Walt at Random

Available now: Cites & Insights 10:8, July 2010.

This 40-page issue (PDF as usual, with most but not all the sections available as HTML separates) has a variety of features to keep you entertained or informed on your long flights to & from ALA–and it’s well worth reading even if you’re not attending (or live near the District of Columbia).

What’s here:

The CD-ROM Project…pp. 1-4

The start of a “digital medium archaeology project”–taking a few dozen of the best title CD-ROMs (that is, CD-ROMs that are extended books and multimedia carriers, not just software) from 1994-2000 and seeing whether they’ll work on a contemporary Windows 7 system, whether they still have much to offer, whether they’re still available (as is or updated) and, if not, what we’ve lost–and what’s readily available on the web that appears roughly equivalent. For starters, we have two astronomical CDs and two art-related CDs…

The Zeitgeist: One Facebook to Rule Them All?…pp. 4-22

A range of commentaries on the December 2009 and April 2010 Facebook privacy changes, including some pre-December items and a few notes on the current situation. Commentaries include some by librarians and a wide range by others–including a group of first-rate commentaries by danah boyd and a ReadWriteWeb piece that gets my coveted middle-finger salute for asininity in the service of (almost certainly false) gengen.

Interesting & Peculiar Products…pp. 22-29

Ten products (or product commentaries) and five group reviews–but some of the product notes are more essay than description, including a non-elegy for OQO and “Catching up with the OLPC XO.”

Offtopic Perspective: Mystery Collection Part 2…pp. 29-35

The second of ten segments of this massive 250-movie set, including three great flicks, three near-classics and another dozen worthwhile films. You get cheating wives, crooked electronics geniuses, a blind detective, a sexy ghost…and that’s just in the first two of six discs.

My Back Pages…pp. 35-40

As always, this chunk’o'snark is a bonus for “print readers”–those who download the whole PDF. Ten items, only half of them audio-related.

This is the final issue sponsored by the Library Society of the World. Now the uncertainty begins…

The June San Francisco Chronicle Magazine (the Chron only does its own glossy-magazine section once a month, a very sensible decision–the weekly book section and review/entertainment section are separate anyway) leads off with an editor’s column with the same title as this post.

It’s not all that long (465 words–shorter than this 558-word post); you can read the whole thing yourself, and look at the amusing picture. The theme: Meredith May (the writer) has been

getting into polite arguments with friends who have been posting pictures of me on Facebook and Flickr that I would never want you to see.

They’re not nude shots or anything like that–but they were “taken in private moments with friends before the world was wide and covered in a Web.” May doesn’t think it’s up to other people–even her friends–to decide which parts of her own history should be made public.

She notes a specific incident–she’s going to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to talk about her story on girl slavery in Nepal and, checking Facebook in the airport, finds that an old friend has psoted pictures of her drinking and posing at high school house parties…

May doesn’t quite understand people’s impulse to overshare their own stuff–”but over-sharing someone other than yourself without his or her permission is baffling.” And, indeed, since we learn that any candid shot is likely to turn up on the web, spontaneity could be suffering.

I have had parties at my house with a dozen of my lovely artist friends, and nine will bring a camera and start shooting. The whole reason for having your homies over for a party is that you can let down your hair and dance on the counter if you want to. But I’m more cautious now. The joie de vivre, the carpe diem, the being alive part of living – is tempered.

In our haste to document and share everything, are we losing what it means to live in the moment?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but this editorial certainly resonates with me. I’ll take it a step further: “Agreeing” that a picture can be posted isn’t always being entirely happy about it. Coercion is a strong word for the process that takes place, but it’s a form of social pressure–the desire not to be thought a complete killjoy.

There are pictures of me on the web (oddly enough, they show up in Google but not on Bing) that I could do without. One of them has a caption about what a good sport I was. “Good sport” in this case really means “didn’t feel he could avoid this without looking like a killjoy.”

I know that my own behavior at, say, conference receptions is now much more circumspect than it might have been in the past, that I’m much less willing to don silly hats or assume silly poses or hold up silly signs. A few years ago, I would have assumed that a few folks would have gotten little laughs out of the silliness as captured in photos. Now, I assume that the silly pictures will live forever on the web and in search-engine results–and while they can’t really do me any harm, I’d just as soon not, thank you.

So does this make me a killjoy? Maybe so. Such is life. Apparently I’m not the only one…

Two miniposts for the price of one!

Gold star

I would be remiss if I did not mention that this here blog received a gold star from Salem Press in its library blog thingie, particularly since they were very quick to move this blog from Public Library Blogs (!) to General Blogs (I was hoping for Quirky, but you can’t always get what you want) after I let them know…

(There seems to be no shortage of links to the Salem Press list, so the lack of one here shouldn’t be an issue.)

Quick expert advice from librarians about web tools

Here’s an easy two-part test for modern librarians–or, better yet, just those who are considered web specialists. They’re honest questions, and presumably y’all should be able to answer them on the spot, in the comments:

1. I have a fully-formatted book ms. done using Word 2007, but also in PDF. How do I convert it to epub (without DRM), retaining as much of the formatting as possible? I even have Calibre, if that helps.
2. OK, so I have the new Facebook privacy tools now, but I just looked at my Privacy settings and I don’t understand what’s going on here:

Note: This is a straight screen capture, cropped but with no other changes. You may have to scroll right to see what I’m really interested in.

To wit: What does “Other” mean? How can I find out?

I await responses with some interest. Based on other discussions, I assume that any employable web services librarian should have answers…

Right up front: I’ve been guilty of this before and probably will be again.

As I was working on a Zeitgeist piece, I looked at a nicely-done 1,300-word essay. On a national newspaper website. About one aspect of social networking. With some interesting and slightly controversial things to say, some of them certainly open to argument.

The very first comment detailed the length of the essay–how many words, how many characters, how many sentences, average number of letters per word, length of longest sentence–and ended with a note suggesting that there was no content, or at least that the commenter hadn’t read it.

Understand: The commenter didn’t disagree with what was being said–the commenter was trashing the essay based on its length (apparently). Several other commenters offered variants of the old “tl; dr” brushoff–that is, “too long; didn’t read.” (I rarely see that on liblogs–maybe library folks actually have more than ten-second attention spans, or at least believe that “tl; dr” leaves one open to accusations of subliteracy.)

I’m not going to argue that people damn well should read longer essays. After all, 1,300 words is just a bit less than two pages of C&I, or three or four pages of a typical trade paperback, or one-third of a typical In the library post, or nine Friendfeed posts. If that’s so much text it makes your brain explode or your eyes hurt, who am I to argue.

dr? dc

But, well…

If you didn’t read the article or post, why are you commenting on it?

Equally, if you read the article or post and have nothing to say about the topic or the substance of the post or article… why comment on it?

Because you know the writer hangs on your every word so much that she will at least appreciate knowing you dropped by? Because you’re so damned important that you must respond? Because you’re a frustrated graffitist? Because you have no life?

