Progress Notes

Progress Notes

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As I’ve mentioned previously, I am taking up writing again. Writing is an all-consuming activity in my experience, and I’m not sure how real writers keep up with their lives while cranking out novels. I’m moving pretty slowly on mine, which is probably a good speed for someone as impatient as me. Having other things to do forces me to look at what I’ve done and not skimp on each part. Savour every little scene as it’s before me, that’s the ticket.

At any rate: I want to record my progress.

13,463 / 100,000
(13.5%)

My goal today was to get about halfway through chapter three, but all I did was add 1000 words to chapter two. Yes, those 13,000 odd words represents two chapters and exactly three days of otherworld time. I’m concerned about overly-lengthy chapters, but I guess that should be the last thing I worry about. I’m hoping for no more than 100,000 words. Possibly that’s undershooting this thing, who knows.

It’s funny, my friend June mentioned that it must be easier to take stuff out rather than put it in, and that made me realize that the exact opposite is true for me. I can always expand on something. Taking anything out is pure torture. I’ve been writing this thing much the way you would paint a picture; put the bones out first, and then go over and over it with different colours until it looks about the way you want it to. At this point I can’t really re-read what I’ve written without adding another layer.

I’m taking some management advice on this one: only get it to 80%. If you’re only working to produce something that’s 80% perfect, then there’s room for that 20% to come from others without causing pain and personal damage in the process. We’ll see how that goes.

I’d just like to note that there is exactly no relationship between writing and being a librarian. I know that seems odd, but really. No relationship there at all.

Joy All Over the Place

Joy All Over the Place

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Google’s RSS reader. You need a gmail account to use it, but there’s nothing bad about the big guys getting in on the RSS bandwagon. The more readers the better!

In other Google news, Google has created a Librarian Center for librarians teaching Google tools to students. This is a company that just never makes mistakes, isn’t it. Nothing but love from me to the big G.

Yahoo and MSN agree to IM interoperability. This means that Yahoo Messenger users will be able to get in touch with MSN users without jumping platforms. Good news! Now, if AIM would join the party, we wouldn’t need to have three accounts to talk to all the people we want to (ahem).

This one isn’t a good news technology story. This is an op-ed piece by a Luddite writing for Wired. From Dark Underbelly of Technology:

For one thing, human beings are not meant to go as fast as modern technology compels them to go. Technology might make it possible to work at warp speed, yes, but that doesn’t make it healthy. And just because the latest software makes it feasible to double your workload (or “productivity,” to you middle-management types), that shouldn’t give the boss the right to expect you will.

With cell phones, IM and all the personal-this and personal-that, we’re connected all the time, or “24/7” as the unfortunate jargon has it. Is being connected 24/7 a good thing? Isn’t it healthy to be “off the grid” now and then? If you can’t answer “yes” to that question, you may be a tech dynamo, my friend, but please stay the hell out of my cafe.

This kind of stuff is so tedious. Being annoyed by people who use technology is so last week. The people who cling to their ipods are not actually the same people yacking away on their cell phones while you’re trying to have your soy latte. And why are we so worshipful of the notebook-toting poet in the coffee shop and so disdainful of the laptop-toting novelist? Is one inherently better than the other? (I say all this with a wrist brace on, an injury less the result of typing and more of handwriting, thank-you-very-much.)

And I’ll get on board with the “tech is not productivity” crowd as soon as they start making their own clothes from fabric they wove on a loom and washing everything by hand. We’ll see just how productive and efficient they are right around then. And let’s talk about being off the grid; how about you lay off the fossil fuels once in a while, big boy? When was the last time you left the SUV at home and took public transit on your way to get your electrically-produced espresso? The folks who write these “technology is bad” columns have predetermined which technologies they like and which they don’t without being entirely forthcoming or fair. These complaints have been handled pretty well by the “Dear Abby” crowd. Let’s not get too caught up in the glitz and glare from the shiny new laptop screens. Being a jerk in public is still being a jerk in public, whether or not you’re using a device that prefers to be plugged in.

In other news, Blackboard is buying WebCT. I know the whole academic blogosphere is abuzz with this news, and my jaw dropped as much as the next person’s. And yes, this is going to have a huge impact on those of us involved with such systems, whether or not we are current subscribers. Is this going to provide us all with a better option when it comes to course management systems? Is it a response to some of the very cool things going on with Moodle? How will a goliath system effect the development of other open source CMS products (like Sakai)? While I will be directly effected by this move, I have no direct opinion about it, really. I’m not a burning fan of any current CMS, so merges and changes just make me raise my eyebrows and nod dutifully. Will it make things better? Who knows. As long as the APIs are still around, I’m happy enough.

I have I mentioned enough times yet that Meebo is fantastic? It sure is.

Picking up the Pen (again)

Picking up the Pen (again)

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This post has nothing to do with librarianship. I started keeping a blog in 2001, and while my life has always had one dominant theme or another, I’ve never had a subject-specific blog. Since librarianship is my bread and butter these days, that’s covered most of what I’ve been posting about lately.

But this is a slight diversion. I’m working on a manuscript at the moment, so I’m going to use this space to talk a bit about that as well. The process of writing is strange, sometimes enlightening, but sometimes completely crazy, and I think getting a bit meta about the process will help to keep me sane.

The story of the manuscript: I started writing this thing at the recommendation of a wise reader. I used to write a quite a lot in amateur online writing communities, and I really really enjoyed it. I like writing, what can I say. So when I started to get significant feedback from professionals in the publication industry telling me to stop writing for the web and start something I could actually publish, I took them very seriously and started working on it. I looked at the expectations of publishers, took stock of what sort of thing got published these days, and reformatted some of my ideas to fit. I did a lot world building, a lot of character sketches, and then I started writing.

I did every single thing wrong. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t. I didn’t plan enough. I didn’t pay enough attention to the thing as a whole. I wrote one version, got some feedback, and then did a serious revision. Then I sat on it for a few months, returned to it, did another serious revision, and vowed to write one more chapter of a conclusion and that would be it. I had taken all the advice I’d gotten. I had fixed the things that bothered me, and fixed the things that bothered others. I had added characters just to kill them, added drama, cut characters, revised some basic assumptions. It was all done. And then I started my library school co-op and dropped it altogether.

I really thought I was done with writing at that point. I just couldn’t take the nitpicky tedium of it by then. I had other fish to fry. When I was writing, I really wanted to be a writer. The librarian thing might work as a fallback, but I wanted to be a writer, at least in the short term. But once I got really into librarianship that seriously changed. Librarianship is the only profession I’ve ever felt really passionate about, and once I realized I actually wanted to be good at my job and change the world in my own little way (rather than just get a steady pay cheque), my writerly dreams fell by the wayside.

So now I’m 4 months deep into my new job, I’m learning a lot and enjoying myself, and suddenly I’m feeling the pull of this manuscript again. Or, at least, the idea of it. It’s not the idea of being a writer that interests me, or even the idea of publishing. I don’t want to change my profession, I don’t want to quit if the writing thing works out. It’s this story, these characters, and the simple fact that I still really enjoy writing that’s bringing me back to it.

I never returned to the original files of my last revision. They’re zipped up and on my hard drive, but I haven’t even opened them. When the ideas, the scenes, and the characters came back to me, I decided to simply catalogue them. What were the elements of this story that I really liked? What were the events that I wanted to write about? What were the pieces of it that made me return to thinking about this story? I picked up a nifty piece of software called Idea Knot. It lets you jot down ideas and then organize them into categories (single ideas can fit into multiple categories, if you like, it’s pretty flexible). So I just wrote down everything I liked and the things I wanted to see. I re-imagined the characters, I interrogated and challenged the decisions I made the first time. I developed new answers to old problems. I discarded characters that weren’t fundamental to the plot. I massively revised the geography, added art and religion, reconceptualized the order of events. And as the list of elements grew, I started filing them into some kind of chapter order. I made notes about elements of the story that should be clear in each chapter. I talked to some writers I know about my concerns, about constructing good characters and the pitfalls of some of my plot elements. I turned a heavily event-driven story into a heavily character-driven narrative. I found a committed beta reader (thank you Caitlin) who had already sat through versions one and two and would be a soundboard for some of the crazy directions I thought the story might take. I pasted my emails to her into my collection of notes, ideas, and character sketches. And eventually I had a fairly detailed outline for a mostly (but not entirely) different story.

Now I am (slowly, carefully, hesitatingly) starting to write again. I have a solid framework for the first three chapters, and I’m going to write them. And then I’m going to look back over my three chapters, consider my plan of attack, and look at getting a solid framework for the next three chapter that will work well with what I’ve already done. Small steps!

The last time I sat down to write I could hammer through a 6000 words like it was nothing and then just keep going the next day. This time I think I’ve gone so far in the other direction that I’m almost organizing myself into some kind of creative straightjacket. The first day I sat down I ended up with about 600 words and couldn’t believe how slowly it was coming. It wasn’t painful, it was actually just as enjoyable as before, but I was so aware of how much I want this story to really work that I’m so much more careful word by word. I’m not clinging to a darling sentences anymore; I’m less sensitive to criticism and more committed to the story itself than to the individual words. By the time I was done that first night I had 1500 words and forwarded them all on to my beta reader. We discussed it, I did some expanding and editing, and now I have 3115 words. At one time I had 96,000 heavily-revised words; it’s amazing how proud I am of this 3115.

But I’m writing this story because I want to write this story, that’s it. I’m not going to look at what’s publishable or what audiences tend to like this time around. I don’t care. Now that I’m gainfully employed (and loving my job), I’m not doing this because I’m trying to change my life, or make a name for myself, or embark on a new profession. I’m going to write this story because I want to, and I’m going to write it the way I think it should be written. If someone wants to see it after that, I have no objection. But I ain’t quitting my day job either way. But it’s wonderful to be wrapped up in a story again. It’s pure delight. And as my beta reader points out, my delight seems to be shaping up into a better story.

