LibraryTechtonics

My friend Colin is a programmer, and not only is he way smart, but terribly eloquent. Funny that, I’m sure you’re thinking.

Anyway, he wrote this awesome post titled “The language of computers” on the nature of computers as a culture of it’s own, and how different types of people fit into that culture, using tourists, business travellers, expats, and people who have gone native as the users within the culture:

When you study a foreign language, you learn more than just the language. Or the language is more than just grammar and vocabulary. It’s culture. And maybe that’s a better way of putting it. When you say you have to learn the language of computers, you really mean the culture of computers. Not so much the specific programming languages, but language in the broader sense of how to interact with computers.

I think this particular bit describes the ideal basic knowledge of a librarian:

Then there’s the business traveller. Knows their way around, but only in the business districts. Has colleagues there. By analogy, has a set of applications they use for work. Maybe knows a bit about Word document formatting, making presentations. May be adept with spreadsheet software, creating formulas and macros.

The entire essay is a user-friendly peek inside the computer world, from the perspective of a programmer with non-programmers subconsciously in mind. He also mentions “In the Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson (the download off the linked page yields a large .txt file for your free reading pleasure), which is described by the back cover text of my monograph copy as “a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past and present”. Read it, he makes tech into digestible English (and makes fun of HTML), uses code bits as examples that somehow make a bit of sense to the unindoctrinated, and it will make you laugh and the wobbly history of computers and the internet as we know them. Good stuff.

I’m so terribly excited! Somerville Public Library now offers wireless access. No need to go to a library further out than my town library.

Nifty.

I find all sorts of neat stuff in the little Wired box on My MSN home page.

RSS Edges Into the Bureaucracy
[Wired 16 nov '04 c/o My MSN]

A funny thing about the article is that it was prompted by a small department of the federal government adopting RSS technology, when the article notes that “RSS feeds are offered by agencies such as the U.S. State Department, NASA, the state of Delaware, the National Hurricane Center, a number of state legislatures, local governments and more.” It’s so odd that the National Agricultural Statistics Service using RSS would get media play from Wired.

Anyway, Ray Matthews, a librarian for Utah State, runs RSSgov.com, a whole *blog* devoted to how RSS is being used by the government. It’s very cool that Ray and his blog got such good media play, since the blog is an excellent resource on how the technology is being used here and internationally by governments, and it’s run by a smart *librarian*. Not to mention that the site offers customized feeds on states, countries, topics, and more. So very nifty.

Ray makes an iteresting and astute note at the end of the article, where he says that if Microsoft integrates RSS into the next release of Windows, then RSS will really start to take off.

While I am a Windows XP user — running Firefox as my browser — in general I’m not a big fan of attaching the success of a technology to an operating system. Ray’s comment is very smart in terms of launching RSS into the mainstream masses based on market share, since users tend to use stuff more if it’s just “built in”, and the market share for Windows is dominant. But I think that integration of RSS into Firefox and Safari is doing a great job for the RSSification of the digital world, for basic and advanced users alike, as is Yahoo!’s wide (and, in my opinion, user-friendly) implementation of RSS features on My Yahoo! and all of the news pages. And, well, with these and other technologies making such fabulous use of RSS, Microsoft should focus more on dealing with it’s security concerns and tightening up their offerings into a more cohesive package and less about reinventing the wheel just because it can.

By stipulation of this agreement, the BOOK includes all material printed on pages affixed to the binding at the time of purchase. The BOOK is also deemed to include any marginal notations made by you or any other user, authorized or unauthorized, and to include any and all ideas, notions, plans, designs, or intuitions formed by you, whether or not fixed in tangible form, during use of the BOOK or within thirty (30) minutes before or after its use.

This agreement is a binding “flip-wrap” agreement; you agree to be bound by its terms by opening, reading, or flipping through the BOOK. If you do not agree to these terms, close the BOOK, place it back on a nearby shelf with the cover in a forward-facing position, and forget all of its contents. You may find it difficult to forget the contents of the BOOK. Do not be alarmed.

OK, imagine an alternate future for the book than too many people envision (i.e., it’s ulitmate demise). Imagine a time when each book contains an “End-Reader License Agreement (’ERLA’)”, where how many lines you can read aloud is dictated at the very beginning, and where your right to purchase anything approximating a “fresh wipe” is definitely *not* protected. And where the Limited Warranty of the book tells you: “The READER’S sole remedy under this warranty shall be words of acknowledgement, rebuke, and/or ridicule.”

Get a humorous glimpse with a sci fi bent of the future book from the FutureFeedForward novel (.pdf):

Best sf site on the net spawns a novel
[c/o Boing Boing 11 nov '04]

The first chapter is up for now, and the book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. So very cool.

Boing Boing is just an internet playpen of darn good fun.

Interesting…

Communicontent
[c/o It's all good 8 nov '04]

The post on Russell Beattie’s online notebook blog talks about how email sucks, how blogs are communicontent (”something sitting directly between direct communication, and static informational content” Beattie, 6 nov ‘04), and how effortless metadata is important to communicontent formats like blogs, Del.icio.us, and flickr.
and how all this is going to breed the next gen of *mobile phone* killer app.

So is communicontent the next step in social networking? Sounds like it to me. I think it’ll take a little while, since there are still people out there like myself who choose to use my mobile phone as just a phone, but I think it could happen. Where could it go for libraries? It could be virtual reference or ELF on steroids…