I think all of usmany of us do this sort of thing–or equally vapid responses–once in a while. (Yes, that’s a preventive strikeout: I was about to commit a universalism, and I damn well should know better.)

It works both ways. I waste time on FriendFeed. (I also use FriendFeed, and maintain friendships on FriendFeed, and gain valuable insights on FriendFeed. And sometimes I waste time on FriendFeed–the activities aren’t mutually exclusive.) As many categories as I’ve hidden, as rarely as I Follow anybody new, I still see dozens of posts (mostly from Twitter, but not all) of the “what’ll I have for breakfast / I just had X for dinner / I just posted from Y” flavor, stuff that for me is almost exclusively in the “who cares?” category–just as some of my posts here fall into the “who cares?” category for some, maybe most, occasionally all readers.

I don’t believe I’ve ever found any reason to comment on a “what I had for breakfast” FF item by asking who cares or saying “don’t clutter up the feed with that crap” or anything of the sort. If I don’t care, why would I take the time to comment? (And, for that matter, if I don’t care, how does that imply that nobody else could possibly care?) I’m dead certain I’ve left equivalent responses on some posts and FF messages, however, and I’m sure I will in the future.

And I’ll be (trivially) wrong to do so.

As of that last period, this post contains 570 words. That’s probably too long for some of you–but I suspect that people who can’t handle 600, 800, or 6,000 words aren’t among my audience anyway.

By the way: I’m tagging this “Net Media”–but I no longer believe that term has much of any meaning, and I’m also doubtful about “Social Media.” That’s an essay I’ll be writing one of these days, probably in C&I. 636 words. My work here is done (645).

The Spring 2010 C&I essay “The Zeitgeist: hypePad and buzzkill” includes several notes taken from The Industry Standard–a site that I still had bookmarked, even if it was a pale shadow of the wonderful trade magazine The Industry Standard, which was great reading, fat, interesting…and overextended itself during the dotcom boom, going under as that boom went bust.

That pale shadow is now itself dead, as of a couple months ago (I don’t remember exactly when). It was absorbed into InfoWorld…sort of.

Sort of?

Yep. I had a number of items from The Industry Standard tagged in delicious, for use in future C&I essays. I probably still do. Today I wanted to use a couple of them for part of an Interesting & Peculiar Products essay.

The delicious link leads to InfoWorld. Not to the article.

Searching for the articles, by any keywords I could think of (e.g., those in the title), comes up empty.

I can’t swear the articles aren’t there…but they’re not findable. Which means they might as well not be there.

This is a shame. There was still some good coverage there. And, as far as I can tell, it’s just gone.

Despite the ambitious title, this is purely some early thoughts (that might eventually lead to a Cites & Insights piece–or a column elsewhere–but “eventually” probably means “next year sometime”). (Read on: I have a question at the end.)

Just this week, I’ve seen three very long FriendFeed threads (participating in one of them) that struck me as particularly interesting in terms of implications for issues, reputations and connections. In two of the cases, my own feelings about specific people changed significantly over the course of the discussions; in one, my existing feelings about a category of people strengthened. In all three, the sheer acceleration of FriendFeed threads (and hashtagged Twitter posts, I guess–but I don’t currently use Twitter) strikes me as both refreshing and a little disorienting. I’d use the word “dangerous,” but I think the only real danger is to complacency and artificial reputation, and that’s OK by me.

(Yes, it’s going to be Another Rambling Crawford Post. I don’t have time to hone it down to 450 or 800 well-chosen words; I want to get back to working on But Still They Blog, now that I’ve finished the draft for one humongous Making it Work essay for the December C&I.)

On one hand: OMG! FF’s Dead!

Let’s take the silliest one first–or at least silly to me. Facebook purchased FriendFeed. That’s probably resulted in tens of thousands of messages on FF and elsewhere, including some panicky threads from people and groups who’ve come to rely on FF for their community of interest and fear that FB will shut it down and they’ll have to move elsewhere. I’m not really addressing that particular kerfuffle. (I’ll suggest that if you really depend on a sustained and sustainable community of interest, “you get what you pay for” continues to be a relevant saying, but I’ll let it go at that.)

Nope, I’m addressing the secondary kerfuffle, mostly among Hot Tech Types and Hot Social Marketing Types, after some of the FF people now employed by FB made it clear that FB has no intention of shutting down FF–but, at least implicitly, that new-feature development for FF may not be speedy.

Some people found this reassuring. OK, I found it reassuring: I’m finding FF to be worthwhile as a set of overlapping communities of interest and, with Pause always firmly in place, a social medium that I can handle via occasional visits. I really don’t much care whether any new features are added to FF (I don’t use some of the existing ones); I want it to be fast, stable, and not so popular that I spend all my time finding new categories to Hide.

Personal case: On FF, I currently have 100 subscriptions–geez, how did it get so high, when I thought it was still 77–and 131 subscribers, including 62 that I don’t subscribe to. I can keep up with that, probably spending half an hour to 45 minutes a day on two split across two or three sessions. On FaceBook, where I’m much less active, I have 199 “friends,” a necessarily reciprocal arrangement–and there’s no way I can keep up with the wall in the 10-15 minutes a day I’m willing to devote to it, so I really only look at my family list of 8-10 and a “libclose” list of a couple dozen. I don’t use FB for professional issues at all; I do use FF for that.

Then there were the others–for whom not having rapid development of new features is equivalent to being dead. One social marketing hotshot said he couldn’t be bothered to “develop his network” (which I read as “getting followers for My Brand,” perhaps inappropriately) on a system that wasn’t busy adding new glitzfeatures, and would probably go elsewhere. To which I can only say: Good. For some of us, the point of social networking is social networking and communities of interest–not personal marketing and branding.

In this case, the effect of the accelerated discussion–”accelerated” over what you’d find on a blog (unless it’s something like John Scalzi’s Whatever) or a list–was to verify impressions I already had about many A-listers. Would you turn away from a Craftsman hammer because Sears hasn’t added rhinestones to it or, in fact, changed the design in years? Probably not–but some people don’t see online tools that way.

On the other hand: The trainwreck

There’s this special organization that includes a bunch of librarians and a bunch of other people. And there’s a move afoot to change the name of the organization. It’s a change that, to some librarians, seems to devalue librarian, to other folks seems high-handed and to still others as a great move…away from that dusty old “L” word to a series of buzz words that people supposedly respect more. I won’t say more about the specific organization or change, since it’s not my battle. What I have seen, though:

• On one of the association’s apparently-official blogs, the word “hater” was used to refer to those who opposed the name change.
• Apparently, one of the Great Organizational Gurus and frequent speakers sent out email that basically labeled name-change opponents as unprofessional.
• Twitter and FriendFeed had (and, I suspect, continue to have) lots of comments–mostly opposed. A number of people were really unhappy about the tone of some of the pro-change stuff (see the first two bullets).
• Some pro-name-change folks seemed to feel that it’s OK for a pro-change bigshot to dismiss opponents as unprofessional, but not OK for opponents to say bad things about the bigshot.