Finding the Right Metaphor

Finding the Right Metaphor

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If you ever wondered if blogs and blogging were controversial in academia, you’d only need to look at the extremely diverse range of opinions on the topic in higher ed publications to get the idea. The Chronicle has published a story called The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas, clearly written by a blogger in defense of the medium in light of all the attacks it’s endured recently.

Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. Academic blogs, like their 18th-century equivalent, are rife with feuds, displays of spleen, crotchets, fads, and nonsenses. As in the blogosphere more generally, there is a lot of dross. However, academic blogs also provide a carnival of ideas, a lively and exciting interchange of argument and debate that makes many scholarly conversations seem drab and desiccated in comparison. Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won’t replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.

Of course I think he’s bang on, and I’m thrilled to see such a glowing, positive article about blogging academics in light of a the rantings of a particular (ahem) soon-to-be-past ALA president. But I wouldn’t have made the leap to the Republic of Letters. While classy and romantic, and appealing because of it’s historical conotations, I would have backed away from that particular metaphor.

It’s something of a crisis of imagination; when we see something written down, we can’t help but link it to books, articles, letters, publications in general. We see the written word and link it in our minds to other written words. They are of a kind, in our minds, and we can’t seem to get past the medium. We see blogs and think of diaries, which is true, but also not; we see online discussions and think of letters to the editor, but also not. The reality is that blogs and back and forth that comes with them are not comparable to articles and monographs, or to letters, or to any other form of traditional written communication, not really; blogs and the blogosophere is more like conversation. If everything we said were recorded and transcribed for our later use, how would we classify it? Would we correct our own grammar? Would we make comparisons between our transcripts and the Republic of Letters? Would we have transmogrified ourselves into speakers of text, or would we acknowledge that this is merely conversation turned into readable form?

I’m always a little surprised when people mention that blogging is not academic publishing. Well, of course it’s not. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any academic value. There’s a lot of value in going to conferences, listening to what other people in your field have to say, and engaging them in discussion. There’s lots of value in sitting back and listening to a variety of viewpoints, going to listen to other, completely unrelated talks, and finding commonalities between the discussions. Finding links, thinking outloud, interacting with others and refining our ideas. Telling people what we think as we’re reading, getting their feedback on our thoughts. We accept that students learn best when asked to present their ideas to their peers, elaborate on them, and defend those ideas against questions and doubt. We seem to have a harder time imagining that professionals might be able to do the same thing using online technologies. Somehow, the moment we move to a keyboard, our ideas about how our communication functions completely reverts.

It’s a cardinal rule of cataloguing that a change in medium marks a completely new item, but the history of technology is also littered with imaginative failures. We are so stunned and awed by new advances in communication technology that we keep putting them in special boxes of their own. Sure, DVDs are fancy, but they’re still just movies in a new format. IM reference is nifty and cool, but it’s still just a new way to conduct reference interviews. Blogs likes the ones we’re keeping, the ones we prize in our fields, need to find their metaphor. I hope it’s not the Republic of Letters, though I’m sure it would indeed be a wonderful thing to resurrect. The blogosphere’s focus on connection, communication, feedback, and community-creation speaks more to what we get from verbal dialogue than any number of letters to the editor.

Hyperlocal Reference

Hyperlocal Reference

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Virtual Reference is one of those things that I think is a fantastic idea that’s not being turned into a fantastic service. A good idea taken not quite in the right direction. And the more I think about reference (I think about reference an awful lot, I must admit), the more I like the idea of virtual reference.

At the moment reference too often means “the reference desk”. One of the things I discover more and more is that reference itself has nothing to do with any desk; it’s an expert service that can be provided pretty much anywhere. We’re most used to providing that service through a desk, but in order to really bring reference service into the present, we need to think outside the box about what the service is and how many different ways we can be providing it. For me, this goes hand in hand with the idea of integrating librarians into the curriculum; why are we waiting for those boiling-point questions to reach the desk? How can we present in other ways on campus (and off it) to answer questions at the point of need?

Virtual reference is one answer to that question. Rather than be at the desk, we can be behind an “ask us” link, there in case anyone needs help. They don’t have to come into the library, they don’t have to even know where the library is. This is the first service that pushes outside of the desk to bring reference service to users in alternative ways.

But to date the idea of virtual reference has been very much akin to the way we think about the OPAC or databases or webpage resources generally; they’re best if they’re available all the time. That the best thing about these things is their ease of use and the fact that anyone can use them any time they feel like it. So we end up with these systems are designed to be useable any time, because apparently that’s what the web means. Constantly on.

What we’re missing in this rush to be available constantly is one of the key elements that make a library a good library; it belongs to a particular place. Librarians spend an awful lot of time and effort making sure their collections reflect their users needs; they conduct user needs assessments to make sure every element of their services reflects a demonstrated need in their communities. A library is a reflection of the community it serves; if you want detailed legal information, you’re going to find better sources in a law library than in an arts & social sciences library. If you need detailed scientific information, go to a science library, right? This is why there are so many different kinds of librarians and different kinds of libraries. If you were looking for detailed information about the history of Guelph, Ontario, you wouldn’t necessarily go to the public library in Victoria, BC. You would go to the Guelph Public Library, or the local archives in Guelph. Right?

So why is it when we moved into virtual reference services we thought these local services were no longer significant? Why is this something we feel we can just outsource? Where does this idea come from that reference questions are so generic they can be answered by any librarian anywhere in the world?

Once I had a specific question about a publication by a faculty member at a school Boston. I noticed they had a virtual reference service at their library, so I got in the queue and asked them. But I wasn’t talking to a librarian in Boston. I was talking to a librarian in California, because they were sharing their virtual reference service in order to keep it open 24/7. This librarian in California didn’t have any extra resources to help her answer my question. She was in the same boat I was.

Why are we so sure our services can be so easily transplanted? Maybe it’s time to start thinking about shorter hours and local service, rather than flashy open-all-the-time service that’s much less institution-specific. Taking stock of our own value, and respecting the value that our own staff and our own collections can bring to our local patrons, might be the first step to making virtual reference the kind of service I know it can be.

You know you blog too much when…

You know you blog too much when…

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I had to walk through one of our local malls today on the way to the health card office, and for the first time I noticed something odd. I walked past one particular store and it struck me, all of a sudden, that it was exactly like a blog. Yes, a store. It had a blue header in just the same shade as a default blog template. A big blue header, small white print, and then variable content underneath it. (I mean the clothes and such that they sell. Sure, it’s not text, but it’s variable and text-like, if you sort of squint and think really metaphorically.) It even had a smaller portion of the whitespace under the header on one side for navigation (the door) and then the rest of the content on the other side.

Surely it’s a sign of something when Smart Set and wordpress default seem like about the same thing.

More Mazars and a Coleman

More Mazars and a Coleman

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I would like to take this time to announce the creation of my sister’s blog, which has been created because she has just started library school at FIS, and one of her instructors is using blogs for class. So mark down one more student-librarian blogger; I can’t wait to see what she has to say.

Also, apparently in conjunction with the creation of my sister’s blog, my nephew has a blog now too. This one has nothing to do with FIS, but is entertaining nonetheless.

Comrades-in-Arms: The Professor and the Librarian

Comrades-in-Arms: The Professor and the Librarian

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about faculty status and librarians. I learned that academic librarians sometimes had faculty status (and, of course, tenure) while I was in library school, when I took a course on academic libraries. Until that moment it never once occurred to me that this might be the case. While librarians are employed by universities much like instructors with doctorates are, as far as I understood it the similarity ended there.

I had mixed feelings about this at first, all entirely personal. I had left the academic life when I went to library school, having very painfully dropped out of a phd program. I thought I was leaving those issues behind me. I didn’t think I would ever have to come before the scrutiny of something like a tenure review committee, or be expected to do research and publish for my dinner. When I decided to go to library school I thought I was making a determined step away from including these elements in my professional life. (Whether they were part of my personal life was another story, of course.) So I had two somewhat contradictory feelings upon learning that academic librarians often have faculty status; the first was whooohoooo fast track, baby, I’m right back where I thought I would be! and the second was oh dear god the stress and pressure is following me everywhere. Now that I understand and accept the nature of faculty status for librarians, I’m more or less at peace with it. But I find myself constantly re-encountering the debate in my daily work.

Much as I had no real sense of what kind of education librarians had before I decided to become one, my experience is that most faculty (including friends of mine) are in much the same boat. Gloria Leckie and Anne Fullerton beautifully illustrate the stark differences between what librarians think they’re doing in their work and what faculty think they’re accomplishing in theirs in their co-written article The roles of academic librarians in fostering a pedagogy for Information Literacy. The teaching faculty are here for the pain/joy of their discipline; librarians are here with a strong service ethic and a big dose of 19th century information organizational principles. We’re all in the same big happy union. So what does that mean? Do we want to be more like the teaching faculty? Do we want them to see us on the same footing as they see their colleagues?

And that’s the crux of it, always. We want the teaching faculty (and by this I mean anyone from the rank of associate professor on up) to see us as their equals, as comrades-in-arms in the daily battle to produce good scholarship, excellent graduates, and better the general welfare of our shared institution and Knowledge in general. We want a standing invitation to the faculty club. We don’t want to be seen as the help.

So how do we accomplish this?

I have no good answers for this question yet. I just got here, I’m still removing the packing material from my office. But what I have noticed is this: no faculty expect a librarian to be as well-educated as she is. Case in point: when a faculty member came to visit me for some help, she expected us to have one degree apiece. Of course, we have three piece. It was a friendly conversation with lots of personal curiosity and sharing of experiences, but we all felt it in that moment; librarians are extremely well-educated people, and people, even faculty, tend to not expect that. Not over-educated, I would say, but far more knowledgeable about subject-specific academic life than most people give us credit for. And I’m getting used to that look, too, the one that says, oh, wow, you’re a real academic too!

