Weibel Lines

Where was I?

I've forgotten how to do this. Holiday travel, the too-common cold, meeting an absurd grant writing deadline, and mental sloth are my excuses.  Until I get the hang of it again, a few notes on things I've read that I would like to share:

Self epitaph, via David Weinberger's Blog.  A role model for those of us who have always wanted to be the featured speaker at their own funeral.

Long term data preservation, via the Stoa Consortium (News, projects, and links for digital classicists everywhere).  As one of the many supplicants for the NSF DataNet solicitation, its all-data-all-the-time now.

Comparison of "extract, transform, and load" with federation, Lorcan Dempsey's recapitulation, through a lens-bibliographic, of Mike Stonebreaker's post on uber data management strategies (see?).

Pew Report on Digital Identity, via Fred Stutzman's Unit Structures

Pew Report on Teens and Social Media, also  via Fred Stutzman's Unit Structures.  Fred notes that 1 of 3 teenagers is blogging or journaling online.  David Weinberger also quoted some nice stat-bites in his piece on the same report.  There is an ongoing lament at the Allegro Cafe where I spend my Saturday mornings most weeks, about the decline in culture, and particularly the reading and writing of poetry and literature.  On the other hand, reading among teens is up sharply (another stat-bite from a Pew report, I think, but I can't find it) and the widely reported bit-stream-of-consciousness that overflows the webservers of the world confirms that creativity will out.  Human consciousness is compelled to create, and while we may not find the next Ulysses on YouTube, somehow we'll be surprised... and pleasantly... about what evolves from the modern idioms of self expression that are erupting everywhere.

A concise view of why Facebook is losing a lot of people's interest, also via Fred Stutzman's Unit Structures.

A lesson on Identity from Chris Messina's Factory City blogpost on L'affair Scobelizer-scrapes-Facebook.

Scrivener, via DChud, a tool which promises to increase productivity in large writing projects -- I'm definitely going to give it a whirl.

Another post by DChud on the Semantic Web, and whether it has reached the tipping point.

If it looks from this post that I've rediscovered my RSS reader, its because I have.  Its on my iPhone in a form sufficiently palatable (or maybe just novel) to draw me to it when i don't really want to get out of bed but can't sleep, either.  Keeping up with RSS feeds is approaching email on the onerous task scale, and doing so in the interstices of the day  seems like a useful life hack.
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The mouth of Kinsale harbor at dusk, taken while on vacation a few years ago.

Random notes on Facebook, Fathers' Day, and library stuff

I'm a 40 hour veteran  of Facebook now.  Some early reflections:

• I've made some contacts that surprised and pleased, with colleagues and friends I haven't been in touch with in some time.
• I became my son Brendan's 700th friend
• I realize that having friend-access to one's progeny enables a degree of familiarity I'd rather not exercise (but thanks, Brendan!)
• My favorite thing so far is seeing what one's friends are 'up to', whether a throw away status message, or, more usefully, what groups they are joining.  Though I cannot currently claim having learned or done something useful as a result, I think there is great potential in this as a sort of guided serendipity.
• My least favorite things thus far:
  • giving out an email password so that Facebook can pillage my contact list for members.  Its a perfect example, though, of the tradeoffs against our privacy which beckon to us, and changing passwords isn't so onerous, I suppose.
  • Facebook forces you into radiobutton category choices which constrain artificially (for example, the How do you know X dialog box) [as I was writing this post, Lorcan appeared in my Facebook Friends feed, having posted a note by David Winer about just this problem
  • I want the Web to work more like this, and not be bounded by a Web-platform utility.  The value that comes from this stuff is proportional to the number of participants (well, participation in general I suppose).  Should we really want or expect Facebook to become the dominant platform?  Monoculture is always more productive in the short term, and always pathological in the long term.

I must say, its fun so far.  It will be quite interesting to see if it can be productive as well.

On an entirely different topic, two BBC radio reports caught my attention on Saturday and Sunday mornings respectively.

The first was a BBC Global Business report (Peter Day, the presenter, has become a favorite of mine) about Tim Smit's, a 'social entrepreneur' and his Monkey Business principles.  Basically, they all have to do with creating and nurturing a creative business environment where people will surface rather than bury their passions, where social discourse fuels work, where people entertain and even cook for one another, and can openly articulate why they like working somewhere.  One that struck me... Make important decisions at night, in social engagements.  It reminded me of the wine-besotted working group meeting in OCLC's Conference Room 1 (I think it was 1... I was the besotted one) during the second night of the first Dublin Core meeting.  We broke  some rules, and broke through some barriers that night.  Ever since, the social events at the DC meetings have been a key part of progress, and laptops-at-the-bar was standard operating procedure.

The show this morning had to do with mobile libraries around the world: where they are fading, and where they remain a fundamental aspect of connecting people and resources.  The Kenya Camel library (I almost typed Kamel) is an example, but  I'm not sure these pictures were even from the specific  show I heard.  It frustrates me that I couldn't easily locate audiofeeds for either of these reports... they were great.

Speaking of connections, I heard from both of our boys today for Fathers' Day... one calling from London, the other from a moving truck (Pensacola to Corpus Christi).  Life is good.

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The lilies in my yard are in full bloom