Open Folklore is up and running. Many thanks to Jason Jackson, Moira Smith, and Tim Lloyd for their vision and hard work. Jason Jackson has many more posts on his blog, including one entitled “What can Open Folklore help me do now?”.
When I get more of a chance to try it out, I will report my results.
This is amazing news if both want the web to succeed as a genuine communication platform and don’t want to sacrifice years of graphic design work in the print tradition.
Wired has the story of a bit of very famous text added to the robots.txt file maintained by Last.FM. I won’t spoil your delight by writing any more.
Anthologize is a tool for content creators to turn their website, and other materials they have syndicated I believe, into a book. It was produced by the Center for History and New Media’s “One Week, One Tool” project. They used a number of extant ideas and projects as their starting points:
UPDATE: Further along in the traditional publishing workflow comes editing and I just came across a website that allows for a kind of crowdsourcing of editing: it’s called BiteSizeEdits. Fascinating.
UPDATE 2: There’s a commercial site doing this: http://leanpub.com/.
I have recently started using DevonThink again for keeping track of diverse research notes and documents. The good folks at Devon Technologies have a great collection of on-line tutorials — simple, small amounts of prose with an illustration, affairs — that are perfectly parsed for learning a little bit here and there to improve your understanding of the application and how you might use it. Great support like this only makes me like — in an emotional sense of the word — the product more, which makes me want to use it more.
In his remarks to this year’s OSCON, Tim O’Reilly makes the interesting assertion that “federated is the future for open source”. His assertion comes out of his interest in the internet as the next operating system. His example makes the point very clearly (paraphrased):
Imagine yourself out with friends and you decide to get a pizza. What do you do? If you have one of the new smart phones [by which he means iPhone or Android], you can quite literally put the thing to you mouth and speak the word pizza into an app and it will search for places to eat pizza that also happen to be nearby.
The technologies involved are quite astonishing: touch sensors (to activate the app) motion sensors (the device has to know you are moving it up to your head to know to turn on the microphone), a GPS radio (to know where you are), and a microwave radio (to transmit your request).
But the technology doesn’t end there: the speech recognition is not being done on your phone in many instances but “in the cloud” as is the cross-indexing of eateries and your location. All of this is assembled into some form of text — HTML or otherwise — and then sent back to your handset, which now offers you a range of options.
Amazing stuff. But even more amazing is that really how Google, for example, know how to understand your spoken request is because they have a pretty good sense of what goes with what. They are, after all, in the search business as well. It’s all this data that makes it possible to give you not just an answer but a semantically-rich and appropriate one.
Obviously, the more you can cross-pollinate these various data sets, the more interesting your results will be and the more kind of innovation become possible. But Google owns its (your) searches and Facebook owns its (your) social graphs. Given that the current trend is in this direction, O’Reilly asks the pressing question of where does the open source community go when a lot of these companies are built on open source — Google runs on Linux after all and gives away a lot of the software it developes — but the data itself remains beyond our reach?
The University of Prince Edward Island cancelled their subscription to Web of Science:
This is to inform the UPEI campus community that we have not renewed our subscription to ISI’s Web of Science database (WoS). We realize this is a key research database for many of you and we have taken steps to ensure access to appropriate alternative resources, as well as the WoS back‑files. Late last year we received notification that our subscription price was going to increase by 120%. A number of factors went into the decision not to renew:
‑ a challenging fiscal climate means that we are unlikely to see an increase to Library budgets;
‑ any subscription increase in these challenging times is difficult, but an increase of 120% is simply not acceptable;
‑ we would have been forced to sign a 3‑year agreement, with additional increases in each of the 3 years;
‑ a weaker Canadian dollar would have a significant impact on our subscription costs;
‑ accommodating this level of increase lends credence to the vendors’ business practices and we felt it important to make a statement against these practices (see http://chronicle.com/article/U‑of‑California‑Tries‑Just/65823/ for a recent decision at UC).UPEI is also leading an effort to create a free and open index to the world’s scholarly literature called “Knowledge For All”. This proposal is currently being sent to various Canadian and international library consortia in an effort to gain support for the project. One goal of Knowledge For All is to ensure that scholars and members of the broader public are no longer disenfranchised by a broken system of scholarly communication. We will provide the campus community with updates on this effort.