What I’ve noticed most of all is how my interactions with people at the university generally change once we get around to personal histories. Partly I think this is true in the same way it would be true with anyone you meet; the more detail you give about yourself in context, the better the conversation tends to go. You get to know each other. But when people find out that I am a Harvard graduate and a former PhD student at the self-same institution at which we find ourselves so happily employed, the conversation changes. I am at least nominally part of the pack. I know how it feels to be confronted with those long reading lists, gruelling seminars, the struggle of academic administration from the other side. I speak the language.

My friend Elizabeth saw it coming long before I did. She invited me to have coffee with her and a new faculty member one day last year, for a first time meet-and-greet with someone from the history department. She said she saw the moment the conversation turned; the language changed, the playing field became distinctly disciplinary, we had recognized each other as comrades. Comrades-in-arms, on the same side, coming from the same general place.

I’ve been conflicted about this, too. I have never been keen on flashing degrees around. I want to be respected for the way I present myself and what I have to say, not the pedigree of my degrees. And yet, this is the kind of connection and respect we’re looking for as librarians. Don’t we want to be seen as one of the pack with these people? Don’t we want them to understand that we get where they’re coming from, we know what sorts of obstacles tend to get in their way, and we understand that sometimes academic work gets really really boring? Who else can you admit that to but one of your own?

When I debrief myself on my meetings with faculty I find I have a lot to consider about what it is I’ve said. As I say, I’m still so new I still have that new-car smell floating around me, and to date all of my interactions with faculty have been unerringly positive. But I notice a pattern in the conversations. We’re never just talking about the matter at hand; it seems impossible to stay entirely on point. The conversations I’ve had with faculty range over the events of the day and their implications in theological, political, racial, feminist, or nationalist terms; the technology I’m recommending and its natural history in the earliest forms of education (generally lead by the faculty member him/herself), and so forth. Sometimes I feel like this might all seem like a waste of our time, just a happy chat, but something deep inside me insists that it’s not.

I’ve spoken before about the problems librarians face when they focus on the tools and only the tools; when people consider us only capable of parsing Boolean and giving instructions on how to use the library catalogue, we project a very surface level of our understanding. If we don’t talk concepts, we don’t get respected as people who get concepts. So when I’m talking to faculty, I get meta really fast. We talk about end goals and possibility; marginality and public notebooks; academia writ large and moving toward a lofty goal. The fact that I can get us to point A to point B in technical terms is the smallest part of the conversation. I don’t do this on purpose, with the express goal of gaining a particular kind of respect, but I do it all the same. I can only imagine it has something to do with the long hours I’ve spent contemplating not just the lot of librarians, but also what it is I want to spend my time doing and talking about. Since I’ve gained all my technological knowledge in a humanities environment, maybe I’ve just been trained to think about it concepts-first, pedantic details later. But I’m drawn to thinking about this approach within the profession as well. Does this serve me well? So far so good.

I realize I’m at a huge advantage, given my background and my position. A librarian interested in subject-specific metadata knows a lot, and I have nothing but respect for these people. But I can easily imagine how a sociology metadata expert would be seen by a sociologist; what, you think you know more about my field than I do? When I think about the relationship in these terms it seems impossibly antagonistic. But as an Instructional Technology librarian, I’m generally going in to these meetings as the person bringing knowledge on something sociologists don’t know anything about and know they’re not expected to be experts on; I bring them expertise they aren’t expected to have. My entry into the departments is possibly the least threatening around. The more threatened people feel by technology, the more pleased they are to see someone who can help them out with it.

So what’s most important in creating a good working relationship with departments and individual faculty members? The degrees on our business cards? Our attitudes toward them and their work? Our attitude toward our own work and its value? What we bring to the table in the most practical of terms? I suppose it’s got to be a combination of all of these things, but I’m still working on the fine-tuning.

You know you’re a woman if…

You know you’re a woman if…

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Via my friend June, Women don’t do tech:

Would you rip files at a high or low bit-rate? Do you prefer AAC, WMA or MP3? If you are completely baffled by these questions, you are probably a woman.

You wanna come here and say that, buster?

I find this kind of reportage odd and appalling, since this is completely not my experience of the internet. Many of the most technology-forward people I know are women. Granted, I tend to move in woman-positive spaces, but even so; there’s a tone to this article that rubs me the wrong way. There’s been lots of stats about how more and more women are using the internet, and how they use it differently than men; framing women as tech-idiots is really insulting.

Xfm DJ Lauren Laverne thinks it’s a shame that women aren’t getting stuck in. “I think a lot of girls are nervous that downloading will be too complicated for them,” she says.

Well, you know, math is hard.

Michael Brook, acting editor of Stuff, a gadget magazine that has a 95 per cent male readership, says that, like Marshall, most women are attracted only to new bits of kit that look nice and serve a purpose.

“Traditionally, technology is a male environment,” he says. “Women are less patient than men: they haven’t got the time or the inclination to read a 90-page manual and work out how to operate a camera or DVD player. They want instant gratification – simple, user-friendly, intuitive technology that they can take out of the box and use immediately. They lose interest if it doesn’t work immediately, whereas men view sussing out a new gadget as a challenge. It’s that whole toolshed tradition of taking something apart to see how it works.”

Don’t you love it when editors of magazine spouts essentialist claptrap to make up for the fact that they have yet to attract a key demographic to their product? Good times, good times.

Still not Evil

Still not Evil

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I love Google. First and foremost, the best search engine the internet has yet seen (regardless of what Yahoo says), innovative email, and now, a Jabber engine. (Thanks to Catspaw for getting me online before the actual release (only a few minutes before, but still.)

It works with ichat, if you’re a mac user. See you on Google talk! (I’m rmazar@gmail, FYI.)

The Revolution Will Be Podcast

The Revolution Will Be Podcast

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To me, the power of blogging is obvious. It was obvious the first time I started a blog back in the old days, back before comments and tracebacks and technorati. The simple act of public reflection seemed so revolutionary then, and the surprising thing to me is that it keeps being revolutionary now, six years later.

I thought all the people who were going to be got on the bandwagon back when the first blogathon kept us posting through the night. It felt then like we had hit market saturation, but clearly I had no idea. Because today I feel like we’re in a totally new blogworld.

There are lots of things that should have clued me in to this along the way. Podcasting, for instance. The sheer rise in the numbers of blogs. The fact that the word gets mentioned in the mainstream media so often you’d think we’re in their employ. But what really drove it home for me was the explosion of weblogs around the CBC lock out.

The background: The CBC is Canada’s national broadcaster. It is, essentially, a government service, with a mandate to provide news and programming to every region in the country. In spite of the government funding (and perhaps because of it), the CBC provides famously good, critical news and commentary. The CBC is our insurance that we won’t be swamped with American programming and news, which, if you look at the film industry, is perilously close to being a reality otherwise.

So the CBC management has locked out the union. The staff is all on the picket lines. In other times, what we would know would be only what the official CBC brass want us to know. But the time is now, and the CBC staff understands the power that the internet represents.

CBC Unplugged is another voice on the whole experience, and tonight (on my nice long walk out along the credit river), I listened to their first long podcast, created out of Vancouver. (I highly recommend it: you can download it here, or subscribe to the feed via itunes. I recommend it if you’re Canadian, or if you’re interested in labour politics in any way.) This is amazing; I’m learning things about this dispute I don’t think I would ever have had access to otherwise. Management has shut down staff email addresses. They talk about a “labour disruption” when it’s actually a lock out, they barred their employees from entering the building. They forced them out on strike. I got to think about this experience from their point of view; Bill Richardson talks about what it’s like to hear his own voice from the archives filling air time, as if he himself (his former self, the part already paid for by the CBC) is a scab. This is amazing.

They can bar access to one means of production, but the world is a slightly different shape these days. People can’t be silenced anymore.

Partly I feel like the right audience for these stories and rants and political outpourings, and partly I feel like a spectator. Part of what these blogs and these podcasts are doing is tying together a diverse and disparate staff. One of the podcasters says that it’s nice to see what’s going on in other cities through the photo blogs; she gets tired of walking around the same block over and over in Vancouver, but she can see that they’re doing that very same thing in Toronto. This is a new kind of solidarity, and I can only applaud the CBC staff’s thoughtful and conscious use of technology. The blogs give them up to the minute communication (audio, visual, text, emotion, politics, ideas, words, slogans) with each other as well as with their audience. The podcasts allow them to derail the “official” line on what’s going on, to put their voices back out there after they’ve been forcibly removed. They are speaking directly to us through every means they can, and they are showcasing not only their own resourcefulness, but also the power of the technologies their using to change the nature of every form of communication, including the managerial one. They even suggest that the blogs are even one way of communicating across the sides of this lock out: staff are reading the blogs of managers, managers are reading the blogs of staff. I don’t know that there’s any kind of precedent for something like this.

All of this has made at least one thing very clear to me; we’re not talking about information technology. We’re talking about communication technology. And that can make all the difference in the world.

Give me back my CBC!

Give me back my CBC!

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I was watching CBC television some weeks ago now when I was visiting my parents, and they were talking briefly about how some cities in the US had been getting some CBC programs, but that some changes and management decisions meant they wouldn’t see them anymore. So the CBC played a bunch of video letters from American viewers sorry to see the CBC go. It was actually quite heart-wrenching, the way these pleas were framed; not in terms of “but I love that show!” but more like, “this is the only news source I feel I can trust, please don’t take it away.” And as the piece on the American viewers ended, the voiceover noted,

“We’re working on ways to keep bringing that programming to our American viewers.”

