The book just got more interactive

The Library of Congress is showing off its latest toy. Neat. It doesn't even matter that I can't read the original text. I suppose if I had just paid more attention in Dutch class.

The most wonderful time of the year?

Once again, the question mark appears in a post title. I'm sure this is a sign of deep uncertainty. I'm taking a break from my severe responsibilities at the Fullerton Public Library information desk to blog up an update.

Update #1: I am finished with library school. With all due respect to the study of library and information science, I am glad to be done. Any less and I'd feel incompetent and any more and I'd burn out like a flaming comet. The best for you: my portfolio is now available for all the world to see! I should warn you that it's drier than Ozu, but more lively than G. Edward Evans.

Update #2: I'm getting married. There will be more time to discuss this life-changing event, but I am already coming to the stark realization that weddings are more for the people you invite than for you and your spouse-to-be. Nevertheless, Frances and I have met with some good people and I'm sure we'll be in good hands on The Day (May 17, 2008!).

Update #3: I'm currently going through a done-with-school-hurrah! binge of movie watching (if you are on Netflix, become a Netflix friend and you can follow along). However the time is coming where I need to really explore how I want to live my life. It's a pretty dreamy list I'm concocting: learn Latin, play guitar, read Ulysses... I'm sure a full-time job and/or children will postpone these pursuits until retirement, alas. The important thing is to keep a record of what I want to do so I never keel over from boredom.

Finally, I want to do more with Internet radio applications. I'm about as stupid as you can get currently in this area (wireless Internet also confuses the heck out of me for some inexplicable reason). A post on MediaShift got me interested. If you have any input on what has worked best for you, please let me know.

The end of television?!

Today the WGA (Writer's Guild of America) went on strike, the first time it has done so in almost twenty years. The crux of the matter lies in how to pay writers their fair share from DVD sales and Internet streaming broadcasts and downloads. This may prove to be more than a mere strike, but rather a clash of the old and the new in the world of technology. On one side you have a system that was built for old media. Enter new media, distinctly unmeasurable by the old systems of counting and evaluating. It is not too far removed from the questions being asked by this video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Clearly, not all the questions raised by Web 2.0 have easy answers.

Here are some thoughts by Marc Andreessen, called "Suicide By Strike":

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/11/suicide-by-stri.html

You may remember him as the guy who brought us Mosaic (or Netscape if you prefer post-1994 lingo) and is now a respected technology guru.

MediaShift is also expressing real concern that television as we know it may be entering the beginnings of its death throes:

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/11/whats_the_role_of_unions_in_th.html

Here we have it. A battle of the Old versus the New. Perhaps the opening salvos in a new technological revolution. Here's hoping the consumers end up the winners when the dust settles. My own personal belief is that good writing is already starting to dwindle on basic cable and broadcast televisions channels, stuffed to the gills with formulaic "reality" show garbage that does not actually reflect anything I would consider "real". What is worth watching requires so much attention (the "24" effect) that watching scripted television live is impractical. The DVR or TiVo is changing people's viewing habits to the point that "appointment" television and even commercial breaks are becoming irrelevant. Although it still looks like regular television, the DVR has shifted the central appliance of mass media from the classic television set to the personal computer.

In the world of movies and film (since they, too, are affected by the WGA strike), I present a couple facts:
(1) Seeing a film at an actual movie theater is more of a pain in the derriere than fun. I have lost most of my inclination to watch a movie with 100+ strangers with cell phones for $10 or more (even if I do smuggle in the sodas).
(2) Studios need to face the fact that technology is becoming cheap enough that amateurs and thrill-seekers will provide equally-intriguing content for free over the Internet, for the sake of getting exposure. I hate tread on ground already much trodden by others, but most star-driven vehicle films are lousy and too much movie budget goes to compensation already-rich celebrities.

In more personal news, I just want to announce that I am two weeks away from completing my masters degree. Since finishing my portfolio is a priority, this blog will continue to be pretty quiet until the end of the month. After that, I'll try to make up enough stuff to keep things interesting around here. Until then, read my "microblog" on the sidebar, a sporadic list of my thoughts at the time.

Let's get connected

It seems like everybody has a blog now. Also, news articles seem to seep out of every pore of the Web 2.0-fortified Internet. How does one manage it keep on top of all of it? Well, there is always the issue of Overload, which I cannot help with, but RSS is a nice little tool to help keep things more organized. Instead of maintaining a huge list of sites to visit (only to discovered nothing half the time you visit any given site), the news and blog posts come to you. Once you see it in action, it isn't much more difficult to comprehend than e-mail.