Again, this isn’t my battle. I already left one association around the time a president said that one of its problems was having too many librarians (a different association, one that never did use the L-word), so I’m used to seeing librarians derided by people who should know better. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, even as a non-librarian.

In this case, the acceleration and ease of threading has exposed some issues that were probably bubbling beneath the surface; this is all to the good (I believe) but certainly makes some people uncomfortable. (Could LITA actually pass a dues increase without a member ballot in 2009? I suspect–and hope–not, but back when the Board of Directors took what I felt was high-handed action, there was no good way to get fast, broad responses. Things have indeed changed.)

I believe this particular controversy has damaged the reputations of a few folks. I know it’s clarified my feelings in one case (but not fundamentally changed them) and slightly lowered my estimation in a couple of other cases (where I admired people but without much specific knowledge). And I believe that wouldn’t have happened without the relatively transparent acceleration of the medium.

On the gripping hand: Rockstars!

[Credit to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle for this particular version of a third hand.]

Leaving out some details here because I’m too lazy to go look it up, someone posted a (Twitter?) comment to FF having to do with librarians being, or not being, rockstars in their community…and being a little snarky about the comment. A fast and varied discussion ensued, bringing in the author of the comment and many others–and included a bunch of stuff about whether “rockstar status” is either desirable, is something that every librarian should aspire to, and the like.

But this discussion was far from a trainwreck. David Lee King, who I believe made the Twitter comment, engaged in the discussion in an open manner, even recognizing that the term might not be appropriate in general. Within a day or so, and more than 150 comments, things moved from a terminological dispute to a serious discussion of whether and to what extent all librarians need to be public figures–and, in fact, the difference between doing your job (but avoiding attention) and being complacent and in a rut.

Yes, the conversation got edgy at times–and I don’t believe everybody arrived at a common understanding or agreement. Nor do I think that’s a necessary or always desirable outcome of a conversation. I do believe most of us understood more about what others were trying to say, and why.

In this case, I think a trainwreck may have been avoided–and I do remember a vaguely similar situation, on a blog, that did turn into somewhat of a trainwreck over time. I’m not sure whether the shorter messages required by FriendFeed made the difference, or whether it was simple acceleration, or whether people were simply more off-the-cuff and open in this environment. Maybe a combination; maybe something else.

In this case, I’ll be specific: While I suspect my attitudes about David Lee King and Joshua Neff will always be complicated, this particular thread makes me regard both of them considerably more positively. Doesn’t mean I won’t shoot the sheriff (metaphorically–don’t call the FBI!) if the need arises; doesn’t mean I won’t make fun of DLK. But all in all, I found it an encouraging conversation. (I just read through it again. I still do.) (And, just as a note, Steve L. didn’t gain in my estimation from this discussion mostly because he already ranks pretty high. Ditto John D., who managed to connect the two threads. Ditto Jenica. And others I won’t mention.)

Geez, Walt, 1500 words and still no point?

Well, I said it was a ramble–one that might, eventually, become a thinkpiece, but not on this blog and not this month. I think something is happening here, something interesting, and while I may not know exactly what it is, I’m getting little points of light around the edges. I’m not giving up blogs or ejournals (or lists or email…), and I’m still not sure Twitter would work for me (tried it, didn’t like it, might someday try it again, might not) but the nature of FF as a high-speed conversational tool for communities of interest is intriguing.

But let’s get to a sort-of point, one that raises a question:

• It’s possible that FF (and Twitter and maybe even FB) yield more honest conversations because we perceive them as being more ephemeral than blog comments and email posts and…
• If so–if you’re more open and honest there because you don’t think it’s as much a part of Your Permanent Record (down there a few pages past the time you snickered at your first-grade teacher)–then it may be inappropriate for people like me to snatch up whole chunks of FF threads (or Twitter hashtag search results) and use them within commentary articles, the way we (I) use blog posts and the comments on those posts.

The question:

Do you think it’s inappropriate or undesirable for your FriendFeed comments to be used in secondary discussions in the same way your blog posts and comments might be?

Comments–here or on FriendFeed? (I’ll post that question as a separate FF comment as well.)

Given everything else that’s going on (read: given distractions and a couple of legitimate projects) the only way to make this blog seem alive at all may be a methodology I’ve seen elsewhere, one that may be legitimate given the change in blogging platform and likely turnover of readers.
To wit, blasts from the pasts, from the archive, golden oldie–reusing part or all of an old post that might still be worthwhile or amusing.
Here’s one from the very first day of this blog, April 1, 2005–although it was the third post.

The one true encyclopedia?

I see one immediate use for this space: items I printed for possible use in Cites & Insights that turn out to be a bit too odd or difficult to use there–and, as a post later this weekend will show (I hope), topics I plan to cover that deserve a head’s-up earlier.
I’ve got several more items in the unending saga of Wikipedia in the Net Media folder, but as I look at “The political importance of the Wikipedia Project : the only true Encyclopedia of our days”, I think it deserves separate comment.
That comment might boil down to “Wha?” or “The French, they will be French.” Or it might not.
Jean-Baptiste Soufron subtitles this four-page essay “Wikipedia : Towards a new electronic Enlightenment Era ?” (Those extra spaces around punctuation are in the original; I can only assume they’re important for some reason. I quote the first three paragraphs:

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” — Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
I am convinced that Wikipedia is the only real Encyclopedia of our days because it’s the only one that relies on a real political goal : to pursue freedom over content and information.
On the other hand, books like the Encyclopedia Britannica are nothing else than simple knowledge compendiums without any political soul and usurping the term “Encyclopedia”.

Scratching your head yet? I love that first paragraph: Wales could give Michael Hart lessons in grandiosity. “The sum of all human knowledge.” Sure, Jimmy. Never mind that.
Were you aware that something is only an encyclopedia if it has a “political soul”? No, neither was I. Ah, but after trashing Robert McHenry and explaining why Wikipedia is inherently superior in every respect, we get the real stuff here: Diderot and d’Alembert of the French Encyclopedie, of the mid-18th century, had a strong political basis for that encyclopedia. So, “a real encyclopedia should be a place directed toward a political project of its own…”
What’s that you say? The word “encyclopedia” has Greek roots? According to Merriam-Webster, it was used in English as early as 1644–a full century before the French Encyclopedie?
That may be factually true, but I’d guess it’s irrelevant to Soufron. Once the French took over the word for a definition of their own, it is uncivilized for anyone else to give it any other meaning, even if that usage preceded the French usage. The Diderot and d’Alembert effort was “the original encyclopedia,” and nothing else can claim to be an encyclopedia unless it has a similarly political end.
Wikipedia’s goal? “The political goal of freedom over content and information.” Read that carefully: freedom is more important to Wikipedia than the actual content.
My only real comment here is: “I laugh in your general direction.”