That struck me. Here we have this well-paid staff of broadcasters who do their work (mostly) regardless of how many viewers or listeners they have. They have a national mandate to broadcast. Does it matter if Americans are listening to it? Not hardly. This is like the definition of art; you do it for the sake of it, because it’s beautiful, because it brings you joy, not because it’s the popular thing to do. I know it’s idealistic, but it’s so amazing to watch it happen. This isn’t about money, this is about doing something great, and truly worthwhile, about connecting Canadians, and it’s a service that’s truly loved.

How political it is, radio. How political podcasts are, the internet is as a whole. Getting the message out in whatever way you can, that’s power.

So I’m not even surprised that CBC employees are still broadcasting while on the picket line. Talk about taking back the means of production!

Historicity, E-Persistence, and Blogs as E-Portfolios

Historicity, E-Persistence, and Blogs as E-Portfolios

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From Ida takes Tea: why not to use blogs as e-portfolios:

The persistence of blogs (via permalinks, trackbacks etc, to say nothing of the recently-sued Wayback Machine) is at odds with the desire to create a personal repository that can be selectively shared and edited, over time.

Catherine has more to say that this snippet, but this snippet sums up an important piece of her issueswith the idea of blogs as portfolios. Put it out there and it’s out there for good. All data is ahistorical, existing right now even though it may have been created 6 years before. Students are not ahistorical; we need a system that respects the chronological growth of the student’s learning.

I actually found this argument really hard to wrap my brain around. I don’t know why the internet would seem more ahistorical than any other document. Manuscripts from the 14th century still exist, and I’ve even seen and held a few of them. The fact that they exist in the now, that I can pull them out and flip through them, does not convince me that they are of the now. Serial literature is the same way; sure, it might have just come into my hands, but I still look at the date on it. It makes a difference to me if the paper is today’s or one from last week. I see absolutely no difference between that and online publication.

This critcism feels as if it comes from a place without any online information literacy. The internet is full of documents, some of them old and some of the new. There are ways to date an online document, from clues as hazy as the design and layout of the page to as concrete as how many dead links a page contains, or the copyright or ‘last edited’ date. The same skills we teach students about information literacy apply here; does the content tell us anything about the age of the document? Is it full of references to something terrible that happened to the World Trade Center yesterday? “Yesterday” is a subjective term, and in a world where every post is written in the now, maybe this is just something you get used to over time. Diaries tend not to be retrospective of themselves; they are forever reflecting on now as if, well, it’s going on right now.

And actually, the fact that this criticism is being leveled at blogs in particular strikes me as odd. If anything goes out of its way to historicize web documents, blogs do. They are archived by day month and year, they are signed and timestamped. Most blogging software allows for some context for blogs, showing you a calendar and links to the post that came before and after the post you’re reading. Additionally, posts on blogs that are a part of a larger community also come with comments affixed, also time- and date-stamped. So, were I to pull up some posts from 1999, I would see, constantly, that it’s 1999. The comments may give me a sense even of how long that particular conversation went on. The post may be written with a sense of immediacy, but I have every chance to witness its context, its datedness. No document exists in a vacuum, and that’s just as true of online documents as of any other.

To turn this debate around a bit: were it possible for students to submit work to a journal and have it published, should we discourage that as well? After all:

persistence creates the illusion of fixed identity, whereas higher education explicitly conceptualises its mission as formative and processual: we believe that students are shaped, and we want them to be so shaped, by their experience of participating in a learning community.

If persistence disrupts that important process, should we disallow publication altogether? Does the requirement of faculty to publish diminish their ability to be formed by their work, to engage in a process of learning? Does hard paper publication prevent us from being shaped by the experience of participating in any learning community?

Or does publication (in any context) allow students the opportunity to engage in participatory learning? Doesn’t putting something out there allow us to grow while at the same time reflecting the benchmarks of our learning process? Why would a persistent record of that process necessarily be bad? To drag this out to an illogical conclusion, should we suggest that students not speak in class, for fear that they would express an idea that, in a few weeks time, they might think better of? Does student participation in any context limit who a student is by putting unformed pieces of them before the eyes of others?

The key to all of this is context. Something a bit newer in the blog world is the possibility of tagging and categories, and I think that this simple classification method bears mentioning in this debate. While Catherine sees no value in the persistence of blogs to education, doesn’t one old blogged idea now sit within a category of similar ideas, organized chronologically, so that the history of that idea can now be easily traced, with the emphasis placed on the most recent addition? Isn’t that even a better and easier historicity than, say, a paper publication? Or a conference contibution?

All that aside, I get the general argument. At its heart it’s an ethical question: should we be asking students to create a web presence that will be with them for life? This may not be their finest hour. Perhaps at some point later on in life they will want to create a new web presence, and they will have to be dodging the one we forced them to create.

Of course, this is a purely intellectual debate, based entirely on one assumption: blogs must be public. Blogs must be googled, tracebacked, ranked on Technorati, traded on blogshares, and tracked on the way back machine.

There is nothing about the structure or features of blogs that require them to be public. In fact, many of livejournal‘s 8 million blogs are entirely locked to the public. The posts are never found on the wayback machine, Google never peeks in; the posts exist only to the people allowed to see it.

As far as I’m concerned, educational blogs should follow Livejournal’s lead. I know there are educational blogging projects in the UK following that precise route. For an educational blog mandated by schoolwork, there should be multiple options: visible only to you; visible only to your instructor/TAs; visible only to your instructor, guest lecturers, librarians, and your classmates; visible to your friends at the school as you choose them, but to no one else; visible to anyone at the school; and visible to the whole world.

There is absolutely no technical reason why a student shouldn’t have complete control over how their e-presence is created. None of this precludes the use of blogs as educational tools or as e-portfolios. Google and the way back machine should not be figuring into the use of blogs in the classroom anymore than Old Navy and the Gap should. They exist, they’re out there, they’re ubiquitous; but we don’t need to invite them in.

The argument is often made that the public nature of blogs is an educational bonus. Putting your ideas out there for the wild internet to see means you may attract the interest of just about anyone, and you may benefit from their comments and questions. I know lots of people who will make the argument that class work should be available to all and sundry for pedagogical reasons. Since students own the copyright to their own work (including everything they create at the request of the professor and hand in), I think they shouldn’t be asked to put that work in the public eye, but that’s a conversation to have in class #1. There’s no reason why we can’t moderate the degree of “public” that students have to deal with, let them decide what they want to add to the public record and what they want to keep ephemeral.

I get frustrated by criticisms that are hinged on the limitations of one particular version of a technology. One of the best things that can happen to anyone is to learn enough about technology to realize that no interface is unchangeable. Everything can be changed, fixed, transmuted. If something is getting in your way, well just change it.

That’s what I love about the internet. Infinite possibility.

ipod sheep, the Ignorance Premium, and Technological Literacy

ipod sheep, the Ignorance Premium, and Technological Literacy

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I’ve been reading a tiny bit recently about something called the ignorance premium, being the price you pay for not knowing better. When you slap down an extra 200 bucks for one product when a cheaper one would have worked just as well, but you didn’t know about it. The general idea here is that we’re prisoners to the people who have the cash to flood the world with slick marketing, because we don’t bother to learn about all our options before opening our wallets. While you can pay more to get somewhere faster by buying a car rather than using public transit, we can also pay more to stay ignorant.

This criticism has been pulled out in response to those of us who own ipods. Because ipods aren’t cheap, and there are cheaper mp3 players out there.

Now, no one has ever questioned my reasons for owning an ipod over any other mp3 player. Nor has anyone ever called me a sheep for buying one. As far as I’m concerned, there are two kinds of people in the world; people who want an mp3 player, and people who don’t. (I’m in the former category, and my sister is in the latter.) But among the people who want an mp3 player, there are gradations and variations. There are the runners, who have specific needs. There are the people who are completely satisfied with the idea of basically listening to one cd at a time, and only need 20 or 30 songs. And then there’s the people like me, who will really only be happy if they can have a complete mirror image of their computer’s mp3 archive in their pocket. And for those people, only a true ipod will do. When you’re looking at that much storage, you need an expensive machine. And if you’re like me, having something attractive, something you can just fall down and love, is value in and of itself. As I say, I’ve never been asked to justify my ipod, but I’m ready to do it. I know there are other players out there, but my decision is purposeful.

What the “ignorance premium” people tend to assume is that design is meaningless. Design is just pretty, not function. If something is ugly and clunky but is capable of the same thing as something pretty and sleek, they’re technically equal. But this simply isn’t true. All this shows is that there’s a segment of people in the world who don’t think that design, look & feel, has a place in the world. But those design elements are actually information bearing, like a form of scaffolding. Let’s presume that we have X amount of time in our lives to spend understanding a concept, or completing a task. With bad design, where we spend significant time learning how to do something, we are essentially wasting time with bad design. Good design, that is pretty, information bearing, and helps us to move on to more intellectual pursuits than figuring out how to play one stupid song, actually lets us reach greater heights.

That said, I have argued the ignorance premium thesis before. Mostly when it comes to non-computer people buying computers. What, you say all you’re going to do is send email and look at the internet from time to time? Well, heck, you’d better get the BEST computer possible, better get, for instance, a powerbook.* We all know that computing technology changes to fast, you’d better get the best one first, not something middling. Middling computers will be out of date and useless in a matter of weeks, right? I know people, good people, smart people, who buy (very very expensive!) powerbooks on this presumption. When what they really need is the powerful, flexible, and extremely wonderful ibook. Sure, it’s less expensive. But it’s so much more than you’ll ever need.

I often get frustrated by what happens to people who are afraid of computers. When they deal with computer people, they can get so screwed over, all because of that ignorance premium.

