Category: Links

In some of my recent talks about Massive Scale Librarianship I have used some examples to show what an exponential scale is, and the idea of storage and information growing by an order of magnitude. This site by Nikon does an awesome job of showing these differences. It is really fun to try too.

http://www.nikon.co.jp/main/eng/feelnikon/discovery/universcale/index_f.htm

Jeff Pomerantz points out (here) that Amazon has launched a new AskA service “Askville” (http://askville.amazon.com/askville/Index.do#answers). He does not seem so hot on it. He has some legitimate concerns, but I actually take this as a good sign. Virtual reference is alive and well. I’d love to know if the folks at Amazon are familiar with the work on the library and AskA groups (all of you lurking Amazon folks let me know). Someone might want to go use the service to ask “what other types of virtual reference services are available?” or “what is virtual reference?” or “do libraries offer these kind of thing?” and at least get these questions in the search service and test how easy it is to fin out about our work.

As Jeff points out it has some interesting use of tagging and features, and I hope virtual reference vendor types will take a look to see if there are some usable ideas here.

My current work on participatory librarianship is strongly grounded in Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory. Todd Marshall found a series of video clips of Pask lecturing. They are very cool. Not only to hear about the theory in his own words, but just a glimpse of the academic life in the 60’s. It kind of makes me want to lecture in a bow tie and carrying a pipe.

Here is the link: http://www.cyberneticians.com/index.html#gp

This video has been making the rounds. I have a very split reaction to it. Part of me really likes the message and I think it is a very apt statement on why we must constantly innovate. It’s not that what we are doing currently is wrong, but the world shifts, so we must constantly re-evaluate and innovate to keep up. Yea!

It would be easy to leave it at that. However, the academic in me is constantly bugged by the lack of any form of citation…who says this? Where can I go for more information on these topics? Great I want to take action…but I need more than a video clip to motivate my community.

So a great little think piece, but it could be so much more with a simple link to a set of supporting documents.

Anyway, here it is.

Thank God for YouTUBE:

So I decided to check out second life for real. Even bought myself a piece of property and built a modest office (see movie below). Feel free to stop by and visit (search for “Virtual Dave’s Office”).

next week I’m actually teaching a class (my digital libraries class working on Massive Scale Librarianship) in Second Life. This should be fun.

Found a neat site that maps the sates in the US you have visited, and the countries you have been to. I thought I’d give it a try:

create your own visited states map

I have a little further to go internationally though:

create your own visited countries map

In case you hadn’t noticed, I MoBlog. For those who don’t know, MoBlogging is blogging from your mobile phone, and most folks use it to post pictures from their phone cameras right to the web (see the bottom of the menu bar on the left). To do this, I send the pictures (via MMS if you care) to a service called TextAmerica. And it has been a really good service and free. Easy to use, and some easy ways to integrate it into my regular blog.

Then, two days ago I got an e-mail telling me that they would now only allow free accounts to have 50 pictures in it (not unreasonable). They would delete free accounts with more (like mine). Now this wouldn’t be so bad if they let you download all your pictures off of the site….they don’t. Turned that option off a year ago. The only way to get your pictures (besides manually doing it one by one) is to pay an external service to burn them to CD or DVD and send it to you (about $30 for mine).

OK, this is far from a rant. I knew when I signed up for a free service things might change. I have never put any critical pictures there anyway (after all, I have yet to see a good camera in a phone). Just seems a little….um….crass to make you buy back the pictures you put on the free service if you want to keep them (or pay a monthly fee).

Meanwhile, I think I’m switching over to FLICKR to do this (not quite as easy on the phone side, but much cooler on the web side).