B9 d++ t++ k+ s u f- i o+ x+ e++ l- c--
Month: November 2004
a rock and roll party in my mailbox
I wish everyone could work out their trademark and copyright animosity as well as The Postal Service and The US Postal Service have. Witness this ugly series of events [with follow-up] concerning a copy of Gone with the Wind that used to be on a Project Gutenberg Australia site.
The world’s protection of creative content may eventually settle at around the same level, say, life plus 70 years, [Mitchell’s heirs’ lawyer] said. The danger, he added, is that the most restrictive governments will be the ones setting that level. “National laws are going to infringe on copyrights around the world,” he said.
hi – 07nov
Hi. Sorry to be scarce, I’ve been reading a lot and working a lot. Today I taught some senior citizens how to use a word processor [hint: typewriter metaphors work well] and tried to find ways to do outreach to the convent. I’m also finalizing my plans for the Australia talk and moonlighting at one or two other things, including one fun library web site Movable Type upgrade/design assist.
I wanted to point out an interesting collaborative information gathering exercise that I recently witnessed in the online world. The question “Why can’t I find photos of Abu Ghraib torture using Google Images?” When I ran into the issue, it had shown up on the group weblog MetaFilter where many interesting pieces of information came out fairly quickly
- try AltaVista, it works better for this
- Yahoo no longer licenses Google search results
- some other ways to search if you want to find those images
- making and testing hypotheses about how often Google Images updates its archive
- an actual email from someone at Google explaining the problem
- feedback from someone using the Google Search Appliance explaining what they found
- links to a larger Slashdot discussion
- a Google Answers question asking the same question of their “experts”
If you follow along closely you’ll notice that the original question was pretty much answered and the information [i.e. pictures] located elsewhere and yet the only for-profit part of the equation, Google Answers, decided to delete the question (which I saw, but, sadly, did not locally cache) entirely from its knowledge base with no explanation or even a placeholder. I’ve always got a host of ready answers to the question “How is Google different from the library?” but now I have a new one “You can ask the librarians about the library itself and still get an answer.”
books are sexy? books are sexy!
Two ad campaigns try to link books and reading to sexiness, one fairly overtly, and one using a wry bit of double entendre. [thanks cheryl & robert]
hi – 04nov
Hi. Michael McGrorty and I and Eli sat around talking politics in Los Angeles this past weekend. While I think the current administration will be marginally worse for libraries [and much worse for people] than the alternative, let’s just rememebr that all John Kerry said about libraries in his big suck-up-to-everyone speech at the DNC was about putting one on a chip. Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for everyone who feels bad this week, but let’s not act like the Great White Hope just walked out the door on us. The decline of libraries and funding for libraries in the US didn’t start with Bush and while I suspect it won’t end with Bush, I’d argue that it wouldn’t have ended with Kerry either. Americans are changing their mind about how they feel about the public good, about sharing, and about other people in general. This election didn’t cement that, it reflects that. So does the decline of libraries. Let’s get started now, shall we, fixing it?