We’ve spent a good deal of time at work lately talking about “technological literacy” and what that means. If we’ve got a grip on “information literacy”, surely “technological literacy” would be easier to define. More and more I feel myself leaning toward defining technological literacy as breaking down those fear barriers that people have, and turning computers into just another tool we use, like pens and radios and walkmans. We’re not afraid of these things; we’re not afraid to look at the specs and talk about what we really need from them, and be able to distinguish between “what I think I need” and “what I happen to want”. Information literacy has broken away from its tool-based roots (how to use X database, how to use a library catalogue) and into the more broader, conceptual level (what makes a good source for this paper? who can I trust?), and technological literacy needs to make that leap too. Maybe a technologically literate person can distinguish between the design that is functional and design that provides information, knows how to get help within a program, understands the basic principles that underlie all software, and can get to work using a piece of software between 15 and 20 minutes after first opening it. It’s not about the software itself, it’s about getting to know how software tends to work. Right?

So that way, if we’re all technologically literate, we can just buy our ipods without people calling us sheep.

* I ‘m using Mac examples here because that’s what I know best. I know powerbooks are great computers, but they’re more high end than most people would ever even think about needing, is all I’m saying.

Actualizing the Experience

Actualizing the Experience

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One to grow on from Educause:

Once while delivering a paper at a conference of online educators, I was challenged by a participant who thought my online course (being projected onto a screen) was “heavy on the text.” Upon learning that the questioner’s field was American literature, I asked him if he thought Moby-Dick was “heavy on the text.” If the work is compelling, the medium disappears and the experience becomes actual.

While we often get mired in talking about how to get the flashiest interface, the most audio/video, the fanciest graphics, we seem to forget this one very simple point. So we should be focusing on making the work compelling rather than making the interface exciting. Which makes online instruction absolutely no different from face-to-face instruction.

Why the Internet was Created

Why the Internet was Created

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Today I believe that the internet was created specifically to enable this guy. A description of this link’s content:

The complete soundtrack to Super Mario World, covered by one man using dozens of instruments. Roughly in game order, faithful to the originals, with some bizarre artistic license thrown around. A private hobby made public.

All hail. The man is a genius.

Tuesday Roundup

Tuesday Roundup

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You can now post to a Blogger blog from Word.

Seriously, I think this is the single coolest thing I’ve seen all week. (I see a lot of cool things in the course of a week, see.) Having spent a wee bit of time helping people who are afraid of computers move into the world of the internet, there are two things I’ve discovered that people feel most readily comfortable with; Word and email. WordPress lets you post to your blog by emailing it; Blogger lets you post to your blog from Word. I know it seems lame to the more technologically engaged, but it sounds like a godsend to me. Now you can get people blogging by telling them to just write up their thoughts in Word. Now, if we could get a hack of that plugin and get it working with a few other (open source) platforms, we’d be good to go. And as I spent the morning thinking about enterprise level content management systems, the idea of Word-to-database content creation makes my toes tingle.

What’s on my ipod this week: Radio Open Source with the wonderful Chris Lydon. I used to listen to this guy every morning when I was living in Boston, and I missed his witty repartee once I got home. And now he’s podcasting these amazing hour-long shows. Personal favourites (so far): Fan Fiction, a truly genius interpretation of this truly postmodern art form; Hyperlocal Journalism, which inspires me to think about getting some hyperlocalness going on in Mississauga, a town that needs it like no other. Next on the playlist for me: Literature 2.0.

Disappointment of the week: the total lack of This American Life podcasts. Shame, that.

In the news: you can now run Mac OS X on a PC. I realize as a mac devotee I should be sad (or at least upset in some way) about this. But I’m not. It’s wrong to use pirated software, yes I know, but I actually feel badly for all those Windows users in the world. They really should have access to such a whitehot operating system. I mean, have you SEEN dashboard? If only Tiger had a built-in camtasia feature, I would upload you a .mov of a dashboard application entering the fray; the whole screen looks like a gentle pool of water. The app sort of surfs on to the screen. Sweet. And as for hardware, I like my mac hardware. It was worth the $$. The advantage I’m seeing to PCs running OS X is that there will be more and more fun software that’s cross-platform. Whee!

And one last goodie: context is everything. This link shows you how the context you see around you had more impact on what you actually perceive than you can possibly imagine. Check it out. (Via June. Thanks, June!)

The A-List and the Z-List

The A-List and the Z-List

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I saw the Cites and Insight thing this morning and laughed a little nervously. It’s sort of amusing to watch people get all wrapped up about blog popularity (in this case called ‘reach’), but sort of depressing at the same time. Since it’s at least marginally possibly to quantify it, I know that it’s tempting to do it. I even understand that looked like a good idea at the time.

I’ve been involved in a variety of online communities, and at some point this sort of ranking always comes up. And it universally causes hurt feelings, conflict, and disappointment, and even results in some undue criticism being levelled at the chosen ones. While blogs really exist for the good of their authors more than for their readers, lots of people start up blogs in the hope of getting some limelight thrown their way, and it’s decidedly dark and dim to be among the unwashed in these things if that’s your goal. Is this a sign that no one really cares about what you have to say? Should you just stop now, since no one’s reading you? Have you failed in some way?

And then the chosen few get this moment in the sun, which is nice. But it also means that they get scrutinized a little more than they used to, because everyone’s trying to see what they’re doing that the rest of us aren’t. Nine times out of ten, people come away from such a search shrugging, saying “not such hot stuff, really”. And once those tokens of popularity are handed out, some people, the outer fringe types, the ones who are too cool to be mainstream, too edgy to be with the popular crowd, will start avoiding the big names to underscore their radical otherness. Divisions are made, cliques etched out, lines drawn. And over what? A few numbers that don’t give the whole picture? A snapshot in time that, over a few days, weeks, months, will look entirely different?

Ranking people cheapens the whole process. It creates and fortifies the depths of anonymity and creates the perch from which the chosen will fall.

Popularity is like the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When it’s good, it’s very good indeed. But when it’s bad, oh yes, it’s horrid.

I can say without reservation that I’m certain Walt did not intend to belittle anyone by doing this research. And yet, I can also say without reservation that someone somewhere felt hurt by being left off his ranking, and some librarian somewhere is looking at her blog tonight with a little less delight than she did yesterday. Is the value of this inevitably ephermeral research worth that loss of delight?

For me, the point of blogging, and the joy of blogging, is in having a place to write things down. For me writing is thinking, and I love to be able to share my thoughts with anyone who’s interested. Rankings therefore don’t bother me much, because my goal has never been to please other people. The only way for me to do something like this for as long as I have is to do it for myself. But still, I’m more than honoured that Meredith has called me “the Dorothy Parker of the biblioblogosphere”.

The best thing that can come of Walt’s research, as far as I’m concerned, is that we remember how many of us there are and support each other, reach out more often and engage each other in communication. And the next time someone goes to look at the statistics of the library blog world, he will see a large, interconnected web of full of people, opinions, stories, and delight. Not an exclusive A-list.

Search Strings Redux

Search Strings Redux

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It’s been a while since I’ve done a thorough expose on my search strings. Things have changed a bit since a) I had catastrophic data loss about three months ago, and b) I’ve moved from Movable Type to WordPress (a move that happened along with a switch from one webhost to another). I’ve partially alleviated these problems by wholesale copying my MT archives into my new public_html directory, but the fact remains. Those links still work, but those pages aren’t going to be updated. All the urls are different now.

The reason why my search string collection is so interesting is because I have a text-heavy website. I use a lot of words, and words are the key to Google’s algorithms. I put words together, and Google looks for sets of words, so I get all kinds of hits from people who may or may not be looking just for me, or someone like me. While I started collecting and analyzing these strings as a bit of a joke to entertain my friends, it turns out that this examination is quite enlightening. I find myself mentioning this ongoing research at work, to illustrate a point. It turns out that looking at these strings has twigged me in to some elements of web searching I think I would otherwise have breezed right by. While I often find these strings funny, I respect user searches more now than I used to. It feels as though this work has worked to my advantage in ways I could never have imagined. The fact that people find me when they’re not looking for me is a great gift.

That said, sometimes people are looking for me.

mazar
rochelle
diary of a subversive librarian
rochelle mazar
mazar.ca
random access mazar
utm mazar

It doesn’t disturb me in the slightest that people are using search engines to look for me directly. In spite of all the articles about how problematic it can be for people to discover your blog, I, stats-obsessed as I am, am more aware than most how absolutely public this writing is. And I don’t feel particularly flattered by these searches either. It’s not as if there are hundreds of them. I’m not famous, or anything.

But what’s interesting about these strings is how much a person needs to know about you in order to find you. I have a rather unusual name. As far as I can find out, I’m the only Rochelle Mazar in North America. A French place name paired with a quasi-Ukrainian surname is, I suppose, a bit unusual. You also have the fact that “Mazar” is not a proper surname at all; it was mangled at the border, making it even less likely that there would be a doppleganger out there for me to cope with. So typing in my last name or my first name does, apparently, eventually get to me. My full name gets you there even faster. These people know who I am, and are looking especially for me. Someone even knows where I work and is searching for me that way.

Others don’t appear to have met me personally, but seem to have heard of my blog. They search for it by title (“random access mazar”, and “diary of a subversive librarian”). They’re not looking for me per se, but for my blog. Real person search, virtual identity search. Both end up in the same place. This was a conscious decision I made; I linked up my real self with my virtual self by naming them the same thing.

Since I spent most of my time these days talking about issues relevant to librarianship, it makes sense that search engine algorithms would send some library queries my way.

librarian behind desk
academic libraries future 3 years
radical reference
radical reference librarians
proactive reference public libraries
reader’s advisor* alice walker
trillian library academic use
academic monograph
casual librarian
library anxiety

My suspicion is that these sorts of queries are the product of librarians making their way online. Note the use of a wildcard in the reader’s advisory string. There’s no direct Boolean involved, but a lot of it is presumed; trillian ? library ? academic use might as well be a subject heading. You can see the careful thinking behind these queries; most of them are keywords strung together.

The only one of these strings I think is not the product of a librarian’s search is the first one; that’s clearly a user looking for an image, but using the wrong feature.