Tiny little update

“Unending saga of Wikipedia” indeed! By April 2005, I’d published three essays related to Wikipedia and mentioned it possibly half a dozen times in all. Since then?
Three more mentions in later 2005. Four in 2006, including one major essay. Four more in 2007, including two major essays. Four more in 2008, and although there wasn’t a major essay on Wikipedia, there was one on Citizendium (also mentioned in some other articles). This year? So far, three mentions, one essay–and half a dozen source items for the next go-round. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s changing (or at least being more up-front about how editing actually works)–and, cross fingers, I’ve still managed to stay obscure enough to avoid an (English) entry.
Of course I use Wikipedia…with caution. And I’m so happy that, in 2009, few people use the “if you think something’s wrong with Wikipedia, it’s up to you to fix it” handwave that was so widely used around 2005 to deflect any and all criticism of the project.

I would add “…doing it wrong,” pace Randy Newman, but I wrote that post a few months ago.
And I was just pointed to a blog post (by someone I wouldn’t normally follow, but there’s a family relationship) about this person’s use of Twitter and someone else suggesting what tweets should and shouldn’t do. The blogger had an appropriate response, stated much more politely than I might state it–in essence, (a) there’s more than one way to use Twitter, (b) if you don’t like my tweets, feel free not to follow me.
In other words, someone proposed their version of The Rules for Twitter, and this blogger wasn’t buying them. To which I can only say, Hooray.

(There are seemingly endless sets of The Rules for blogging and other social media, and lately The Rules almost always seem to posit that we use these media to Build Our Brands–that the only legitimate motivation for a blog is gaining lots of readers and mindshare. “Pfft” is way too polite a response and my two-word response violates my own standards for this blog, so…)

But maybe I’m doing it wrong…

A few months ago–10 days after that earlier post, apparently (that is, on March 21, 2009)–I started using delicious. (I hadn’t seen the point of it, since I don’t really build an online bibliography–but after some other people were talking about it, I realized that I do have a use for it: to flag pages that could be source material either for the Library Leadership Network or for Cites & Insights.)
It’s working well in that regard. Instead of printing out a leadsheet (the first page, assuming the source plays nicely with Firefox) for later reference, I tag the page–and then, when I think I’m likely to be working on a topic, I’ll go through that tag, delete a few pages that I’m not going to use, and print leadsheets for others, then use delicious as a home for finding those items as I’m writing about them. Right now, there are 549 tagged items.
So far, so good–but if there’s a set of norms for delicious as a social medium, I suspect I’ve been violating it all along, and it’s getting worse.
To wit:

• Some of my tags are meaningless to almost everybody else–e.g., miw, cifeedback, ir, mbp, lln, tqt. (Long-time C&I readers can probably guess what miw and mbp and tqt stand for.) Others are obscure but may make sense to a few other people, e.g. oa, oca, gbs–that is, open access, the Open Content Alliance, and Google Book Search/Google Book Settlement.
• I delete items once I’ve written about them.
• The newest violation of The Rules: When I do print off leadsheets, I modify the tag so that I know I’ve printed off leadsheets and won’t try to do it again. So, for example, 21 items tagged “deathprint” (which most people could probably figure out as “death of print”) became “deathprintx”–and then disappeared as I worked them into an essay.
• I have yet to pay any attention to “popular” or “recent” tags–and I rarely pay much attention to the set of proposed tags for an item that come from everybody else.

In other words, I’m not a very “social” user of delicious. Such is life.
(If there’s one change in delicious I’d love to see but regard as unreasonable, it’s this: It would be lovely if delicious recognized that a URL was part of Bloglines or an equivalent service and pointed out that you’re not really tagging a page you can get back to. OK, so I’m an idiot sometimes…it’s just so easy to click on the square of squares up on the toolbar and tag away, not realizing that I haven’t clicked through to an actual post.)

Maybe they’re doing it wrong…

I encountered something today that, while minor, suggests that I’m not the only one with “norm” problems.
To wit: I wanted to unsubscribe from someone else’s Friendfeed account; they’re not really a friend or even acquaintance, and I found that 90% of their updates, while perfectly charming, were simply noise for me.
And I couldn’t find any way to do it. The mouseover menu doesn’t include Unsubscribe. I clicked on the person’s name, which brought up their profile–and there was no Unsubscribe option there either. Wha?
I temporarily dealt with it by removing them from all lists, including Home. Later, Iris Jastram noted (on FriendFeed, of course) that some FriendFeed styles actually hide the options from the profile–the Unsubscribe option still works, but you have to guess at where to click since there’s no text or box.
Went back, clicked on the place where I thought the Unsubscribe option should be, and got confirmation that I was unsubscribed.
This, to me, really does violate the spirit of FriendFeed–which, in this case, I’d summarize as “easy come, easy go.” It’s easy to subscribe to someone (unless they have a private feed), it’s easy to hide (most) aspects of overactive feeds without actually getting rid of the users…and it’s easy to unsubscribe from someone if situations change. Only not so much, if they’re allowed to hide that option.
This is really a FriendFeed issue, though. My subscription to Person X is part of my settings. It’s only secondarily part of Person X’s profile.
Minor stuff, to be sure. And I still don’t buy into The Rules…any more than I’m ready to add some badge to my blog. (Ah, but that’s another topic, one I might not get to for a while, maybe never.)

What we have here is a contemporary item that reminds me of a several-year-old backstory. I’ll give you the item first; then, I’ll quote the backstory.

The item

Consumerist, that sometimes-good, sometimes-absurd compilation of consumer complaints and snarky comments (does Consumer Reports really understand what it purchased when it purchased this?), has a followup item yesterday: “Dave Carroll launches second ‘United breaks guitars’ song and video.” It links to a YouTube video of the song.
Go watch. I’ll wait.
Oh, and if you hadn’t already done so, go to the earlier post from July 2009 and click through to the YouTube video of that song.
The Consumerist issue here–that United baggage handlers (apparently) wrecked Carroll’s $3,500 Taylor guitar during a change of planes at O’Hare, and that in a year of discussing the situation with United he could never get them to take responsibility for fixing the guitar–is interesting, but perhaps secondary.

Given that Carroll has now said he doesn’t want United’s money, but would be happy if they’d donate the amount to a charity, it’s pretty clear that the original problem is a little secondary to him as well. There may also be aspects of this story, on one side or another, that haven’t appeared on Consumerist

What I get out of it is a little different, and for once the post title is also the legitimate lead sentence for the post, when prefaced with “With the rise of social media or the read/write web…”
”’Channels are easy, content is hard.”’
Which is to say:

• Any idiot can put a “song” or a “video” on YouTube.
• Don’t like YouTube? There are lots of other choices–channels are easy.
• For little or no money, your homemade media has as good a shot at worldwide success as any professional effort. It’s a revolution!

