The next week or so for me is completely insane, as I’m attending both CES2011 and ALA Midwinter 2011, even though they actually overlap. I’ll be flying from Nashville to Las Vegas on Tuesday for CES, hopping from Vegas to San Diego on Friday for ALA Midwinter, and then taking the red-eye late on Monday night to get back to Nashville and then home early Tuesday morning.
Then I’m gonna sleep about 20 hours.
There are a lot of things I’m excited about for both trips…CES is a bazaar of tech, and I’m attending a number of exciting Press Conferences from Sony, Lenovo, ASUS, and other major tech companies. I’m going to be doing reporting on the trip over at Perpetual Beta, including (if the wifi holds up) some livestreaming. I will send a tweet out when I start a livestream, so if you are interested, follow me over at twitter and you’ll get the head’s up when I go live with anything.
At ALA Midwinter, there’s also a lot to be excited about. I have two favors to ask of anyone that happens to read this and will be in San Diego:
The first: if you are a LITA member, consider coming to the Saturday morning LITA Board of Directors meeting at 8:00am in the SDCC Room 11b. It’s early, and I don’t begrudge anyone their sleep, but if you want to see how LITA works, and help to make it better, come hang out with the Board for the morning.
The second is: Come see me stumble over my fanboy self while I interview Dr. Vernor Vinge, on Saturday in the SDCC at 1:30pm in room 29 A-D. Go to that link and leave me a question you’d like to see Dr. Vinge answer, check here and at LITABlog for a live stream of the interview, and help make this an awesome event for librarians everywhere. Dr. Vinge is a 4 time Hugo Award winner, and his writing has within it possible futures for information, libraries, and books that we should really pay attention to.
I hope to see a lot of friends as well…if you see me, please wave me down and say hello.
This is evidence of the insane world we’re currently living in…the Library of Congress, ostensibly the Library of Record for the United States, is currently blocking access on it’s staff computers as well as it’s guest wireless network to Wikileaks.
From the above story, the Library issued a statement, saying:
The Library decided to block Wikileaks because applicable law obligates federal agencies to protect classified information. Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents’ classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents.
Oh, really? Is that so?
Anyone online realizes this is a senseless act, and that anyone with any knowledge of the Internet will be able to get around this sort of filter trivially…this does absolutely nothing to protect classified information. As far as I can tell, it does nothing except make the Library of Congress look asinine. Perhaps the librarians running the LoC should take another gander at the Library Bill of Rights to remind themselves what exactly it is that they should be doing.
I hope that there is serious fallout for those who made this decision. ALA Council…here’s a discussion worth having.
Categories
Princess Eliza
Categories
Princess Eliza
Well, this past week Eliza got to live out a huge number of little girl fantasies, as we spent the week at the Magic Kingdom in Disney World. This is one pic of the dozen or so Disney characters she got to meet, not even counting the several dozen she saw in parades, or as we passed them in the park. She rode rides, stayed up to watch the fireworks, and was generally a complete champ with all the lines and crowds.
She was awesome, and I’m sad we had to leave. It was the best thrill in the world seeing her so incredibly happy…she had, literally, the time of her life. So did Mom and Dad.
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Interfaces, part 2
This distinction from the post below, that media can either be collapsed (Content, Container, and Interface as a single piece, as a book) or expanded (each separated, as in a DVD, remote, and screen) explains a bit about why the Touch interface is so visceral. The iPad feels different from other devices when you use it, and one of the reasons that I believe it does is that it collapses what have been expanded media types. With the iPad (and to a lesser degree, the iPhone, Android devices, Microsoft Surface, etc) you directly interact with the media and information you are working with. When you watch a video on the iPad, the Content, Container, and Interface are as-a-piece, and you interact with the video by touching the video itself.
This has a lot to do with the revolutionary feel of these new touch devices…and I think it explains why previous attempts at things like Tablet PCs may have failed.
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Interfaces
I’m sure this isn’t an original thought (so very, very few are), but it was novel enough to me that I needed to write it down…and that’s pretty much what a blog is designed for.
I’ve written and talked about how libraries need to become comfortable with the containers of our new digital content, as since we move into the future the containers (ereader, ipad, tablet) will be important to users. We already know, more or less, how to deal with content. I’ve also been thinking about the interfaces that we use to access this content, and it just hit me:
Print is the only example of a media where the User Interface, Content, and Container have been, historically, the same thing. With music and video, we are completely used to the container, the content, and the user interface each being distinct: we put a tape into a player, which we control with kn0bs or buttons, and the content itself is ethereal and amorphous. With print, until very recently, the content, container, and interface were all the same thing…a book, a magazine, a broadsheet, a newspaper. All are content, container, and interface wrapped into a single unit. This may point to one of the reasons that people seem to feel a deeper connection to print materials than to the 8mm film, or the cassette tape.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these distinctions between container, content, and interface….I think that these three concepts could inform the way that libraries conceptualize what we do, and maybe find better ways to do it.