I’m still most interested in search strings that show very little processed thought. I’ve recently had discussions about just this; is this the dumbing down of academia, turning to algorithms to parse our search strategies? Or is this another form of scaffolding, letting people think less about creating the perfect search string and more about the topic at hand?

teenagers 2005 what’s important to them?
evaluate about since the invention of internet libraries and textbooks have become obsolete
turn the handle and the couch becomes a bed ikea sofa
xanga can hurt people

What I love best about these strings is how spontaneous they are; can’t you just see an internet user staring at that search box, thinking about their question, adding useless words into the string. No, I take that back; what I love best is that those searches work. That second string, evaluating the idea that textbooks are obsolete in the face of the internet; I have written about that, and this awkward, clumsy search lead them to me. There are enough keywords nestled in that unprocessed thought to get somewhere useful. That’s a powerful search engine at work. This is cyborg searching, an algorithm so responsive it accepts the unprocessed nature of human thought. Tapped right in, plugged into your brain.

I’m writing about search strings; in the tradition of metacritique, of course I get searches from people interested in, well, search strings.

search string apostrophe
search strings
funny search strings in google failure
my favourite search words
weird search strings
string search narrow algorithm

Though, that first string is probably someone hitting the same mySQL problem I had, where apostrophe’s bork the database command, and looking for the script to remove them. I’ve got it. I can hand it off. Just email me.

The rest: I think it’s interesting that someone is looking at how search strings show the obvious failure of the system. We distrust it, we librarians in particular; a machine can never be so smart as to not have a panapoly of errors to giggle about. In some ways I think we want it to fail, again, librarians in particular. If Google fails, we will still feel we have a legitimate place in the world. It must fail, it must be laughable.

Does someone out there have a set of favourite search words? What would make a search a favourite? I think that’s a search doomed to failure. My (somewhat educated) guess is that most people don’t think about their search strings at all. I suspect that getting back a list of their own search strings would be a foreign and off-putting experience for most people. It would be like getting an itemized list of what they had thought about in the last three hours; recognizable, but not nearly as linear as a list would make them seem. Putting stuch things in a list would make the process unrecognizable.

new jersey bar exam and july 2005 and opinions

However, some people really do think hard about their search strategies. Interestingly, while this search is perfectly constructed, as opposed to most of the other strings I’m displaying, the results were obviously poor if this person was led to me.

One of my other favourite things about looking at search strings is seeing the ones that are more statements of belief or feeling rather than actual searches.

i hate reading
wow can’t express by words you look beautiful
start revolution

The total randomness of these strings delights me.

Often my musings about search strings leads me in the direction of thinking that Boolean is dead, that real searching these days is more about throwing out lines of thought and seeing if anything bites; I spend my time illustrating how thoughtless searching is for most users, how they don’t metaconceputalize before turning to Google (or Yahoo or any other search engine). But then I get strings like this:

powered by wordpress inurl:ca

This is a brilliant bit of Google-Fu. Someone wanted to see all wordpress blogs with Canadian domain names. So they typed in the tag line of all wordpress blogs (“powered by wordpress”) and limited the search to domains ending in .ca. This is simply genius. This user got exactly what she was looking for; I bet it’s an interesting list, too.

And then we have the strings which are direct or indirect questions; they are turning to the internet because they have a specific activity or plan in mind. I’ve been thinking of these as the true reference questions of the web. These users are approaching a search engine not as a database but as an answerer or questions.

writing a narrative essay letter to my boss
how to fill out a reference letter for school
why does my computer random boot?
how can i clear my search strings
hide phone number from bots
post a comment blog

I am looking to do a particular thing; the instructions will surely be on the internet.

I’m still keeping an eye on the strings, obviously. I feel that there’s something for me to learn in them. I’ll keep you posted on precisely what that might be.

The Dewey Decibel System

The Dewey Decibel System

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I just finished listening to one of my favourite NPR programs, This American Life. I got hook on it when I was living in the states, and thankfully for me they’ve been available over the internet for years, so I still get my Sunday fill by tuning in digitally.

On tap today: Image Makers. This episode got me twice: first, it has a segment on how the Michigan public library was trying to change its image among teenagers…by bringing in rock bands.

Hey, if librarians could do this, making a library not very much a library, making it loud, then anyone can do anything.

Genius. Every single thing about that story is inspiring; doing something totally different, tapping into the interests of the patrons, and the idea of changing the general perception of what the library is, what words to use to describe it, by pairing two apparently contrasting ideas; the library (quiet) and rock bands (very loud). Two constrasting things in the same place at the same time. If anything can be a crucible for change, that’s probably it.

Then the second part of this episode tells the story of a mother trying to recreate the image of her extremely ill husband for her 10 year old son, and that part made me cry. Not that that’s a terribly difficult thing to do, but still. So, a success from start to finish.

So my recommendation if you have an hour of time you can fill with some interesting sound: Image Makers, from This American Life. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. If you’re a librarian, you’ll be inspired.

The Final Frontier: Investigating Undergrads

The Final Frontier: Investigating Undergrads

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Some time ago, I read an article called Undercover Freshman. It told the story of a faculty member from the anthropology department taking a year off and applying to live in the student dorms for a year.

Nathan had been worrying that students were starting to seem “like people from a different culture,” and it upset her that she didn’t understand this culture with which she interacted every day. The experience in the course she audited only added to her frustration. She saw that once students removed the title “professor” from her persona, they were more than willing to open up. She just couldn’t get them to do that the same way in the classroom.

So we she went undercover. She let students believe that she was recently divorced and living in the dorm while taking undergrduate courses. She experienced the undergraduate student life by sneaking in, listening through the walls, and watching. She’s using an assumed name to publish the results, because her subjects still don’t know about the ruse.

That study made me bristle for all kinds of reasons. First, I’m not all that keen on those sorts of colonialist observational methods. I realize anthropology has been through the ringer about this already, and I’m hardly qualified to add to the pile, but I’m squeamish about observing and writing other people’s reality as truth (at least as non-fiction).

And when it comes down to it, I don’t like the divisions that are being erected here; undergrads are not actually in a separate culture than faculty are. The institution (and society) itself may foster walls between the two groups, but undergrads are adults living in the same town as the faculty members, probably going to the same restaurants and the same bookstores. They are not aliens. There are other ways to meet and communicate with undergraduates than lying to them about your job and eavesdropping on their conversations. Even the article about this woman’s research indicates that students were perfectly willing to talk to her when she was auditing a class, even when they knew she was also faculty. The bridge she’s trying to build is between an instructor and an instructee, not between the high reaches of the faculty and the seething scum of the undergraduate residences. An iota of respect, please! Surely there is a better way to cope with power differentials than this.

What also put my back up was the presumption that undergraduate life is this hidden frontier, that such a study was required in the first place. There are lots of staff and faculty members at any university for whom interacting with undergraduates in a non-class room setting is their mandate. There are staff living in the residences. There are student staff living next door to first year students, helping them with the adjustment to university life and getting to know them as people. When I read this article about Dr. “Nathan” and her research project, I felt as though she had opted to shut down everyone else, she was going to go experience it for herself rather than examine some “secondary” source material first. In the end, from the sounds of the article, the research was more about professional development on the part of this one nameless faculty member rather than ground-breaking research. She didn’t uncover anything those of us who have been working with undergraduates didn’t already know.

Now there’s a similar but entirely different project underway at the University of Rochester. But this time, they’re being upfront about it. The research is being conducted by an anthropologist in conjunction with the library, in order to help tailor services to the specific needs of undergrads.

To get the data, the researchers did such things as interview students about all the various steps they took from the time they got an assignment to the time it was turned in and give students disposable cameras with which to shoot everything from where they do their research to the contents of their backpacks.

The library’s research team — among them, librarians, a graphics designer and a software engineer — then brainstorm over the findings.

I’m interested in the results of both of these studies, but I’m quite certain the former will not hold a candle to the latter. What a great way to re-invent library services! How much more respectful!

A Generation Lost in Space

A Generation Lost in Space

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Hot from my feedreader, this: the internet makes students stupid.

Although campus computing is often touted as aiding education, many professors say the Internet has actually hampered students’ academic performance. When asked whether the Internet has changed the quality of student work, 42 percent of professors in a recent survey said they had seen a decline, while only 22 percent said they had seen improvement.

Normally when I read about research I’m open to the idea that its conclusions might be true. I start from a positive place with an article, shall we say. But not this time. This may be a study of some kind, but it’s not measuring student output since the internet appeared. It’s measuring faculty’s perceptions of the quality of student work since they started listening to ipods and posting to livejournal. Don’t people always pine for the old days?

“The thing that I hear from faculty colleagues is that there’s plagiarism and cheating going on over the Internet and that there’s a worsening in the quality of students’ writing,” he said. “I hear complaints more often than I hear any kind of positive comments about how the Internet has affected students’ work.”

What’s missing from this study are things like measurables: have grades gone down since the internet appeared? Have fewer students been graduating? Are there fewer graduate students? Has there been a marked decrease in the level of published works by faculty members who spent time on the internet prior to finishing their phds? None of these sorts of markers were examined. All we have here is some nostalgia by some fairly aged faculty members (given that the internet has been in active and wide use for the last 10 years). But the key reason why I’m not all that convinced by this article is it’s secondary findings: while students are stupider because of the internet, faculty report that they are actually better because of it. They are in better contact with their students and their teaching has improved, faculty say.

Most of the professors surveyed, 83 percent, said they spent less time in the library now than they did before they had Internet access. But professors said that online journals, e-mail lists, and other Internet tools had become critical for keeping up with news and research in their disciplines.