OK, so I don’t believe that third one any more than most of you do (or maybe you do?). It’s pretty unusual for homemade media to achieve “worldwide success” at the level of, say, Ron Howard or Queen Latifah or Don Brown or any of those…
Part of that is distribution and promotion–but another part of it is talent.
I rarely listen to full “user-generated” songs or watch full “user-generated” videos on YouTube or elsewhere, even ones related to my field, because most of them aren’t very good. Maybe I’m choosing the wrong ones, and it’s true that I prefer singing to yelling, but most of what I’ve seen is “amateur hour”–not just amateur (done for love, and can be extremely high quality) but lacking in talent.
To me, maybe because I’ve been writing for a long time, it’s harder to write a good song than it is to write a good article; it’s harder to sing a song well than it is to…well, write a good article; and it’s much harder to bring together all the skills required to prepare a competent video.
That made these two songs breaths of fresh air: To my ear, at least, Carroll is a talented writer, singer and musician–and the videography is generally good in the first song, much better in the sequel. I enjoyed the songs as songs, all the way through. (OK, they’re not whatever the newest wave is. Maybe I should move to Nova Scotia? )

The backstory

Turns out I’ve written about this before. The following column appeared, possibly in slightly different form (this version is what was submitted; I haven’t corrected for editorial work), as “Rich Media is Hard” in the May 2006 EContent Magazine, in my ongoing “discontent” column:

Heard about the Read/Write Web? It’s an instant cliché most econtent professionals need to be aware of: The growing importance of user-generated content–and the preference of many users for content coming from other users.
I’ve discussed this before (October 2001 and February 2003), back when it was an interesting new trend. Now it’s a phenomenon. I spend more web time reading “nonprofessional” material than I do reading pro content and I’m sure I’m not the only one. It’s a considerable change from traditional media, where the sheer cost of publication and distribution limit most of the field to the pros. I’m not sure it’s the kind of change people expected.
Rich media is one of this issue’s themes, and rich media may be where you as professionals still have an edge over “amateur” users. I could be wrong, but I’m inclined to believe this principle is likely to hold true for a while: The richer the medium, the more people will prefer professional content.
The reason is simple: This stuff is hard.
That’s true for traditional media. One person with an idea, literacy, and time can write a book. Fewer people have the skills to write music or produce paintings that will please listeners and viewers. But those are nothing compared to truly rich media, the net equivalent of television or the movies. That’s just plain hard. I believe the principle holds equally true in net media, if the goal is to produce something that will satisfy the reader or viewer.
Any idiot with moderate literacy can write a blog (and quite a few of them do, along with many sophisticated, knowledgeable writers). Recent web developments eliminate tool complexity as a barrier. If you can write, you can create a blog or a wiki or add to a collaborative review space. Most people can write well enough to submit posts or reviews that a few other people will want to read.
Podcasts are almost as easy to generate as blogs–but you have to be comfortable speaking to an unknown audience in a coherent, organized manner. That’s harder for many of us than informal writing. I don’t doubt that there are tens of thousands of amateur podcasts–but I’ll bet the continuing audience for amateur podcasts is at most one-tenth as large as for blogs.
Podcasts aren’t particularly rich media. Even vlogs (videoblogs) aren’t really rich media, not if they’re basically talking into a webcam and mike and recording the results for playback. But they’re enough richer to discourage many people–quite apart from the facts that many of us would find videoblogging uncomfortably close to public speaking, don’t necessarily want our speaking mugs on the web for all to watch, and may not even own webcams.
Sites such as OurMedia have made it easier to get vlogs and other amateur rich media out there for people to see. A search on “vlog” in Yahoo Video yields a few thousand entries. But are people willing to watching amateur talking faces for very long? I suspect not. I’ll guess the continuing audience for amateur vlogs (excluding amateur porn) is another order of magnitude smaller than for podcasts, partly because it’s just plain harder to do a satisfactory video.
Even for true rich media, epitomized by TV programs and movies, the financial and distribution barriers to entry have come down. You can buy a digital videocam for a few hundred dollars, a high-definition videocam for $2,000, and pretty good nonlinear video editing software for $100–and either OurMedia or the Internet Archive will host appropriately-licensed video for free.
When Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle covered the Sundance Festival four years ago, he called high-definition video the best trend of that year. His final sentence: “In the future, anyone with talent will be able to make films.”
Consider those three key words: Anyone with talent–or, realistically, anyone with talent and the resources to gather people with the other talents you need to make a movie or truly engrossing video work. Creating a believable story in moving visual media is much harder than writing a book or posting a listenable podcast or producing a readable blog.
Point a webcam out a window: Easy but usually uninteresting. Write a screenplay, find a cast, scout locations (and build the ones you can’t find), assemble the crew, film it all, edit the results (and add music), and revise it after test screenings–oh, and pay for the whole thing. That’s moviemaking, and it’s a complex way to tell a story.
For now, pros have the edge when it comes to truly rich media. I think that edge will hold for a while just because rich media is hard–and there’s too much of it out there to tolerate badly-done amateur stuff for very long. It’s an edge; can you make the most of it?

What’s changed since 2006? There are lots more free and cheap ways to distribute rich media. There’s a lot more of it. Equipment costs continue to drop–I think you can get flipcams with HD capabilities for under $200.
Unfortunately (in my opinion), some lacks of talent can be masked: With “correcting” microphones, we may not even know whether some “professional” singers are capable of singing in tune, or whether some of them know what “in tune” even means.
The need for talent? Still there. And still relatively rare. Which made these songs such a pleasure. Glad Carroll got his guitar fixed.

A few days ago, on this increasingly infrequently-updated blog, I posted a little musing about FaceBook’s acquisition of FriendFeed (FF).
Since then, I’ve seen one or two other FF users offer similar comments on FF itself–and a whole bunch of milling around looking for alternatives after the apparently inevitable and soon-to-come shutdown of FF. Christina even wrote a response of sorts. (Hmm. Her response never showed up as a trackback on my post–is there some special rule for inter-SB trackbacks? No problem, really: The previous incarnation of this blog didn’t allow trackbacks at all.)

Expanding on my peculiar calmness

Lots of people, most of them presumably more web-savvy and, as researchers, possibly more intelligent than I am, are dead-on convinced that FB will kill off FF at the first opportunity. I’ve tried to follow the reasoning. Here’s the logic, as far as I can figure it out:
Given that: Google buys lots of services and always shuts them down.

Well, that’s certainly true. That’s why Blogger disappeared in 2004, Picasa disappeared in 2005 and, most important, YouTube was shut down in early 2007.
What’s that you say? You thought Blogger, Picasa and YouTube were still available? And, for that matter, that Postini is still operating? Or that any number of other acquisitions have been renamed or merged into other Google services in a reasonably respectful manner?
You must be mistaken. Or, just maybe, the rule for Google isn’t universally true…

And given that: What’s true for Google is true for every acquiring company.

Use Flicker lately? Of course not; Yahoo! bought it–and must have shut it down, right?

Therefore, FaceBook will shut down FriendFeed.

Based on the absolute truth of the two premises, this conclusion must be sound.