Watch this video first. I think it helps emphasize the important role of RSS for the information-craving person:


If you already know about RSS, good for you, you early-adopter. If the video inspired you even a little bit, get yourself set up with a reader (I've used Yahoo!, but Bloglines has been better to me) and try subscribing to this blog. I don't have once of those orange logos on my blog yet, but if you use Firefox, you will see the icon in the URL field, and Internet Explorer puts it somewhere on one of those toolbars (can you guess which browser I prefer?).

Subscribers to my blog enjoy the luxury of having me tell them when I post the monthly-or-so update, rather than forcing people to keep checking up on me. Besides, I feel a little strange have people "checking up on me".

Pictures from Napa

Frances and I came back from Napa over a week ago, and only now have I got the photos up on Flickr, complete with witty descriptions. I'm still getting the hang of Flickr, but I stumbled around long enough to test drive a decent set of pictures. So, without further ado, some photos from Napa Valley for you to inspect. For best results, view them as a slideshow and turn on the information capsules. Enjoy! Be warned, however, my camera is ancient.

Dude, these games are, like, old

I am just about to begin another semester of school, so my mission in these final days is to waste as much time as humanly possible. I've managed to keep IQ-lowering stuff to a minimum. When it involves the TV, it is something of quality like Renoir or Ozu. I read an entire series of mysteries by Robert Crais. Harry Potter...check. In fact, if you have finished Harry, check out the wiki. I had to use it a couple times just to figure out who the heck so-and-so was. Unfortunately, something brainless was bound in enter the scene in these dog days of Agosto: Rogue!

The 1980 UNIX classic lives on, now as an addictive java game. There are tutorials for the curious, but my overview goes like this: You are the @ symbol. You get objects that look like punctuation. You fight letters of the alphabet that represent monsters. Excited? Go there now: http://www.hexatron.com/rogue/

Paging Dr. Evil

Um, I don't think there is this much money in the whole world! Anyway, somebody is suing Michael Vick (the dogfighting ring-involved football player, for those living in caves like I am). It's a lot of money.

Web Awards, if they must

We humans like to give awards to everything. Back in the days of Infoseek (see previous post), there was some dumb logo people slapped on their websites that said "Top X% of All Web Sites" like anybody cared. The systems have changed, becoming more fluid and interactive, but the awards remain. Behold the 2007 Web 2.0 Awards, from your friends at the rank-crazy Seomoz.

The most striking observation of the list is that there is so much stuff that creates Web 2.0 and that is just the ones that actually registered in the rankings. If you actually tried to use all of these resources to the fullest extent you would have no life! Somebody should make the ultimate mashup and combine all of these wonder web utilities. I think I will be putting something up that links them all from my blog, essentially creating my own personalized web portal.

Secondly, the different domains of Web 2.0 are divvied up by each one's various competitors. Most telling and easiest to relate is the MySpace versus Facebook wars (oh yeah, Friendster was in the running once upon a time). Most people relate to one or the other and most people settle on one or the other. Of course there is nothing stopping you from doing both (like me), but that is twice the work. Now I have Facebook friends and MySpace friends and I have to run back and forth to appease both camps. I lose. It is like having a lot of email addresses; it splits the focus. This mashup I referred to in the last paragraph should be called the "ultimate aggregator". It should be simple. MyLifeBrand lost me on the very first page, but perhaps I need to give them more time to get set up. The bottom line is the the Web 2.0 apps need to learn how to talk to each other even better than they do now. XML is the key, but everybody will need to their XML homework so nobody gets shafted. MySpace, especially, needs to clean up its act and do something to halt the tidal of hideous HTML work its pages sport. My advice to anybody with a MySpace account is DO NOT CHANGE THE DEFAULTS. Well, at least learn proper XHTML before doing something terrible with wallpaper.

And so I bid adieu to the Summer Fun Program, exhibiting the wonders of Web 2.0 and proclaiming myself a believer in the power of building better web applications and then messing with them for the power of good. I think I'll keep blogging here, so stay subscribed and I will attempt to entertain in my delightfully ham-fisted style.

