So I did my presentation on “Perfect Past,” Nabokov’s wonderfully, impossibly flawless autobiographical essay, and it went well, and then we turned to “The Doomed in their Sinking,” a 1972 essay by William Gass (collected in The World Within the Word). This is a technically excellent, masterfully erudite essay that outrages me on two points. […]
Over at It’s All Good, Alane asks something I’ve heard from time to time: why are we so knee-jerk about patron confidentiality? When it comes to encouraging technologies that trade a little patron privacy for convenience, we can be party-poopers. The answer is yes, sometimes we go farther than we need to on behalf of […]
In traditional bloggy style, I’m reporting that by way of Dan Gillmor I see Engadget is saying Pew is backing away from its claim that 6 million people have listened to podcasts. Dan had originally expressed doubts, and apparently those of us who were wondering if the survey’s wording had misled its subjects were not […]
If my earlier podcasts weren’t excruciating enough, in this one I sing a tribute in the manner of Marilyn Monroe to Michael “Tame the Web” Stephens on the occasion of the second anniversary of his blog. I wonder if I could be sued for singing this song without paying royalties, but then again, I have […]
(I cannot mention having a cold without commenting how much I enjoyed Annette Bening in Being Julia. She particularly shone in a wickedly funny ending that involves a stage character with a cold. Bening makes me proud to be middle-aged.) My joy on Mondays is to talk about what I’ve been reading. I do have […]
I tried posting this to LITA-L, but it hasn’t appeared yet. Feel free to share with interested parties. Briefly donning my work hat: We have a new site in development for the website I manage. I have contracted third-party for usability and accessibility reviews (the former done, the latter pending), and am now looking for […]
Pew just released a report indicating that over 6 million people have listened to a podcast, or as Pew puts it, “this new feature that allows internet ‘broadcasts’ to be downloaded onto their portable listening device.” I felt in the eye of the storm while reading this report, as just minutes earlier I had downloaded […]
Half of writing school is reading other students’ submissions and submitting intelligent feedback on their work–a great way to learn from others and to polish analytical thinking and the ability to closely read texts. During the semester, I am assigned between one and three pieces every week, and I try to write at least one […]
I had a boffo time at the New Mexico Library Association, talking about the new MPOW to a very engaged SRO crowd (in a conference center with free wifi). Sandy and I then hitched a ride to Santa Fe with Miriam Bobkoff, blogmom to the nifty Icarus blog from Santa Fe Public Library, and an […]
If you’ve read today’s Library Journal you know the cat’s out of the bag. Michael Gorman has resigned and I have been asked by a coalition of bloggers to run for ALA president. Making this more complicated is that based on my recent theorizing about improvements to search engines for directory-style engines, Google called with […]