Walt at Random

Here’s this week’s post at PLN Highlights–and, as always, I encourage you to sign up for the PALINET Leadership Network and add PLN Highlights to your aggregator (or subscribe to posts via email).

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What’s happening at the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

New articles include notes by Steven Bell on Innovation and control and some new Mentoring notes from the business literature. We’re continuing to add links so you can keep exploring a topic once you find a worthwhile article.

Two new features may also help you find worthwhile articles and notes:

• Every topic (the twelve primary categories in the topics sidebar) now shows a “Feature article of the month” at the end of the list of Recent articles. These articles aren’t necessarily the must-read articles or the best of PLN. They are articles that may deserve more attention than they’ve received recently. You’re encouraged to take a look–and to add criticism or commentary as appropriate.
• We’ve also added What’s hot at PLN? This page shows the 25 articles viewed most often during a given period–currently March 7 and April 6, 2008. Typically, that list will be updated once a month, sometimes a little less often. This isn’t exactly “Greatest hits of PLN”–it reflects recent readership, not overall readership.
• Assembling that first “What’s hot” page–taken directly from log analysis, but with most Topic, Category and Help pages removed from the list–we removed one additional page, but maybe it’s worth highlighting here. The General feedback and suggestions page was viewed a lot–but had no content other than the header. So, to get you started, we’ve added a couple of polls on content within PLN. Please respond to the polls (you can add a message)–and, of course, add your own suggestions there or on the feedback page for each topic, or start a discussion in the PLN Forums.

Know people who are or might be library leaders and haven’t heard of PLN? Tell them about it and encourage them to join. And if you have acquaintances who have PLN accounts but aren’t getting these posts–encourage them to sign up. PLN Highlights is the best way we have to keep you informed on what’s happening at PLN. We won’t flood your aggregator or inbox, but we will try to let you know what’s new.

Looking for deep thoughts? Boy, have you come to the wrong place…

Disappointment: We watched The Bourne Ultimatum on Saturday night. We’d seen The Bourne Identity. Somehow, the second flick (these are flicks, not films) is way down on our Netflix list… Anyway: A little ways in, my wife noted that she didn’t remember the plot of the first flick. At the end, we agreed there was a reason: Neither of us would remember the plot of this one two weeks later, much less a few months later. Lots of action, lots of car crashes, no heart, no real plot… A flick many people would love, but it sort of felt like a waste of a couple of hours. (If you love the Bourne flicks or novels, more power to you. Just not really our thing.)

The Pearl Rule (if I have it right): When I picked up a few books at Mountain View Public Library last time around (three weeks ago–I’ll take them back later this week), one of them was George Carlin’s 2004 book. I seem to remember liking George Carlin as a comic–snarky, a little mean-spirited, but literate and funny–so expected th like the book. Five or six pages in, I realized that it wasn’t so much a book as a bunch of little observations slapped together in no apparent sequence–like a blook, but less coherent than most of those. OK by me…

Then, a few more pages in, I found that I was getting lots of dystopian views, an enormous amount of bitterness, and damn little humor. And, speaking of “damn,” a different four-letter word was being used to an extent that, frankly, comes off as a lack of a real vocabulary. That word can be effective used sparingly. When we start a movie where it’s used in every other line of dialog, we usually don’t bother–and here, it seemed to show up at least every couple of paragraphs. Sure, that reduces the shock value–but it also means the prose reads badly.

Well, OK, no problem: You’re not going to like every book you pick up, and apparently Carlin’s aged differently than I have. He’s turned into one of those who frowns upon any questionable pleasures that don’t happen to be his own while, of course, frowning even harder upon anyone who disagrees with him. And somewhere along the way, he seems to have lost his humor.

I made it to Page 38. Which is where the Nancy Pearl Rule comes in, if I remember it rightly.

That rule? Once you’ve decided to give a book a try, you should give it a fair try–which starts out as being “read the first 50 pages,” but as we age, we find that life is too short. Thus, the rule as I remember it: Read the first 100 pages minus your age–so, for me, the first 38 pages.