Documents, documents

Today's rant was brought to you by the power of Google. It is pretty strange writing anything longer than a few sentences without being in the confines of Microsoft Word. A lot of people don't even realize that the idea of a word processing program that manipulates text the way you would see it if you were to print. In other words, if I want something to appear in bold type or italics it will look that way on both screen and paper. I remember using a very old version of WordPerfect or some other oldish program and the only way to tell what font or style a character was in was by highlighting the text and seeing what "attributes" it had been endowed with.

Now documents and spreadsheets are going to the next level: collaborative. Unlike putting something to disk or tossing around an attachment, a shared document on Google Documents keeps everybody on the same page...literally. This is really great for group projects. No more trashing old versions or recklessly overwriting something that you actually meant to keep for reference. For individual use, it's a nice way to get around the cost of Microsoft Office programs. Too bad there are still many people out there who will insist documents stay in a Word format. Oh, and there is a spell checker on Google Docs, too. They seem to be everywhere now (Firefox has become particularly obsessive about watching what I type!).

What is Not So Good? I'm pretty positive about how Google Docs runs, but a couple worries surface:

(1) Your work lasts only as long as Google remains in business. Sounds crazy? Remember Netscape? We thought they were going to be the new Microsoft, but instead they were consumed by AOL, which in turn became a decaying mess. AOL today retains none of the spunkiness of the Netscape it consumed. The Netscape name today, in 2007, means nothing of importance. Even sadder, one of the greatest search engines of 1995, Infoseek, twelve years down the road, is nothing more than an alias for Disney's tepid Go.com search engine. AltaVista, the greatest search machine before Google burst on the scene, is now a bit player in the Yahoo! family. The point to all of this is that those things we think are going to be with us forever often die, and the online world tends to be more accelerated than the physical one.

(2) I feel kind of weird having no local home for the stuff I write. I feel like I am giving Google a little bit of ownership of my work with every document I create with their programs.

Everything you just read was made in a Google Documents template. Here's a very special link that will take you right to the meisterwerk itself:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhgdfjf6_0dxcd3q

Creating and remixing culture on YouTube

Once upon a time, there was a truly awful commercial, which somebody put on YouTube. Little did they realize, a cultural phenomenon had been born (and the spot on the Ellen DeGeneres show didn't hurt). Go ahead and watch the original, but don't except to get the next two minutes of your life back:

OK, that was really bad. However, various people saw this as raw material from which to create their own masterpieces. Although a bit on the long side, the following clip demonstrates some of what people have done to the "classic" original.

Finally, some people are just sick of the whole concept. And yet they have inadvertently contributed to a cultural phenomenon that only YouTube could have birthed. Enjoy this final (and thankfully short!) clip.

To see more of how dumb raw material can be honed into remixed classics, check out the latest craze, and at least one clever remix of the concept. Judging by the high number of hits, this is even bigger than old Flea Market ever got. The lightning short running time helps, too.

Misadventures in social networking

Today I decided to snoop about some of the finest social networking site the Internets have to offer. First it was off to MySpace to see what all the fuss was. MySpace has a truly awful search engine. Don't even try quotes in your search. My first successful search on "Fullerton Public Library" (no quotes, mind you) turned up many places that had all of the words present in the profiles, but it had nothing to do with the library. For example, Joe Bob Public graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 1994 and watches public access cable shows when not maintaining his large library of comic books. What a charming false drop. I was fortunate to find the profiles of some fellow employees of the library as well as the TAG (teen advisory group) profile. Nice work, everybody.

Before bidding adieu to MySpace I decided to see how the latest crop of president candidates reach out to the electoral through this forum. Not only did Barack Obama have more donors than Hillary Clinton, but he also has more MySpace friends! If this isn't the smell of victory, I don't know what is. Both sites, however, are easy to read (no crazy wallpaper and/or clashing colors). Unfortunately, like Cylons, there are many copies. Anybody can make a site for a candidate, and some have done a good job at confusing the casual potential voter. Watch the spelling the names in the URL if you have any doubts over the authenticity of a profile.

I moved on to Facebook, where I am currently faceless. The layout is much cleaner than MySpace. That is good. Not so good is that I cannot jump in and start randomly spying at people's profiles. In fact, I cannot even show you the account I just created. I guess you will have to join my network or become my friend to see it. Since this sucks a lot of the spontaneity out of the experience, this may explain the diminished popularity of Facebook next to MySpace. We want our instant gratification!

