Cites & Insights 5:7, May 2005, is now available for downloading. (HTML versions of most essays are also available from the home page.)
This 22-page issue includes:
- ©3 Perspective: FMA: Watching the Way You Want: a commentary on the recently-passed Family Movie Act, part of the Family Entertainment Act of 2005.
- Following Up: Four corrections and clarifications.
- ©3: Balancing Rights: Comments on piracy, infringement, and P2P, DRM, and more.
- Offtopic Perspective: Family Classics 50 Movie Pack, Part 2: 25 more old movies, including a half-silent/half-sound flick, a silent movie with speaking and sound throughout, and Fred Astaire on walls and ceiling.
- Ethical Perspective: Weblogging Ethics and Impact
- Session Report: ACRL 2005: Joy Weese Moll reports on “What’s Next? Academic Libraries in a Google Environment”
In case you haven’t guessed, you really don’t need to subscribe to the C&I Updates weblog if you subscribe to this weblog: I always post new issues on both.
Slight typo correction: it’s Joy Weese Moll. I know because I met her at ACRL. 🙂
And comments on the issue, now that I’ve read it:
You find all the cool weblogs. I didn’t know about DigitalKoans, and it’s a winner. Thanks.
As for what you do and don’t know about me, most of what you said you don’t know can be found out with a bit of digging (try the front page of yarinareth.net for most of it). CavLec has actually been less personal lately, probably owing to job-search nervousness, but I anticipate returning gleefully to singing my own life once I, er, have one again.
I’m not as convinced as you that these characteristics don’t matter, however. I agree that they shouldn’t — but the point you glossed over about conference gigs and whathaveyou points to an effective old-boys-network (and I use the term “boys” advisedly) that adversely impacts (e.g.) women and latecomers, no matter how small the absolute larger-world impact.
The larger-world impact (which you measured by pure readership numbers as compared to, say, a newspaper) is a bit of a red herring, to my mind. Real social and professional networks are considerably smaller than that. So the question becomes, do A-list bloggers and link reciprocity have a disproportionate impact on important professional networks? I happen to think that they do. In librarianship? Doubt it, Steven Cohen and Karen Schneider notwithstanding. But certainly in consumer-level software development.
I appreciated reading Joy’s Google-session summary. Hated like poison to miss that session, but I had to go home the day before.
As always, much food for thought in this issue.
Responding to two posts:
1. Thanks for the typo correction–which, fortunately, was in my postings, not in the publication itself (which gets Joy’s name right).
I’ve corrected it (no, readers, Dorothea’s not making it up: the original post said “Jay”)
2. Your points in the longer post are all well taken. I’m not sure I agree with all of them, but they’re well taken. And as to blog influence in consumer-level software development–well, maybe. On some professional networks, probably. But the blogging triumphalists claim that weblogs are overturning traditional journalism; given that ambitious claim, it’s fair to compare actual reach. (Specifically, the whole Civilities discussion is about politics and media, not social software development or other narrower niches.)
As to whether sex/religion/politics/age/location characterists matter–again, it really all depends. It certainly does in some cases, but not in all. Would you claim that Jenny Levine or Jessamyn West (both relatively young women–relative to me, at least) have less impact in the online library community than, say, middle-aged men with established offline reputations like Charles W. Bailey, Jr. and Walt Crawford? I would claim that’s not true–and I would claim further that the religious preferences and physical location of the four names mentioned matter not at all. There are other cases where those factors might (do) matter.
As usual, “it all depends.”
I knew about DigitalKoans early because Charles is an old friend (after all, I was nearly a charter member of PACS-L back in the late 1980s) and sent me email about one of his first posts (or maybe it was about choosing WordPress and the Letterhead template–and, by the way, I responded by giving you credit for suggesting Letterhead). No deep investigation on my part: Just luck and friendship.
ok… I’ve got a bread-free lunch to whip up now, work to return to, a friend visiting from out of town to reach, the New Gatekeepers series to finish, bags to pack to go to the Bahamas on Saturday (…and Guilder to frame for it). I’m swamped. And now I learn that there’s 5 pages in Cites and Insights devoted to Civilities.
Thanks for taking the time to read, consider, and comment.
and wow, you cover the gamut– from the reviews to the essays to the proposals to the humor to the “cheap calculations of imperfect data.” I take it that your overall impression is that you are recommending that your audience read Civilities from time to time, and furthermore that they read it critically (damned typos aside!) and seek out the places where I am perhaps making false generalizations, non-sequitors, etc. Certainly the more formal one aims to write, the higher level criticism they should expect to get.
Some quick responses.
Slights and Insights: Perhaps I am missing important contributors from library science. Perhaps others are as well.
Licence and Registration: I originally chose Creative Commons; explained why I changed. I may change back. I’ve also explained why I require site registration before people post. Both they provide me with a level of conversation and interactions that I can handle. There are many conversations I *could* have but I simply haven’t the time to pursue.
Interest rates: How interested am I in things like the census of the blogosphere? Somewhat. I believe I use this hypothetical formulation at times in my writings: If someone is interested in this sort of data, these are the sorts of questions they should ask. So I send it to Sifry, to Pew, to peers in academia.
Yes, I’m recommending Civilities (at least for some readers).
For the rest: I don’t feel the need to respond (and may not know enough to respond intelligently).
[Responding to someone else somewhere, maybe on this weblog, maybe elsewhere: From what I can see, email accounts provided for WordPress posting do NOT show up when other people look at comments; the owner is the only one who can see them, and then only if the owner is managing them.]