Never mind that one of FF’s founders has said it’s not likely to happen. Never mind that FB might do better on a revenue basis by adding ads to FF and leaving it as a separate service than by attempting a clumsy merger or simply shutting FF down.

Missing the point

Indeed, maybe I am missing the point. I think of FriendFeed as a tool–a good tool, for the most part, but a tool.
But I’m a “library person”–and as others have noted, library people are all over new social media like ants over honey. I’m far less social than most of the library people on FF, I believe; otherwise, I’d be back with one bunch of them on Meebo, another bunch of them on Ning, another bunch of them in (sigh) Second Life, and more…and, to be sure, big overlaps among all those bunches.

There are a lot of library folks on FaceBook as well. My brother, who’s an active FaceBook user, remarked on my 185 “friends”–far more than his count. The difference, I told him, is that I’ll generally accept any “friend” invite from a library person, and that probably accounts for three-quarters of that count. He has a lot fewer people, mostly family and actual friends, possibly a sounder approach to actually using FaceBook rather than dabbling in it as I do.

FriendFeed is, in a number of ways, a fine tool. In some other ways, it’s aggravating, but that’s true of every social medium of which I’m aware. (Yes, I use Stylish to control some of the aggravation and broadly-applied hiding to control most of the rest.) Of course, social media aren’t ideally suited to relative asocial/shy people like me anyway.
But for a fair number of people, apparently, FriendFeed is more than a tool. And if FriendFeed (or the rooms set up within FriendFeed) has become something significantly more powerful than a tool, you get a lot more upset when you think it might go away. (Or, given the number of people with no apparent insider knowledge I’m aware of who have said this flat-out, “when it absolutely is going away.”)
I can’t tell those people Don’t Panic. I certainly can’t, and wouldn’t, suggest that they’re wasting time by looking for alternatives.
I can suggest this: If you’re looking for an alternative, look for the business model.
Having a business model doesn’t assure that you won’t be purchased or otherwise go out of business.
Not having a business model substantially increase the chances that you will go out of business, one way or another.
In other words: If you love the fact that FriendFeed doesn’t have ads and doesn’t charge fees…well, think about who or what was paying the bills. (And if you come up with one pundit’s approach to digital repositories, “just plop a server down and connect it to the internet, there’s no real expense,” you deserve the results you’ll get.)

Disclaimer

As already noted, I’m a shy guy (the first letter of my Myers-Briggs never varies from “I”), and not terribly social.
My hierarchy of writing/communicating preferences is also a little odd, actually nearly unique within the library field. Setting aside the writing I do as a part-time job, here’s the hierarchy:

1. Cites & Insights, my odd not-so-little ejournal, now in its ninth year (120th more-or-less monthly issue, 2.225 million words, 2,788 pages).
2. The bimonthly columns I write for EContent and ONLINE print magazines.
3. Blog posts–here and, once in a while, on what’s left of Walt, Even Randomer
4. Notes and comments on FriendFeed, and occasional status updates on FaceBook.

If FF was closer to the top of that hierarchy, would I be more concerned? Possibly.
If I was part of a close-knit community that only communicates on FriendFeed, would I be more concerned? Possibly.
So, just to be clear, I’m not telling you (my readers, apparently still only 5% of what they used to be on the other platform) not to be concerned or take action. I’m just expanding on why I’m still calm. As always, YMMV.

I’m old. I’m nearly 64–less than a month to go. I’m part of the Silent Generation–you know, the ones who brought you the Free Speech Movement and other non-protests (yes, I was at UC Berkeley throughout those times). I’m obviously too much of an old fart, luddite and general nincompoop to understand any of this shiny stuff.

There. Better now?

Which is to say:

• It’s Monday as I write this, with all that implies.
• I’m not that old, but possibly calmer–or just slower–than when I was a mere child of, say, 55.
• And, responding to the Oh Noo! FaceBook Acquired FriendFeed! We’re Dooooomed! comments (and the news itself), I find that I’m insufficiently paranoid.

In other words, I’m not looking to flee FriendFeed just yet. (Yes, I have a FaceBook account–and yes, I have a lot more “friends” on FaceBook than I have followers on FriendFeed: that’s the way things go. Also, yes, I treat FaceBook with considerable caution, ignoring every cause/gift/thingie invitation…and probably spend more than ten times as much time on FF as on FB.)

Why so calm?

Because I don’t see the point of panic at this stage of the game, and I’m too tired to panic anyway.
After all, I haven’t spent a dime on FF. Sure, there’s “original content” there–probably hundreds of comments and posts that don’t appear anywhere else. None of which amounts to much in the grand scheme of things, or even in my odd little web universe.
The “maybe the sky’s just a little overcast, not falling” story–that is, that FB’s mostly buying FF for its talent and can readily afford to just leave FF alone–makes sense. And, you know, FF serves as a nice escape hatch for FB users who become overwhelmed with the glitz and sheer mass of FB. It probably doesn’t cost a lot to keep going, and I suspect a few modest little ads wouldn’t disturb users that much.
FB says they have no plans to shut FF down. Do I take them at their word?
Not necessarily–but if not, then what? Do I rush out to join another social medium (there are plenty to choose from)? Been there, done that, generally wasn’t pleased with the results–but times and social media change. Do I rush away from FF because I think it’s going away anyway? Why? How would my leaving somehow benefit me or avoid damage if FF does go away? It’s not like being a passenger in a car crash, after all…
Of course, that’s just me. Maybe for you, this is terrible, horrible news that requires major action right now. (Or maybe you’ve never heard of FF anyway–I think one reason it may work better is because it only has a million or so users.) In which case, if you’re one of the six dozen or so who I directly follow, well, I might miss you…but then, maybe you’ll start blogging again, and that might not be a bad thing.
And if you’re about to write a post saying “FriendFeed is dead…” ah, but that’s another post–or, rather, a magazine column, and it’s one I’m working on. (No, FriendFeed doesn’t appear in the title. The column should appear in December.)

Long-suffering readers will be aware that one of few things still left on my old blog, now retitled Walt, Even Randomer, is the series of brief reviews of old movies, done each time I go through a disc from one of the Mill Creek Entertainment packs (typically 50 movies on 12 discs).

Mill Creek Entertainment does a remarkable job of mining the public domain and other areas where they can license movies or TV for very small sums–including TV movies–to create large sets of VHS-quality movies, typically four or five to a DVD, sold in genre packs at extremely low prices.

I’d been using the movies to “stay on the treadmill” for the past five+ years–going through more than 300 movies in that time, including some true classics and a few total turkeys. Of late, I’ve been alternating discs from two sets and watching two movies in a typical week, so it takes about a year to go through a 50-pack.

End of background. Start of foreground.