Moving right along to Twitter... When I plan to make my life an open book, I will thank Twitter for making it all possible. Now if there was some way to send Twitter messages in my sleep. "I am asleep" - I would say...no...think with brain waves. My initial impressions here aren't too incredibly negative. Functionality over multiple platforms is one of the trademarks of Web 2.0, so Twitter is definitely part of this family. In fact, it brings back warm fuzzy memories of college, using a crummy old system called "Broadcast", which we students liked using more than the phone to do things like flirt and meet up for Chicken Finger Night at the dining hall. That's 1998 talking, buster!

Looking to the future, I trolled over to something still developing called MyLifeBrand. Again, the goal is to keep things looking a bit more organized than MySpace, but I wonder if it may actually be a case of entering too late. I would like to see the inner workings of this system, but right now I need a sponsor to go any farther than the "About Us" page. An aggregator of the different social networking site would be valuable. That way I can put this blog, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Gmail tools, etc. into one big toy chest. Right now the closest thing I have is del.icio.us, but I just looked at my sorry list on that site and I don't think it is particularly representative of who I am. However, in the way VHS vanquished Beta, the best functioning, best looking inventions often still end up as the big losers.

In closing, I left a trail of breadcrumbs behind so you can see the mess I made. Here is me on MySpace, something I put together a few months ago so people would stop bothering me about not having a profile. It is what it is. Again, if you are with Facebook and you know who I am, try looking me up and see what happens. I'm so alone right now! I have a single word in my Twitter profile right now, which pretty much says it all until I get this post published. Now if there was some way to send Twitter messages in my sleep. "I am asleep" - I would say...no...think. Anyway if you want to become my first follower, go there right now! Deals like this don't last!

Web 2.0 in the library

I think we can use Web 2.0 technologies in many ways to benefit the library. While the first things that spring to mind are those which help the staff work with each other, I am more interested in what can be done to involve patrons in positive ways with library functions typically most often handled by the staff. Two big ideas come to mind.

RSS and patron records
A lot of patrons want to see a history of all the things they have checked out. For privacy reasons, that is currently not available. However, a site people pay for, such as Netflix, has meticulously kept five years worth of my rental history on file. Five years is how long I've been with them, so this means the entire history. I should be possible to create a personalized feed with checkout history and wish lists, all conveniently accessible through the patron's RSS reader of choice.

Flickr maps of the library
The chaotic half of my brain has a murky vision of a Flickr mashup in which many more pictures of the library get taken and suddenly the visual data of a catalog search is not just a book cover, but directions on finding it. I haven't put much more thought into it, but it would require a lot of involvement of people reaching beyond just the staff.

Geeks still rule

I was over at Technorati today and found definitive proof that geeks still rule. Simply go to the "most popular" section and pretty much every blog, starting with the mighty Boing-Boing (currently posting info on how to make your own Mont Blanc pen for five bucks), then working down to a blog that helps people "pimp" their MySpace site.

However, I do appreciate the integration of text, video and image results when searching for something. After all, if blogs mix things up, why shouldn't the tools that search them?

In other breaking geek news, I started a del.icio.us account. You will be amazed at all two things I have bookmarked to date. You go check it out now. And does anybody else find it bizarre that soap gets more bookmarks than the New York Times bestseller list?!

Tasty

I just returned from trolling around on del.icio.us. It is a pretty nifty idea. True, there is the risk of "crazy tags" that don't really don't benefit the concept of metadata, but it washes out in the safety of numbers. It is akin to voting. Sure, some people are going to write in "Donald Duck" for president, but it is negligible in the overall results. So just let them have their fun vandalizing 0.000000000000001% of the world. No one will notice. Have faith that most people competent enough to actually use del.icio.us will employ helpful tags and contribute positively to the folksonomy in progress. It is the same concept of openness that makes wikis click, which I think is a matter that will be addressed later.

While the budding information professional inside me says there must be guidelines, I have to concede that the Internet is too big to be diligently indexed by the chosen few. The masses, over time, can do it for free. Let the professionals turn their attentions toward educating others on the art of evaluating information. Don't expect me to say things like "everything in on the Internet" or "if it is on the Internet it must be true." We can file those statements with "since the Internet is now commonplace we can do away with libraries."

I think I'll be setting up an account with del.icio.us, pretty much for the same reason I choose to blog here and not on Myspace: cleaner presentation of data, increased flexibility in its arrangement, and all-around greater accessibility. When the account is finally born and has something to show, you will hear about it.

