Walt Crawford’s lates Cites & Insights is out and has a fascinating several page discussion of “backchannel communication” going on at conferences, speaker panels, etc. Based on one blog posting and comments and expanded from there, Crawford discusses the recent [in our sphere anyhow] trend of laptop-enabled audience members not only being online during a speaker but communicating via chat or IRC with other attendees, comparing notes and discussing the talk in progress in a more formalized way. This was built into BloggerConII, you can read the transcripts from the librarianesque session if you’d like. I definitely do this during Council meetings sometimes, and yet when there’s a speaker at a conference, I often take special care to be at least one person in the audience who is paying attention, nodding and smiling at the right places, “getting it.” I will always remember the guy from RUSA who did this for me during a difficult right-after-lunch talk in an overhot conference room with bad acoustics when I was struggling to hold people’s attention; it was a kindness
Category: ‘puters
the filter wars continue in florida
State of Florida considers legislation to require filters on all public library computers, since 46% of FL’s public libraries don’t take Erate money and so aren’t mandated to filter by CIPA. [thanks dsdlc]
computers are hard? no, they just look that way
Libraries, Wired and Reborn. I really like the computers we have in our public library, thanks to the Gates Foundation, however technology without staff training and staff funding only reinforces the “computers are hard” myth at our rural-ish public library. [thanks all]
The nature of meaning in the age of Google
“The nature of meaning in the age of Google” a paper by my former professor, Terry Brooks.
“Google may index billions of Web pages, but it will never exhaust the store of meaning of the Web. The reason is that Google’s aggregation strategy is only one of many different strategies that could be applied to the semantic objects in public Web space. Hidden in the ‘dogs’ retrieval set of 14.5 million are special, singular, obscure, unpopular, etc., Web pages that await a different aggregation strategy that would expose their special meanings. To charge that Google has a bias against obscure websites… is to expect Google to be something other than Google. Google finds the common meanings. Many other meanings exist on the Web and await their aggregators.”
free stuff for national library week
National Library Week starts tomorrow. Gale is making 24 of its databases free for the whole week.