It’s interesting to note that it may very well be the smaller universities that make some of these shifts, perhaps clumsily, first because they usually are closer to the economic trends than the majors. I think such is also the case with my own university.
Apple has a page of demonstrations that emphasize the full possibilities of HTML5. As others have noted, it’s not strictly HTML5, as a number of these features are a function of WebKit. To make matters a bit more complicated, Apple’s version of WebKit is a bit more robust, in terms of cutting edge functionality, than Google’s — and I assume other browsers built on WebKit. That said, kudos to Apple for building there browser on top of an open source project and for making all their developments open source as well. That some of these cool new possibilities only work in Safari should goad other browser providers, especially — and obviously — those also using WebKit, to step up. This is the way to make the functionality of the web move forward.
Privacy is, of course, an evolving social compact. In the modern era, we have enjoyed, thanks both to economics as well as philosophies and policies keeping pace as best they can with the changing economic context, an expansion of privacy. More of us than ever before live comfortable lives with an increased sense, and scope, of what we consider private. Much of our notions of privacy have to do with the spaces within which we interact with others. Thus, we have the notion that our front yards are more public than our back yards, if we have such a thing, because one is more viewable from the clearly public space of the street than the other. Our living rooms are more public spaces than our bedrooms, a fact we emphasize by putting the living rooms between the front door and our bedrooms.
But how do we define privacy within the so-called “virtual” space of the internet? We have come to regard certain information about ourselves as private. Sure, there have always been unscrupulous efforts or acts that revealed our privacy was more tenuous than we would like to believe, but usually those acts have been met with outrage.
Some enterprises or pundits have, in what has always struck me as a power grab, declared that “privacy is obsolete.” Give it up, they tell us. Give it up and we shall be set free. Don’t believe it.
More insidious has been the efforts of some enterprises — and here I am thinking directly of Facebook, but also of that stupid website where you share your credit card purchases and perhaps even, in some sense, GDGT — to whittle ever so slowly on our privacy expectations or, perhaps worse, to bargain with us. There gambit is simple: give up some of your privacy and in return you get … all the coolness that is “social media.” That would include a sense of community, of connectedness that was one of the promises of the internet (but not the only one).
But to return to a better definition of community than the one that gets slogged around the interwebs, what you get isn’t “community” but “association” as Max Weber made so clear at the beginning of the twentieth century. Communities are made up of the people who are around you because they are your neighbors or your family. They may or may not be “like” you in some larger sense. In fact, they often are so unlike you that they drive you crazy. Associations, however, are voluntary groupings of individuals who come together around some abstract sense of togetherness. This could be Methodists or it could be Masons. Ham radio operators were perhaps the first to use an information technology to seek out other like-minded individuals who never knew in person.
Yes, Facebook does offer you a bit of the real version of community, but it does so with an eye to mapping you, your friends, and your relationships. It is the kind of data that organizations, both private and public, salivate at the thought of getting.
And most of us have gladly given up our privacy in order to have this sense of community, of connectedness.
And it was convenient to do so. We could have built our own infrastructure to transport our ideas, but here was somebody else with the light rail system already set up. They weren’t charging money, only asking us to give up a little bit of our privacy here, and a little bit there, and suddenly, once we were on the train and enjoying the ride, they announced, “oh, you have no privacy, unless you ask for it.”
Nonsense.
And so I am deactivating my Facebook account. Not deleting it, because I want to keep my name, but deactivating it.
Thank you, New Curator, for trying to take a bit of wind out of the sails of the ship that seeks to take a perfectly useful term, curation, and a perfectly useful set of skills often embodied in trained professionals known as curators, or also as librarians, and make it so overused as to be as useless as “data mining” or, now, “social media.” Here’s the link.