulted for snippets of information, making those that are out of copyright available by means of a notoriously fallible search engine seems to be, at best, a misallocation of resources.
At best a misallocation of resource? It appears that Gorman believes that people are interested in the Google Dig project in order to find primary materials for research. While that might be ONE reason for something like the GDP, it certainly doesn’t strike me as the way it will popularly be used. I see the GDP being used as a quick and easy way to find quotes, to locate books when all you have is a quote (how many times have reference librarians had to spend hours figuring out where famous quote from scholar X came from?), to do intertextual comparisons that are simply not possible with print resources (I see massive digitization projects like GDP as potentially the biggest innovation in linguistic/pattern related text study ever), and yes, sometimes, to serve as a quick and easy method for those that are not near a library that has access to these works to read them.
And I really want to know what his justification for the “notoriously fallible” line is. That’s just incredibly sloppy writing, to make a judgement like that and not back it up. Then again, it appears that’s what Gorman is really good at, given his last couple of publications.
Any user of Google knows that it is pathetic as an information-retrieval system — utterly lacking in both recall and precision, the essential criteria for efficiency in such systems.
Utterly lacking? Utterly lacking?
At this point I just want to know what planet Gorman has been on for the last 5-7 years.
Google is by far the best search engine on the Internet, indexing and making searchable over, at the time of this posting, 8,058,044,651 web pages. That’s EIGHT BILLION pages. Mr. Gorman…I would love to see your suggestions for a better way to index 8 Billion pieces of disparate information.
Statements like that only show how out of touch Gorman is with the reality of information seekers.
Also, no amount of “research on search engines” is going to overcome the fundamental fact that free-text searching is inherently inferior to controlled-vocabulary systems….Google is supposed to have complex algorithms but still produces piles of rubbish for almost all searches.
And speaking of out of touch with information seekers…Mr. Gorman, there is a reason that our patrons want our OPACs to be “google easy” to use. It’s because Google, as far as the only audience that matters (the patron) gets them the information they need without the need for them to become experts in a controlled vocabulary. Would it be great if everyone memorized LoC subject headings and used them to search for what they need? Possibly. But that will never happen, and in the meantime while we’re waiting on that, full-text searches are the way people find information.
I can only guess again that Gorman actually means something like “Google produces piles of rubbish for specific kinds of searches that I can’t bother to deliniate right now” because it is a demonstrable fact that Google does provide good results. Want to know what demonstrates that? The fact that everyone uses it. The fact that it’s a freaking verb at this point in time. Heck, I can produce excellent results for Google searches, and I don’t try very hard. I have not yet had Google let me down when I need a factual answer to some question (and contrary to Mr. Gorman’s unspoken assumptions, that is what most people are after…random facts).
I can’t describe how disappointed I am in the President-Elect of the ALA. He’s not only come across as petulant and out of touch in his writings, but has repeatedly denegrated technologies that are useful and, in Google’s case, necessary for information seeking at this point in history. For someone who is supposed to be leading the ALA, it appears that his leadership might be in directions that most newer librarians aren’t very happy with. We already have to swim against the current of the established order of things in Library Land. Gorman is simply adding fuel to the fire of the next generation of librarians to come along and revolutionize our understanding of information seeking and gathering.
EDIT: A bit of conversation going on re: this topic over at lisnews.com.
Found via Justin, Tim over a Tuba City with the all-time coolest sewing adventure ever…the story of the Tarheel Luchadores! Am I the only one that thinks this is a ripe photo for a Fark photoshop contest? 🙂
Oh yeah: Duke Sucks. Go Heels!
EDIT: Also seen on The Real Paul Jones.
So evidently, somewhere in the vast media conspiracy against fair use and copyright, someone bought a clue.