So last week, I finished an unusual 20-pack (early Alfred Hitchcock), alternating with a comedy 50-pack (I’m on disc 9)…and, instead of starting another 50-pack, I started something a little different: the 250-movie Mystery Collection.
Two hundred and fifty movies on 60 DVDs…
And suddenly thought, “If I watch movies at the typical rate, I’ll finish this box in about five years.”
Which then suggested musing a little about five years on–particularly where media are concerned.
If you believe some pundits, physical media will all be gone in five years–we’ll rely on that great digital jukebox in the sky for everything, when and as we need it. I don’t buy that for a minute. For a variety of reasons, I firmly believe that many of us will be buying physical media five years from now, enough to make for healthy industries.
On a medium-by-medium basis? I’m deliberately not a futurist, but here’s my best guess:

• Music: Even though CDs have already reached the 25-year mark (over the history of recorded music, a given medium has typically been dominant for about 25 years), they still represent the majority of music sales (about 2/3), despite widespread assumptions that CDs are already dead. There are two reasons for that: First, every DVD player is also a CD player; second, no replacement physical medium has succeeded (and those that have been attempted were, by and large, CD-equivalents). I’d bet that there will still be a multibillion-dollar (per year) CD industry five years from now, although it will probably be considerably smaller than today’s industry. But I’ll also bet that vinyl will still be with us five years from now, even though I’m not among the “digitization destroys music” brigade. (Not even close: The day we purchased our first CDs was a bit after the day we purchased our last LPs.)
• Films & video: I’m nearly 100% certain that there will still be a large (that is, multibillion$) commercial market for DVDs five years from now–and almost certainly a decade from now. Unlike music, the infrastructure for a truly workable universal video jukebox isn’t in place–and, as with music, there are millions of us who actually prefer a physical object. I’m about 90% certain that Blu-ray Disc will also be a multibillion$ market five years from now. Will Blu-ray become dominant over DVD? Short of a forced conversion, I think it’s unlikely–not because there’s anything wrong with Blu-ray but because most people either don’t notice the difference or don’t care about the difference. (By all accounts, a very large percentage of people who own HDTVs never actually watch high-definition TV. Those people aren’t going to pay $1 more for a Blu-ray version, much less $5 more.) I think Blu-ray will do just fine, but for some people, anything short of market domination is a failure, in which case I think Blu-ray will fail.
• Print magazines: Not going anywhere. Of course some are failing. Some always fail, and recessions aren’t great times to start magazines. It’s a tough time to start Yet Another Business Magazine (sorry, Portfolio); it’s a tough time to start Yet Another Any Sort of Magazine. I’ll still be subscribing to print magazines five years from now and ten years from now, and probably still paying absurdly low prices for some of them.
• Print books: Do I even need to discuss this one? Unless you believe that an 0.2% dip in sales in the midst of the worst recession in decades means Books Are Doomed, there’s really no sensible discussion here. I hope ebooks, done right, take a few $billion of the book market where ebooks do it better–but I don’t happen to believe that ebooks are likely to “do it better” for most long-form narrative fiction and nonfiction in my lifetime, much less the next decade. (I plan to be around three more decades, with luck, and my family history suggests that’s on the short side.)
• Print newspapers: I believe that hundreds of small and medium-sized print newspapers will still be around five and ten years from now; they’ve generally been doing better than the huge metro dailies. I hope that the better metro dailies will still be around–but I’m a little less sanguine. (Will we renew the San Francisco Chronicle next year at more than $400 a year? Hard to say…but I’d sure miss it, even though most content is available at SFGate.)

So, there it is: My personal take on what I think’s likely as regards physical media. I know some hotshot futurists say Everything’s Going Digital Real Soon Now. I also know the history of new and old media–and the wonders of DRM aren’t really helping. (Yes, Amazon probably did what it had to–but it also waved a Big Red Flag about the mutability of that big celestial jukebox. The book you “purchased” yesterday may or may not be the book you’re reading today…)
I could be wrong about any of these. I could be wrong about all of them–but I’d be very surprised. Heck, I’m hoping I’ll find interesting new Mill Creek 50-packs or 100-packs to buy in 2014. (The 250-packs appear to have been short-lived phenomena: you can still buy them from Amazon and elsewhere, but they don’t show up on Mill Creek’s website. That may be sensible…)
So, is this enough of an information science hook? The Future of Physical Media, from one reasonably informed perspective…

Greg Schwartz just announced that Uncontrolled Vocabulary, the “weekly live interactive roundtable discussion of all things library,” is on hiatus. The eloquent post offers reasons why (a matter of family priorities) and how difficult it is to take the step.

It’s not a decision I make lightly and it in no way reflects my enthusiasm for what we do here. I love producing this program. I love the conversations. I love the people who’ve joined me on this journey. I know some of them will be genuinely disappointed. For this, I am sorry.

…Please understand that the problem for me is not so much the hosting of the show, which is only an hour of my time per week. It’s the never-ending involvement: the slave-like attention to my feed reader, the setting up of blog posts, the reading and re-reading of proposed conversation starters. All worthwhile activites that I enjoy, but that require a certain constant level of engagement which forces me to make compromises with the rest of my priorities. I’m making a conscious decision to not make those compromises anymore.

So far, it’s only on hiatus–but a “permanent vacation” is a possibility.

Great work (from everything I’ve heard)

True confession: I’ve never participated in a UV episode (there have been 71 to date)–and I’ve only listened to one of them all the way through.

That’s my loss. I’m just not a podcast person–even less so now that my daily commute is from the dining room to my office, maybe 25 feet. (But even when I was working, it was only a 10-15 minute commute–and I think I’d find something like UV too distracting for that commute.) Since I wasn’t a listener, it never made much sense to be a participant (and I tend not to do any professional stuff after dinner).

But I’ve heard enough, from people I trust, to know that UV was great stuff–lively, interesting, informative, with a diverse range of perspectives. The one episode I did listen to made me want more, just not enough to find the time for it.

The profession definitely owes Greg thanks for what he’s done to date–and, to be sure, for the earlier Carnival of the Infosciences.

This stuff is hard (and not always very rewarding)

There have been a number of unique, passion-driven experiments in non-institutional, freely available  “periodical media” serving the library field–making a distinction between things that appear on a fairly regular basis and the hundreds of blogs and other wholly irregular sources. (If you think I’m putting down liblogs, you really don’t read my stuff much: I’m making a distinction, not a value judgment.)