Whether this is a change that makes their connection to their own disciplines better, or that makes their own research easier if not better than it was prior to the internet, doesn’t appear to have factored into this survey. The hint in it is that it might, though. Here we have faculty connecting with each other, keyword searching journals, keeping up with the professional literature from their desks or from home. Faculty claim to be in better contact with their (increasingly stupid) students, and also with their colleagues around the world. It would seem to follow that their research might have also improved. They are coming into the library less, but they are using library resources possibly even more than they used to.

I’m just not ready to trust contradictory hearsay research like this yet. This sounds more like nostalgia than hard evidence.

Return to MOO

Return to MOO

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It’s been an interesting week. It started with a full-fledged return to MOO.

MOO is very close to being a dead technology. Back in the day when monochrome screens ruled and we did everything from the command line and the tab key, MOO was not that much of an imaginative or skill-level leap. Text-based environments made sense to us then. But now that the GUI is God, MOOs are faltering. While there are some efforts to force a GUI onto a MOO, none of these have been particularly successful. Users just don’t get it anymore.

But those of us old school enough to remember MOOs still tread backward from time to time to play with them. So I joined Jason‘s class on a MOO Jason threw together at the last possible second for their edification. The scramble to get it together, to put something into it to show off, was exciting. It felt like the old days. I found myself back in the verb editor again, making things happen, staring at long lines of code I could barely remember ever looking at and cheering when something compiled. I got to watch Catspaw in action again, which was just as thrilling this time as it was years ago when I first met her.

Building on a MOO again, and explaining to a group of students what it is that MOO affords, reminded me of why I still have a soft spot for it. While David Weinberger argues that the internet is conceived of as a place, there is very little remaining online that has the sense of space/place that a MOO gives. You don’t exist online through IE in the same way that you exist online on a MOO; in IRC you may have a registered nickname, but you don’t exist there. You can take over a mouthpiece and communicate, but you don’t exist as a unique creature. There’s too much that’s transient about the internet; your IP address varies, your terminal changes. A decision was made in MOOs long ago to create a physical presence for people on the internet; while you’re offline, your MOOself sleeps.

It’s not a small thing. These kinds of concepts have reverberations, and I think they’re just the kinds of reverberations we need. As we’re looking at elearning, at creating communities on the web for distance learners and even for undergrads on campus, a physical metaphor could mean the difference between a student who feels isolated and invisible and a student who actually feels that they can walk into a classroom full of fellow students, regardless of the distance between them in the physical world. Metaphor is at the heart of the internet. Metaphor is the key to good interface design, good connection with users, and the core element of a successful application. MOO has a watertight metaphor. But how to translate into a GUI world is a challenge.

So today I called a meeting. I enlisted Jason and Catspaw in the tea-filled afternoon of discussion. I even moderated; when the conversation went off in different directions, I tapped their shoulders and reminded them of the whole point. Interface. How can we build a good MOO GUI?

MOO is a dead/dying technology, but it doesn’t have to be. And I have decided to make it my personal mission to bring it back.

MOO metaphor is built around objects. You enter a MOO, you are a physical being within that world. You can be touched, you can pick up objects and carry them around, you can enter and exit rooms. You can smell the flowers. If it rains, you get wet. In the right places, you can get sick. You are a creature with a gender and a name, and the world around you treats you accordingly. The original interface is text only; the first metaphor was the novel. But no ordinary novel. A novel in second person present tense, heavy on the dialogue, written line-by-line by you and the people around you.

Is there a conflict between a book metaphor and a place metaphor? This might be part of the conceptual problem that we’re wrestling with. We understand MOO as a place that you go to, but it’s a place buried within a book. Do you actually “go” places when you read? In a sense you do. It’s a tenuous metaphor, but it’s a powerful one. When you read, you really do experience another place, a place that often feels incredibly real. You conjure it up with the help of the author and then navigate through it. For people who use MOOs, the people who really get it, the sense of place is perfect. It’s a novel about you.

I remember when I first started using instant messaging systems (late to the party in 2000) my friend and I felt frozen, cut off. We could speak to each other, but the rest of the language we used on MOOs was excised. We had no bodies, and thus no body language. We couldn’t emote. It felt flat.

Is there a place for body language in elearning? In ecommuniations generally? I can’t imagine an argument that would say no. In fact, the need for body language is apparent in the way people use IM systems. The proliferation of the language of smileys. The way people try to mime out their actions with a language never designed to allow for that (LOL, ROTFL). People using the internet as a form of communication still wrestle with this 2-D environment that IM systems create, even without having experienced a richer one. Even if most body language is unconscious, a lot more about a person’s meaning is communicated when we allow them easy access to body language. Giving people MOO bodies allows for nodding, smiling, eyebrow-raising, chuckling, the kinds of reactions that encourage communication and give a speaker some instant feedback. Just like the kind you get in real life. Body language is full of meaning. A smile and a nod can convey a lot, even digitally.

So we spent the afternoon talking about MOOs and GUI interfaces. In a perfect world, what would a make a good GUI? How can we translate this rich, novelesque environment into something current web users can easily understand? Just how graphical do we need to go to give people a sense of space?

Another thing that’s driving my return to MOO is (finally) reading Snow Crash. Jason has been trying to get me to read it for years, and I finally gave in. I see why he was pushing it. Snow Crash contains a vision of the internet that never materialized; one in which we actually go there, see and are seen, interact, communicate, and exist. We have homes if we can afford them, we traverse digital space. We work within the faux-laws of gravity and space only inasmuch as we don’t know how to hack them (yet). There are scenes in this book where people are in two places at once; they are in the Metaverse talking to people in difference time zones, and they are in a car, driving from one dingy California location to another. The internet as a second world where we can recreate ourselves never entirely manifested itself.

So in our long conversation about how to translate MOO to a new generation of internet users, we started in one direction and ended going a completely other way. What do we cut out; the idea that everything is built and communicated in text, or shall we create a world where everything is communicated visually? Which is richer? Which is the viable option?

The best part of getting involved in software development is the realization that it’s not the code that makes something work, or that makes something good. It’s getting the concept clear, and getting the metaphor right. If we get it right, the rest will follow.

Dangerous Waters

Dangerous Waters

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“I’ve been a librarian for ten years and I have to tell you, I feel like a fraud. I don’t really know where to start when it comes to figuring out whether a site is believeable or not.”

Wikipedia. The word that makes many librarians (and teachers and academics) tremble, or snort, or turn up their noses. I’ve been reading a fair bit recently about wikipedia and how we’re supposed to react to it, to think about it: there’s the Wikipedia Lesson Plan for grade school classrooms, which, while interesting, seems designed to underscore that the Wikipedia is essentially untrustable and of poor quality as a source of information; there’s the sad mewling at the Chronicle of Higher Education forums, where one academic says,

Having found a fairly serious problem on Wikipedia, I contacted the owners of the site. They were less interested in the problem than I was (they were violating copyright) and one of them argued with me about it. I don’t know what they did about it, but their attitude convinced me that these sites are not vetted carefully and while they might provide some useful information, they are not academic and should not be given even the slightest nod by academics. We could be sending our students into some dangerous waters.

The basic principle I glean from my library school education and from all of the discussions around Wikipedia is this: for a source to be creditable, we want it to pass through the hands of a third party, for-profit company. That is, essentially, the mark of success according to the old rules. Sure, we say we’re looking for peer-review, and most of the time that’s true, but it’s not always true. Do reference works pass through peer review? Not really. They are collected by an editor, but they don’t need to be peer reviewed the way an article does. Or the way a monograph does. I’m fairly sure the Oxford English Dictionary didn’t go out to 3 un-named reviewers before it releases updates. Many of these sources are simply prepared or written by people of some repute, people that other educated people respect. Sources that have been published by one of the Old Boys are waters free from danger, right?

Not to say that there isn’t some validity to the old rules. Having to pass through to a third-party publisher means that at least one other person has read over this work of yours and find it worthy. That vetting process is very important to academics; while so many seem to prize the ancient practice of thinking and writing alone and uninterrupted, they prefer the results of that work to pass through the hands of others. Communal acceptance is one way to divine truth, and since communal acceptance finds its hallmark in publication by one of the Old Boys, that’s one way to provide validation. That’s one way to sort out the truth without engaging with the subject matter.

I understand the fear a lot of people have around Wikipedia, I do; in principle, it’s chaos. Everyone can edit these webpages, and no one is entirely sure who did what. Anonymously imparted information sits there on the page alongside information provided by a known quantity. We can’t tell who has a phd and who doesn’t. We can’t tell who has published books on this subject and who is a construction worker by day and a Pliny fan by night. In the traditional world we want to draw big lines between those people and be able to have a mental picture of the author before we read the work. We want to know if the University of Smart Folks has endorsed this person or not. We want to see the Mensa membership cards before we decide whether or not what you say has value.

Because here’s the problem: while people are upset that Wikipedia isn’t authoritative enough and is likely to contain errors, we largely ignore the fact that the sources we hold so dear, the ones published by the Old Boys , vetted by all the right people, are filled with errors too. Encyclopedia Britannica was proved wrong by a 12-year old boy. There are reportedly numerous errors in the new Dictionary of National Biography. We don’t trust Wikipedia because there might be errors in it, but we have no problem referring patrons to these stalwart pillars of the community, errors and all.

There is a growing disconnect between the traditional conceptions of knowledge we inherited from the Enlightenment and our current understanding of valuable information. As David Weinberger so gracefully points out in his talk to the Library of Congress, Everything is Miscellaneous, the difference between the Encyclopedia Britanica and the Wikipedia is that that one is theirs and this one is ours. And librarians don’t trust ours. There are too many of the unwashed among us. We can’t account for them all.

The ironic thing is that the Wikipedia is the best example we have of pure peer review. There is nothing posted on the Wikipedia that is not vetted by a cast of thousands, including lots of accredited Smart Peopleâ„¢. Writing in the Wikipedia is like writing an article at a conference, with the document itself open and projected on the wall, and everyone in the room shouting out responses as you type, grabbing the keyboard from you, arguing about your facts and interpretations. The errors found in the DNC and Britannica would have been corrected rather than reported had they been wikis rather than paper publications. The problem with Wikipedia is that we don’t trust everyone.