The Sci-Fi channel (naturally) has offered the first episode of Battlestar Galactica as a streaming video (the whole episode, commercial free). They also have a blog where the Exec. Producer Ron Moore updates the public on things and answers plot questions. And, to finish off the hat-trick of coolness, they just started doing podcasts of commentaries by Ron on each episode. You set up the podcast, or just download the MP3’s from their site, hit play at the appropriate time, and the commentary will overlay the actual episode. It even beeps when a commercial is about to come on so you can pause the playback. Such very cool technology usage…not only that they are doing podcasts, but they are doing them in such a new and different way. Real-time commentary on a broadcast TV show via podcast is, to put it simply, cool. And by cool, I mean something that I would never have thought of.
Well, I’ve recovered from the sickness that consumed me earlier in the week, although I don’t feel completely 100% yet…more like 98.3% or so. Missing nearly 3 days of work did put me far enough behind in a couple of projects that I’m struggling to catch up now, which isn’t any fun at all.
Here’s a few quicklinks to things that made me say “well…how ’bout that?” this week while I was recovering.
Really great parody of Gormangate: Revenge of the Codex People.
102.6 degree temperature
chills
body ache
headache
sinus pressure
inablity to concentrate
feeling out of it
doctor says virus, stay in bed two more days
betsy fixing me soup and hot tea
hate being sick
I normally don’t post these sorts of online quizzes, but this one was interesting for a few reasons. First, it uses dialect analysis to “code” you, and is based on a Harvard Computer Society Dialect Survey of 30788 respondents. Second, it’s something that nearly everyone I know has discussed with me at some point.
So there you go: I’m 71% (Dixie). Just so you know.
…from the ever-insightful Eli over at Mad Librarian. She left a thoughtful comment on my post about Gormangate, and I wanted to get some thoughts out in response.
Eli in blockquotes:
Digitization can democratize information, it does allow for greater, broader and for the end user, cheaper access to information [my cynical side says that very little information is truly free and it’s more a question of how much gets subsidized, and whether the costs spread across a given community, but that’s what I get for hanging out with special librarians].
Of course, “free” here means something like “of such low individual cost as to be non-important” but your point is taken. I do believe, however, that digitization is a democratizing force in information interaction in much the same way that the printing press was a democratizing technology for information interaction. Potentially moreso.
I suppose my point (other than the one on top of my head) is that the devil is in the details when it comes to digitization, particularly in the current climate. There are many and great benefits to the process, but not all of them are automatic. Digitizing content doesn’t help people on the other side of the digital divide get to it, our current copyright climate encourages content owners to make material less available for the exercise of fair use rights (and first sale seems to be a dead issue entirely for digital material) and on the whole, it’s about as easy to lock down or “disappear†digital content as it is to do the same with “analog†works. And I have a one-word example for you: Elsevier.
I suppose that I am just enough of an optimist to see these hurdles as short term, given a wide view of the problem. The digital divide is there, of course, but is shrinking daily (and of course I believe that libraries have an enormous role in this…providing open computer access to patrons, playing the lead role in the cost spreading of the information in digital repositories, etc…). You have a pretty good idea how I stand on copyright issues, and any longtime reader of my blog should know (if not, I’ll refer you here or here). I cannot imagine a situation where, over the next 20-30 years and our generation begins to move into positions of power within the country, that the current copyright regime can hold. There will be a radical overthrow of the current legal understanding of copyright, and it will involve a re-definition of fair use with digital content at the core of the understanding of it, first sale rights will be reimagined…I left a comment on Justin‘s blog a while ago that underlined a bit of what I think is coming:
Add in the bit about “Content creators will rise up against the business interests of the RIAA/MPAA and demand that copyright law be brought into a more sensible form. The next generation of lawmakers will incorporate the Creative Commons licenses into US Copyright law, adding provisions for code as well as consumable media. This will spawn a remix culture that will sweep the globe, pushing the US out of the center of the entertainment industry and relocating it in China, India, and the former Soviet Union.”
I completely agree that Elsevier is the devil, though.