Regression session

Since the program is taking a break this week, I thought I would regale you with some videos that made me the person I am. Enjoy.

A most excellent CSE

Most people are fooled by nerdy demeanor and don't realize I have long had the love of heavy music. I will probably be That Crazy Old Guy about forty years down the road. So, here is a custom search engine (CSE) I built that dredges up information on various hard rock and heavy metal acts. I test-drove it and was pleasantly surprised, considering I've only put in a mind-boggling three preferred search sites. You can probably thank Google more than me for whatever you retrieve. Have fun.

LibraryThing: Yeah, I've got one

Oddly enough, I had a small LibraryThing, mainly of stuff I've already read this summer. I should really add some stuff to it because it is very small and highly unrepresentative of my actual bookshelf. I also have developed a problem with reading books I don't own (ie. library books!) and it would unfair to catalog those, seeing there is already a perfectly good system in place for looking those up.

Robert Fugmann Meets Andy Warhol

I am very tempted to say I am sharing my own private collection of lost Andy Warhol treasures, but I'm actually only sharing the results of me goofing around with an image generator, the Warholizer, available to all through the FD flickr toys. Go try it yourself.

Who is Fugmann anyway? Here's a short biography and here is the HTML table demonstration (the links to the other tables don't work at the moment!) where I orginally used the "normal" photo. Oddly enough, the site where I found the original photo has totally vanished. They had no idea how much it changed my life.

Testing the retrievr application

Lake Peyto - Canada, originally uploaded by Reinhard.Pantke.

Retrievr is a great idea, but it doesn't work very well. The great idea here is that you draw something and then it matches up photos from flickr that look like it. This photo is the result of me drawing a crude landscape with a built-in simple drawing program on the retrievr home page. About half of the retrieved results were landscapes and the rest were...I don't know what. Before this attempt, I tried to draw a picture of a brown cat with big green eyes and all it returned were pictures of not cats. There was one really artistic shot (read: black and white) of a cat and that was pretty much it.
Where does retrievr excel right now? Color recognition is quite good and I presume that is where they attempt to make the matches from. Either that or I need to learn how to draw better.
What do I suggest that would make retrievr better? They tell me that save all the sketches you make, but I can't seem to find the button that let's me save the sketches to my own blog/disk/whatever. I did get to rate some spectacularly bad sketches made by other users. This means all the sketches are being saved. I can only hope that the other raters who are lucky enough to see my sketches go lightly on me. I'm a pretty easygoing person, but I hope the folks who made retrievr have covered themselves on copyright issues, because I felt like I was signing away to them my hard(ly worth the time) work on those sketches!

Flickr goodies

Shadow Traffic, originally uploaded by Telstar Logistics.

Was this picture taken from a plane? Nope. Try a building. A really tall needle-like building called One Rincon Hill in San Francisco. I've seen this thing. It is very tall (and still being built, I think). You have to be made of money to live there; it's a yuppy beehive. It is funny to think that the area used to be the kind of place you didn't want to go after dark. I remember going up to San Francisco as a lil' rugrat and being scared of the industrial wastelands in that area. Now it has been "revitalized" and "sanitized" for your convenience. AT&T (formerly Pac Bell) Park, sort of to the right of this picture is a nice place to catch a game, even when the Giants are chronic losers.

Week 2: I'm a slacker! (testing things out)

I want to apologize to my wonderful group, The X Factor, that I did not complete week #2 in time. Unfortunately an excessive number of hours at the other jobs coupled with my natural scarcity at FPL. It's looking better for next week.

So I gave birth to this thing. Fitting it should be on a Saturday night, one maybe better spent over a couple ciders at The Olde Ship. Before you even start thinking it, I want to be a record as saying cider is NOT a "chick drink". When I say "cider" I'm talking about Blackthorne, Strongbow or the much missed K, not alcohol-laced apple juice like Wyder's. Uh, anyway, I digress. Blogger is nice because it ties right into my gmail account. That means one less password to memorize. I have done some blogging on MySpace, but it is pretty weak. I want to give this thing a running start in the hopes I can break free of the cyberdorm mentality.

Web 2.0 is the greatest thing since I first tried to navigate with the unwieldy Mosaic back in 1994 (between Gopher sessions). I'm glad to have an excuse this summer to play with all of these toys and maybe get a reward, edible or audible.

If you don't know me, why not visit the reference desk on Monday night?