The advantage of the traditional, print reference materials we work with is that we’re used to working with them. We know that they were produced by intelligent, qualified people who may sometimes make mistakes or overlook something or may not be able to remember every single little factoid. They are few and human, after all. But they are humans who have passed through the refining process of graduate school, of the interview and hiring process, the tenure system, and then, finally, through the final sieve of the peer-reviewed print publication process. We rely on all of those steps to create authority for us. We don’t want to look at a source and see if what its saying is reasonable, we don’t want to have to judge a source on what it actually contains. We want to judge this book by its cover. That’s our comfort zone.

But we need to move beyond that. We’re not living in a positivist state anymore. We can’t be objective, we can’t efface ourselves from the catalogues we produce or the reference advice we dispense. We can’t be the 19th century matrons who tell people what’s good for them and keep the stuff that will rot their brains out of the library. We just have to give people the tools to think critically, to ask questions of the sources we help them find. And if we do it right, we help produce the paradigm shifters, the ones who question even the people with millions of publications, with a research chair at Big Whoop Dee Doo University, and a sizzling article in Very Expensive Quarterly. And in spite of all our fetishes around academic publications and citations, that’s’ exactly what we want.

Video Killed The Radio Star

Video Killed The Radio Star

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I spent today in Toronto, getting in some quality time with my favourite Torontonians in an outrageously overpriced tea house. The price tag, however, was justified by the fact that we were permitted to spend a ridiculous amount of time hanging out in the comfort of their establishment, hashing out everything from grad school to the future of instructional technology. I was able to show off my incredibly ability to drink two entire pots of tea in one sitting to boot.

I walked back to the bus station through a stunningly beautiful Toronto summer day. And on the way there I saw a policeman on horseback.

I’m used to seeing police on horses. They clop around Queen’s Park all the time, and Queen’s Park is right in the middle of the U of T campus. I used to walk through Queen’s park every day. And nearly every day I saw police on horseback.

Since he was right in front of Union Station at the time, this particular policeman on horseback was getting a lot of attention. All the tourist eyes were on him and his noble steed; the tourists pulled out their cameras, they pointed, their children trotted along beside the horse. No one said anything, but you could very nearly hear them thinking it: wow, look at that! A horse! On a city street! How quaint!

As I say, I’ve seen policemen on horses before, but this time, after an afternoon spent throwing around many and varied ideas about technology, teaching, and learning, I looked at this fellow and his horse a little differently. Here we have a society with a preferred mode of transportation: the automobile. We have built out cities to accommodate them. We build houses with a special added room our automobile can drive right into for the night. There are painted parking spaces on the streets, sized just so, because automobiles are expected to be a certain size, and that size can be predicted. The size of the car is one of the standard measurements of our lives, built into our consciousness at this point.

This is where we can so clearly see how good technology works, how good thinking about technology can lead to impressive results. While one technology may take over, become the standard, the obvious and the unthinkably necessary, the validity and usefulness of older technologies remains. Because there is a standard size for automobiles and because a congested city spawns traffic jams, a horse, which is not the standard size, can evade traffic. The problem presented to the standard technology is no problem at all to a older technology. The fact that one standard took over the transportation business means using a older standard gives police an edge.

In an environment where the latest thing is usually considered the best and only thing, sometimes an older technology can add something we didn’t think possible. Just a nugget of thought on a Saturday.

Bloggers Need Not Apply

Bloggers Need Not Apply

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Via my curmudgeony friend Jeremy: Bloggers need not apply: how job seekers with blogs eliminate themselves from contention by keeping a weblog.

Job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road ahead, if our committee’s experience is any indication.

You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, “Oh, no one will see it anyway.” Don’t count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

I have two opinions about this article. On one hand, I am cringing at the behaviour of some of the blogging candidates the author mentions. These people appear to be keeping named, public blogs wherein they talk about things as if the search committee (or their students, parents, and exes) will never see it. This is one of the issues I wish bloggers would be more conscious about; there is no hiding on the internet, there is no difference between a formal conversation and kitchen table banter on the internet. This isn’t a matter of “dance as if nobody was watching”. Dance as if the world’s eyes are on you.

However, the author of this opinion piece is expressing more about the toxic environment of his own department than he is about any of the bloggers he interviewed. One of the bloggers he nixed has a phd in the humanities, but also has a passion for computer hardware and software. Rather than be pleased about this well-rounded candidate who would be a valuable addition and support in the areas of personal computing and instructional technology, this department chose to see his technological hobby as threatening. The “technogeek” is not a true academic, because he has other interests beyond his (apparently solid) research. The ideal candidate for this department is one who will not even potentially share interests with any other department in the university. Note to applicants: while you may have other interests, it’s best to keep those a secret. While interdisciplinarity is interesting in principle, in general it’s best not to rock the boat and do anything vaguely different. Additionally, while universities are heading in a technological direction for teaching and learning, those who abhor computers and prefer a pencil and paper for communication are preferred.

The author of this article is also seriously concerned that the bloggers are using this self-publishing platform to air opinions about current events. This, also, is apparently a bad idea. While every academic search committee must know that people with phds are prone to thinking, arguing, and expressing their views, this committee apparently prefers to imagine that each candidate has no opinions; at least, none that anyone will ever find out about. A blank slate candidate is better than a known quantity, apparently. This part of the article begs the question: what’s the point of academics in society? In the grand scheme of things, aren’t the learned supposed to be guiding society, presenting views, correcting misinformation in the mass media and in our culture in general, and adding to the collective knowledge and understanding of a society? Apparently, when it comes to getting a job, it would be best if candidates appear meek, mild, and without opinions, ready to be inoffensive to everyone she meets. Again, I realize full well that there are inappropriate rants that get published on blogs, and I’m the first to cringe at them and work on writing up the blogging policy, but doesn’t it seems odd to disqualify a candidate because s/he is prepared to express opinions in any forum? It would be nice if the concept of academic freedom actually meant that academics generally respected and supported the idea of free thought and expression for everyone, but apparently this doesn’t work everywhere.

Finally, the author notes that merely having a blog is a negative for a candidate, because his department is concerned that such a public individual would air dirty laundry. If anything is revealing about the author’s department, this is. Rather than be afraid of an outspoken new hire, wouldn’t it be best to actually clean that dirty laundry? Make the department one that no one would want to air dirty laundry about? Re-invent it as a positive, non-toxic place to work?

I’m glad these blogging candidates didn’t get the job in the department described in this article. It seems to me that they (any of them) could do better.

Mainstream Media Vs. Web 2.0

Mainstream Media Vs. Web 2.0

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Moments like the ones we endured this morning, watching the tragedy of the London transit bombings, remind me over and over of the power of the internet. These moments of crisis act as a kind of case in point in the argument between the mainstream media and the forms of media developing online. I remember in the days following September 11th, 2001 that articles were appearing announcing that the internet failed us in the crisis; major news sites were bombarded and being dragged down into uselessly slow loading; while the internet was supposed to be rapid-fire, it wasn’t providing the news fast enough for its hungry audience. Live television, with it’s ability to quickly interrupt itself with the latest news, was faster at getting the news out. There was an air of “I told you so” about the articles, a sort of finger-waggling, reminding us that we still need the wire stories and our tvs. I read these articles and shook my head in disbelief. These people accusing the internet of failure were not looking for information in the right places. The internet did not fail us on 9/11, and it didn’t fail us this time, either.

The mainstream media cannot do what the internet does; it can’t connect us to each other. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was getting my reports from a friend of mine living in Manhattan, feverishly taking pictures from her rooftop and sending them to me, and waiting for her daughter appear on the street below, her shoes covered in ash. I called her friends in Toronto for her to let them know that she was okay, because the phone lines were down, but her broadband internet connection was still working. She could talk to me, and a whole slew of us who had gathered together in a multi-user synchronous space, but not anyone who was offline. While the anchors on my tv were scanning the latest news release, I was hearing the same information from my earphones, as live streaming radio from the US and from the people in the same virtual room as me, living the events as they occured. I was following this thread (warning: slow loading, as it is a huge, fascinating page) on metafilter, which is a moment by moment group blog detailing each excruciating detail, partly by people at the site itself, in and around New York City, and partly by those around the world watching and listening to the news. Mainstream media can show me the official video and hand me the official stories, but they can’t be hundreds of people on the scene, reporting directly back to me. They can’t be my friends, and I don’t feel for the mainstream media what I felt about the people there that I knew and loved.

Today was a bit different, but not that much; I started my day by hearing the story on the radio and being completely without an internet connection. I felt helpless, my hands tied. I didn’t know what was going on, I was blind and deaf because I didn’t have my contacts at my fingertips. I got into work early and checked on my friends. Someone created a group blogdedicated to check-ins from Londoners; people were desperately logging on, trying to find out if their friends were okay. The phone lines might have been down, but if you were online and had a blog, you could contact your friends and family and fill them in on what’s going on. The comments to these blog posts are filled with comfort, concern, and offers of help.

I talked to a couple of Londoners over YM and AIM; they told me about their empty offices, the long walk home, the eerie calm. We listened to radio streams together, and a friend of mine corrected some misinformation in the cbc radio broadcast. (“It’s not a tourist bus, it’s just a regular one.”) As was the case four years ago, a metafilter thread stands as a historical record of information as it appeared.

When it comes to big events, big tragedies, the internet has not failed us. Expecting the internet to act as if it’s just another version of the mainstream media is setting it up for failure. When it comes to connecting us to each other in ways we were never able to connect before, the internet has provided us with a whole new view of world events. By connecting us with each other, the internet brings the news so close to our hearts it hurts.