Over the last couple of months, I had the other half of the Nancy Pearl Rule, in both cases with Connie Willis novels. (I love Connie WIllis’ short stories, but hadn’t really been familiar with her novels.) To Say Nothing of the Dog was, for some reason, a little difficult–maybe because I was initially reading it in short spurts, which wasn’t the way to read it. But at Page 38, it was clear that I should give it a few more pages–and by Page 100, I was hooked. This month, I picked up her Doomsday Book–which is a big book (578 pages in the mass-market paperback my local library has) and “five years in the writing.” It also took a little getting into, because it is a big, serious book–but by Page 38, I knew I was going to read the whole thing. And loved it, of course.

Then there’s Donald E. Westlake and a newish Dortmunder novel, What’s So Funny? With Westlake, I don’t need 38 pages. On the other hand, his prose is of a sort where you go through 38 pages pretty quickly…and just keep turning those pages. Not big, serious books, but I do love ‘em.

Now to read that serious librarianship book I agreed to review…

I hear from semi-reliable sources a grotesque rumor that I was “on” LSW Meebo (is that like being on drugs?) during a presentation on LSW at CiL.

LSW? CiL? What are all these initialisms?

I can only say this to that: I’m as likely to be found on LSW Meebo as I am to post mini-reviews of old movies.

I would note that any LSW participant (I hear from those deranged types who actually frequent whatever-the-heck it is) can set their screen name to be anything. Michael Gorman, Edgar A. Poe, waltcrawford, you name it…

TLI? Well, LSW isn’t an acronym (at least I can’t think of any reasonable way to pronounce it as a word), so TLA doesn’t work. Besides, I’ll be at TLA (or TxLA, if you prefer) next week…in the flesh, not in some crazy person’s impersonation of me in a room talking about…well, no I’m not going to repeat that. And since LSW Meebo is passworded, you can’t get it from the buffer anyway

23. And still it didn’t crash. Not that I was there to see it, of course..

Back in November 2006, I wrote this post–or, rather, I cut it out of an Offtopic Perspective in Cites & Insights and used it as a post, with slight updating.

Since then, I’ve been staying on the treadmill, watching those old movies (and in some cases TV movies), posting each time I get through one disc, and adding a new Offtopic Perspective each time I finish half a box (six DVDs, once in a while seven DVDs). For a while, it seemed as though the company–now named Mill Creek Entertainment–was running on empty, just distributing the 20-odd sets they’d assembled from public domain, TV movies, and other sources where they didn’t need to pay royalties.

A couple of weeks ago, Seth Finkelstein of Infothought sent me an odd email, assuring me it wasn’t spam and he wasn’t getting a commission. He reads C&I sometimes, and knew I watched these old flicks. He saw that BestBuy.com was having a two-day sale (sorry, it’s over): Two of the 50-movie packs for $25. I didn’t really need any more movies–I’m on disc nine of one set and disc seven of another, with two more packs (100 more movies) waiting after that–but, hey, 100 movies for $25 is a pretty good deal. So I checked it out–and found a couple of sets I wasn’t aware of, one of them released last month. I ordered two of them (that’s right, I now have more than 200 movies waiting to be watched–I intend to keep using that treadmill for years to come), and decided it was time to take another look at Mill Creek Entertainment.

Here’s what I found: The company’s active–and they’ve come up with some even bigger packs. As I write this, there appear to be thirty different 50-movie megapacks, up from 21 in late November 2006. 50-packs I don’t remember seeing before include Box Office Gold, Combat Classics, Drive-in Movie Classics, Family Fun, Frontier Justice, and Nightmare Worlds.

There are also eight hundred-movie packs–most of them straight combinations of 50-packs with no duplications (e.g., Action Classics combines the Action and Suspense 50-packs), all of them (I believe) composed of movies that are also in 50-packs. There were already some smaller subsets of 50-packs and that continues–I see 24 20-movie packs and nine 10-movie packs. (I could see some people going for the 20-pack of John Wayne flicks, most of them early and short, and some of the thematic packs are interesting.)

For libraries where the “informal circulating collection” model suggested in the earlier post might make sense, Mill Creek now has something else to offer:

250-Movie Packs.

That’s right. Four packs–Family Collection, Horror Collection, Mystery Collection and (predictably, given the 50-packs) Western Collection. The “foil collectors boxes” still have individual cardboard sleeves for each disc. So you’d have 240 informally-circulatable items, each with four or more old movies, for a total outlay of no more than $400 and probably significantly less.

Make that definitely significantly less, if you can buy from Amazon: I see all four 250-movie packs available for $50 each. That’s a thousand old movies for $200–less than a buck per circulating DVD.