A few examples (excluding peer-reviewed OA journals) and what’s become of them:

• ExLibris, Marylaine Block’s weekly essay, which lasted more than 300 editions. It eventually became less-than-weekly. Block gave up on it in 2008, but continues to maintain the archive.
• NewBreed Librarian, “a publication and web site intended to foster a sense of community for those new to librarianship, whether in school or just out.” The bimonthly “webzine,” heavy on graphic design, began in February 2001–and ended in August 2002.
• Library Juice “was an irregular, weekly, then biweekly, then, for a moment, monthly electronic zine for librarians, library and information science students, and other interested people, published between January, 1998 and August, 2005.” Rory Litwin, who produced the zine throughout its eight-year life, resurrected the name as a blog, a book and a book publishing company. I’m not aware of any archive of the many zine issues.
• Carnival of the Infosciences, while technically a series of blog posts, falls into this category, with the interesting twist that it had many direct hosts during its 90-issue life (August 2005 to May 2008). While the link here yields pointers to the first 57 editions, the wiki hasn’t been kept up to date; you’ll have to search a little to get the remaining 33 editions. Update: Schwartz notes that links to the latter half of the Carnivals are here; I just missed them.
• Free Open Scholarship Newsletter, a monthly launched by Peter Suber in March 2001 to support “free online scholarship,” is a survivor–in part because SPARC took it over, sponsors it (Peter Suber is now a senior researcher at SPARC, among other things) and renamed it SPARC Open Access Newsletter in July 2003.
• Current Cites, a team effort providing “8-12 annotated citations” of current library literature each month, is also a survivor and by far the longest-lived of any of these efforts, since it began in August 1990.
• Added 2/25: LLRX.com, “Law and technology resources for legal professionals” (most definitely including law librarians) is a monthly collection of articles and columns (in a way, it’s an overlay journal) that Sabrina I. Pacifici has been doing since 1997. It has advertising and is a strong survivor. As noted on the “About” page, “LLRX is now in its 12th year of continuous publication, as a solo, independent enterprise.”
• Cites & Insights, my own experiment in this field, began in December 2000 and has appeared at least monthly ever since. I no longer consider it an experiment. It does have modest sponsorship. And, frankly, if I was still fully employed and had a better sense of balance, free time and priorities…well, I’m not sure C&I would be around.

And now another one’s gone, at least temporarily. I didn’t use “unique” in the phrase “unique, passion-driven experiments” because I’m a sloppy writer–I used it because it’s true. Each of these (and probably others I’ve forgotten or somehow missed) has had its own strengths, weaknesses and approach. Each has served the library field well (in my opinion).

And most have, I suspect, been underappreciated and under-rewarded relative to the direct work and indirect effort that’s gone into them. As gray literature (and I’ll include podcasts as literature), they’re mostly ignored by indexing services and other “official” resources. Nobody got rich from advertising on any of these. In most cases, I think the creators have needed a little craziness to keep things going.

So, Greg, you’ve done good work–and made what’s undoubtedly the right decision. Hope things work out.

Cites & Insights 9:1, January 2009, is now available.

This 30-page issue (PDF, but each section is available in HTML form from the links below) includes:

Bibs & Blather (pages 1-5)

Announcing The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 and an early-bird special ($22.50 through January 15, 2009). Also announcing Cites & Insights volume 8 in paperback form (a great way to show your support for C&I and my blog research)…and notes on other books and the start of a new volume.

Net Media: Wikipedia Notes (pages 5-13)

“Verifiability, not truth,” Wikipedia’s growing pains, the power of the editor and rise of the Wikicrats, and other notes on the messy reality of Wikipedia.

Retrospective: Pointing with Pride Part 9 (pages 13-18)

Solving the “missing issue” problem (oops) and ten notes from ten issues.

Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Hollywood Legends, Part 2 (pages 18-26)

A wild variety, from classics such as Love Affair, Meet John Doe and The Man with the Golden Arm to pathetic cases like Chandu on the Magic Island to the pure oddity of Home Town Story, a GM-commissioned charmer about how wonderful and pure big business really is (with a bit part by a young Marilyn Monroe).

Retrospective: Pointing with Pride Part 10 (pages 26-30)

This final Retrospective appears here because the next issue will (with luck) be a little different–and I didn’t want to stretch it out until March. Just a few selections and comments.

Nope, this isn’t more advance flogging for The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008. (You’ll get that soon enough, along with a special offer for early purchasers. If you’re wondering: I uploaded the PDFs to Lulu yesterday, and am now waiting for the proof copy, which could take a couple of weeks.)

This is a Friday funny–and a slightly delayed joining in an offhand meme I saw at Helene Blowers’ Library Bytes. Namely, a few blog analyzers…and in this case, how they rate this here blog.

Typealyzer

This one claims to do a Myers-Briggs style analysis of the blog. I just ran it and came up with:

ESTP – The Doers

The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Bwahahah… yep, that’s me, out there playing volleyball when I’m not on the links or joking with my huge array of friends, since I’m so attuned to people. And, you know, never following through on anything, which is why Cites & Insights disappeared after six issues and I’ve never managed to complete any of those books I’ve started writing…

What’s most absurd here is that I ran the same site’s test a few days ago (November 10), when Blowers posted her item–and came out INTP, The Thinkers (and an introvert). I’m notoriously an introvert (and yes, I tested that way on a real Myers-Briggs test–I think it was INTP. That was when I was LITA Vice President/President-Elect; the LITA Executive Director had all of the Executive Committee members take the M-B test and assured us we were all “E”s because, after all, how else could you win an election?)

So in four days with, I think, two posts, I’ve gone from introvert to extrovert and from one who regularly finishes projects to one who leaps from idea to idea? Man, those must have been some impressive posts…or this is an unusually silly beta site.

Genderanalyzer

This one “uses Artificial Intelligence” to determine whether a blog is written by a man or a woman.

The robots say I write like a man (75%, whatever that might mean).

Well, at least that’s not as absurd as ESTP; last I checked, the gender choice was right.

Readability Test

What grade level this blog is written at.

Junior high school. Whereas C&I is at college/undergrad level and my personal website (which includes a few old articles) is at “Genius” level.

Hmm. I’m happy enough with “Junior high school” for the blog, but I wonder whether that’s as erratic a rating as the Typealyzer. Somehow, though, I find it hard to believe that the handful of items on my personal website are that much deeper intellectually or confounding in style than C&I–or, for that matter, that C&I is all that much more hifalutin’ than this here blog.

In this case, it’s a repeat performance: I posted about this site last November. Came out junior high school then, too–and most individual essays from C&I came out high school, which was fine with me.

What is your blog worth

Claims to determine the blog’s monetary value based on Technorati ranking and advertising potential.

$28,227.00

I love the precision: Not just $28,000, but $28,227.

Ah, but the “most successful linkbaiter, ever” who put up this site claims his blog is worth $6,220,101.72. Must be nice to be rich. (And yes, that site has LOADS of ads. When I had ads here, I made $24–over six months, as I remember. Yes, my Technorati “authority” rating and number of subscribers have both grown. Not that much, though…)

As Helene says, “use at your own risk” and “for your pure amusement purposes only.” By the way, she comes out ISTJ, woman, high school and $47,569.

Oh, and if someone wants to sponsor this blog, I’d ask a whole lot less than $28,227 (but more than $227)–but then, is that “per year” or “over a lifetime”?

In fact, I am very much looking for sponsorship–but primarily for ongoing real-world research into blogs and wikis, with this blog being a tertiary possibility.

Meanwhile, you may find these tests fun. If you test at the genius level…well, I probably couldn’t understand all them big words anyway.