I’m not shilling for Mill Creek. There are a couple of the 50-movie packs I’d be reluctant to buy for myself or a library (a couple recent packs are heavy on R-rated schlock), and lots of these movies are from damaged prints, nearly all VHS-quality or worse. When they say “Carefully digitally remastered,” they mean the movies were converted from analog to digital form: Otherwise, they couldn’t put them on DVDs. It does not mean restored or anything of the sort: Not at these prices!

That said, Mill Creek Entertainment is doing a fine job of using the public domain for all it’s worth, and I think that’s a good thing. Sure, you can download a lot of these movies–but why bother?

I just checked Amazon a little further. They appear to have all thirty 50-movie packs at $13 to $18 each) and all eight–whoops, all nine 100-packs (there’s one that isn’t even on Mill Creek’s site yet, and it won’t actually be out until May 2008)–at $27 to $45 each.

Mill Creek has some other stuff–collections of cartoons (300 in one box), TV boxed sets and TV-movie mixes, even a few indie movies and fitness sets. But mostly, Mill Creek is boxes of public domain movies at fair prices. The prints may be (and usually are) mediocre, and lots of the pictures are B or less–but there are also some classic gems. Within the last two weeks, I’ve watched McClintock! and the original, black-and-white, Irene Dunne/Charles Boyer Love Affair. Good stuff.

This blog’s been using WordPress 2.0.6. Just a wee bit behind the times.

Maybe that’s part of the reason I’ve had so much trouble with paragraph-swallowing.

Since PLN Highlights is moving to the current WP version in the near future, and was already much closer to current form, I thought it finally made sense to move.

Downsides: I don’t get an immediate overall comment count, the Category list is well down the screen instead of being on the right side of the editing window, and you can’t add HTML directly to the visual-editing screen–which is terrible practice anyway. Or, rather, you can add HTML directly to the screen, and WordPress will turn it into displayable text, e.g., attempting to embolden a word by using <b>word</b>–well, you can see the results.

Upsides: For one, I don’t believe this editor will swallow paragraphs, and on any post longer than 200-300 words, the old version was getting really bad in that regard–sometimes, even after I went into HTML view and added explicit marks, it would turn them into line breaks.

Also, the visual editor is much cleaner, is resizable and, tada, you can even go to a full-screen editing mode. What a concept!

Post and comment management also seems much cleaner.

Hmm. This is interesting: In HTML mode, paragraphs show as spaces rather than <p></p> pairs. I don’t believe that was true before. I switched to HTML because horizontal rules won’t work in visual mode.

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So I inserted that as <hr> in HTML mode–also much smoother than in WP 2.0.6, since that version popped up a little HTML window as a separate window, where this has it as a tab.

Now, let me complain about LISHost service. Nahh, not really…I don’t have any complaints about LISHost service. I may disagree with Blake Carver about the future for public libraries (”may” is an understatement), but he runs one heck of a hosting service.

I see other library folks migrating to LISHost–and even more folks migrating to WordPress. I’m trying to remember the last time I saw a liblogger migrate away from WordPress… (well, except to move from a WordPress-hosted blog to a WordPress blog on their own domain).

Enough blather. For once, I’m up to date. Well, heck, my new(ish) computer is a Core2 Duo, so that’s fairly up to date also. And it’s maroon–that’s something not everybody can say.

Oh, I just noticed something else that makes me happy: “Uncategorized” is no longer tagged by default, so I don’t have to remember to unclick it. Nice.

Now, about tags…well, not this week, not on this blog.

Here’s this week’s post at PLN Highlights — and if you haven’t signed up for the PALINET Leadership Network, now is a great time to do so, and to become an active participant. There may be readers of Walt at Random who have no intention of ever being any sort of leader within libraries, not even thought leaders or professional leaders–but surely there aren’t many!

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What’s new at the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

• We tend to share success stories–but we’re not so good at sharing failures (or “learning experiences” or “qualified successes” or “premature innovations”). That’s true even though we may learn more from clearly-described missteps than we do from successes. Learning from failure combines a post by Meredith Farkas, some of the comments on that post, a related post by Alan Kirk Gray–and a new page on the Library Success Wiki. We’d all benefit from your learning experiences; can we do better at sharing?
• In Light my fire: thoughts on the Kindle, Villanova’s Joe Lucia comments on his own experiences using Amazon’s Kindle and considers the nature of text and books.
• Leader’s Digest for March 2008 brings together summaries and extracts from more than twenty articles on aspects of leadership and other current events. Some of the elements in this collation will turn up elsewhere over the next days and weeks, but they’re in place now for a good overview–as are 18 earlier Leader’s Digest compilations and conference reports.

There’s a Feedback and suggestions page for PLN–and each of the dozen Topics (primary categories) also has a Feedback and suggestions page. There’s also a Site Feedback Forum. All of which is to say: We welcome and need your feedback–and if adding to one of those pages or starting a topic in the forum is too public for your taste, feel free to send your feedback to crawford@palinet.org or waltcrawford@gmail.com.

This exercise in randomness began three years ago today, not at all by accident. (Technically, I wrote the first post earlier…WordPress lets you schedule posts for a future date. They don’t let you go backward; only Gmail does that, and then only on certain days…)

So how’s it going since last year?

Prior to this post, the blog has a total of 729 posts and 2,480 comments. I’m still proud of the comment-to-post ratio: More than three comments per post is on the high side for liblogs, if not for Big Deal Bloggers. And I’m still bemused at the partially-random nature of which posts get lots of comments. For example, of the small handful of posts with more than 20 comments, most were “on topic”–but the one with the most comments of all was about as random as you can get: 27 comments on Tri-tip: A food question.

I guess I’m slowing down a little (not that the last year has been troublesome or anything…): There were slightly fewer posts than in the second year (210 as compared to 247) and significantly fewer comments (733 as compared to 936).

Readership? At the end of the first year (that is, for March 2006), the blog was up to 1,064 sessions/day and 2,370 pageviews/day.

Some alternate months for this past year, compared to the second year:

• May: 2007 = 1,693 sessions/day, 2,072 pageviews/day, 10,001 unique IP addresses. (2006: 1,254, 3,001, 6,930.)
• July: 2007 = 1,712 sessions, 2,546 pageviews, 8,194 IP addresses. (2006: 1,215, 2,549, 6,223.)
• September: 2007 = 1,320 sessions, 2,185 pageviews, 6,456 IP addresses. (2006: 1,219, 2,393, 6,303.)
• November: 2007 = 1,295 sessions, 2,233 pageviews, 5,839 IP addresses. (2006: 1,389, 2,433, 6,639.)
• January: 2008 = 1,362 sessions, 2,604 pageviews, 6,139 IP addresses. (2007: 1,445, 3,328, 7,173.)
• March: 2008 = 1,443 sessions, 2,462 pageviews, 7,115 IP addresses. (2007: 1,628, 3,298, 8,823.)

Over the past year, some 58,762 different IP addresses have visited this blog for a total of 541,816 sessions–and 911,817 pageviews. Last year, I was a little astonished that the IP count for this blog was almost three times that of Cites & Insights for its first nine months on LISHost. This year, it appears that C&I is making up ground: It shows 36,805 IP addresses for the last 12 months, about two-thirds of the W.a.r. total.

If you look at year-to-year trends, if this was a “brand” blog, I might be upset: It’s trending slightly downward year to year. But this isn’t a “brand” blog, and I’m thrilled at there being almost a million pageviews for a blog that ain’t all that much.

As for subscribers…since I didn’t force everyone to resubscribe via Feedburner, I really don’t know how many there are overall. As of mid-March, I had 510 Bloglines subscriptions and 192 Google Reader subscriptions (for one feed, at least); since, of the Feedburner subscriptions I do have (only 77 of the 510 Bloglines, pretty much all of the Google Reader), about three-quarters are for those two readers, I’m inclined to believe there are between 800 and 900 subscriptions in all. That’s probably about the same as a year ago.
It looks as though readership probably reached its peak in the blog’s second year. So did my blogging, for that matter, so I’m not surprised. I’m inclined to believe that blogging in general may have peaked in 2007, and that liblogs might have peaked then, but that’s just a belief.

“Peaked” doesn’t mean “and is now falling apart,” to be sure. I’m not going away, and I continue to be astonished at the number of people who apparently read and respond to what I write here. Neither are liblogs going away (or library blogs, for that matter).

Enough metablogging for one day. (Did I mention: buy my books and join the PALINET Leadership Network?)