the final push

And now the end is near

So I face the final curtain

This has been an experience, that's for sure.

I enjoyed learning about Rollyo, though I'm not sure if I'll ever use it again. I had lots of fun, of course, with the image generators and YouTube. And, strange as it may be, I've almost made my peace with Bloglines. The truth is, I only regularly check one of the feeds that I put in my account, and I usually do it from my laptop (where I have the same one saved in my IE "Favorites"), but when I'm not on my laptop, it's been a quick and dirty way for me to access the information I want without directly visiting the site and having it show up in the drop-down address bar. (Although, if I'm at home, even not on my laptop, I will just go straight to the site, and I can tell now at one glance whether anything is new.)

In addition to my relationship with Bloglines surprising me, I was also sort of amazed to discover how much about the Internet I never wanted to know. Although too many people assume something to the contrary, I've never claimed to know anything about the Internet or technology in general; I teach myself most of what I want to know through exploration, and if I don't know something, it's usually because I don't want to know it. The various exercises included in PRL's "20 Things" program exposed me to a number of things on the Internet that I really just didn't want to know existed. I got very uncomfortable with tagging, publicizing RSS feeds, and even blogging. After some of my experiences, I started feeling very paranoid, as if Big Brother really were watching--or could. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt that way. Suddenly, I went from amateur 'net surfer to unwitting conspiracy theorist! And I felt like an old grouch, too, stuck in the past and unwilling to leap into the future with the rest of my lemming friends. While I've never been one to blindly follow new trends, that feeling was also a first for me. Never before had I so pined for regression! So that was new, and that was surprising.

Overall, this program had a unique impact on my education in that it made me want to crawl back into my shell and never again emerge. What is it they say, ignorance is bliss? How true. Knowledge is power, but power corrupts, so doesn't that mean that knowledge corrupts? I'm reminded of a lyric from "Good and Evil" from Jekyll & Hyde: "Adam and Eve and the apple tore Eden apart." Anecdotally, was Eden not the most blissful place to be until the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge was consumed? [And we're all on a path back to the garden. That's the inescapable fate of mankind--reversion to sloth and ignorance. God bless the efficacy of technology!]

I have had many regrets in my life, but none really worth mentioning or fretting over. I've also had many complaints in my life, but similarly few to voice emphatically. My one suggestion for this activity is this: I wish it had included/required more interaction with fellow Pamunkey staffers, like by sharing things with one another over the Internet. I mean, if we're talking about the community nature of the web, why not ask everyone to share their favorite website, then ask bloggers to locate another staffer's blog, visit the recommended site, and blog their own thoughts about it? That would get everyone reading someone else's blog, exploring a new site, and maybe even learning a little about the person who posted it. It would also give folks a little more freedom to tailor their experiences to something that would be personally useful outside of work.

And finally, through ups and downs, I had a generally good time.

codpasting... or, podcasting

I found the how-to tutorials for podcasting very interesting. I have several friends with shows--though I never listen to them--so it was cool to see how they go about doing what they do.

As for podcasts that interest me, I located the Modlin Center podcasts, added that feed to my Bloglines account, and tried to listen to a couple of them on the office computer at the library. After finally loading, the show I wanted to hear wouldn't play. I don't know if there was something corrupt with the file, or if QuickTime is outdated on this computer, or what. At any rate, I was disappointed. I might try later from home or something.

Sadly, even the podcasts I tried from podcast.net were disappointing failures. Not a single one would play. Have I been doing something wrong? Is there a certain finesse one should use while clicking the "Play" button? Perhaps I'll try these from home, as well.

The 2.0 Awards

So, I explored the "Fun Stuff" category of the Web 2.0 Awards. The top selection was really cool. It was cocktailbuilder.com, and what you do is enter in the ingredients you have in your bar (soda, mixers, alcohol, fruit, etc.) and the site generates a list of cocktails--with recipes--that you can make! How awesome is that?! That would have been so handy when I was in college, instead of making all those gross experiment drinks like tequila & Sprite. And there was that one time when I drank a whole mug of vodka because I didn't have anything except for Gatorade to mix it with. I guess the "Web 2.0" aspect of it is that users can contribute their own recipes for cocktails. Anyway, this is the coolest site I've found in a long, long time.

There was another site I looked at, called onesentence.org, where you're supposed to tell a true story in only one sentence. Some of them were rather good, others were clearly written by people who thought they were being intelligent/poetic, and still others by folks trying (and failing) to be Hemingway [that's an allusion to his famous six-word story, of course].

The third site, fuzzmail, was ridiculous. I couldn't get it to work. It kept telling me that the e-mail address I was trying to use didn't work, even when I filled out a feedback form. Unless it's supposed to be a joke, it's dumb and needs to be debugged.

That is all.

What's up, [Google] Doc?

Since signing up for my Gmail account several years ago, I have tried to keep abreast of Google's various extras, so this was not my first exposure to Google Docs. What I like about Google Docs is that I can treat it like an online memory expander, uploading things that I want to make sure I don't ever lose, or I can use it to edit the same material from any computer. This comes in handy for me, especially when I'm working on a new story. Recently, I couldn't get the opening line of a story out of my head, but I wasn't anywhere near my laptop, so I logged into Google Docs, wrote the opening, saved it, and then the next day accessed it from my laptop and was able to work on it more. I like that you can upload a document or start something completely new.

Before finding Google Docs, I'd been familiar with uploading documents to websites and then being able to edit the text there. The site I use to publish some of my prose fiction uses that type of interface; you can upload the story (in a supported format, of course) and then use the site's tools to edit it if you need to. One of my other favorite sites has the same feature (I think they were patterned after the same site), only you can also type your entire entry on the site. The pitfall with creating something original on the site, though, is that if your contribution is rejected, it gets deleted, so you'll lose your work unless you've saved a copy elsewhere.

♪..A Wac shared her wiki with a naughty Marine..♪ (An homage to Mother and Barbara)

When wikis are monitored by editors, or even patrolled by non-users (through rating systems, etc.), I like them very much. I'm not such a huge fan of Wikipedia, because I think people rely on it more than they ought to (misguidedly expecting it to be more factual than it sometimes is), but I have a great respect for certain other wikis, and I think they could be useful for libraries.

I don't know what I thought of the provided library wikis. A lot of them seemed outdated, and I wonder how frequently they get used? I'm also not entirely sure what all of them were supposed to be. The Bull Run Library one? Not sure about the purpose of that. The Library Outreach one? Felt like a shared workspace more than anything else--or was that what it was supposed to be?

If someone could arrange for a patron's card number to serve as their login--to ensure that only valid library-cardholders had access to editing a library-sponsored wiki--I think that a library wiki could be very successful. It could provide a forum for discussion about books and the sharing of opinions and recommendations. Or can wikis--or wiki features--be combined with existing sites? Would be any way in Pamunkey to combine a wiki with PamCat?--so that, when a patron is logged in as him/herself, s/he can write reviews of library materials either from the account summary screen or just the browse screen. I don't know anything about programming--like, even HTML stumps me sometimes--but I wonder if there would be a way for patrons to tag books and make the tags searchable? I guess that would be along the lines of opening the record to patrons... And I wonder if patrons could offer suggestions about further reading? And the suggestions could link to other records in the catalog... kind of like the "Customers who bought this also bought..." feature on Amazon.

At any rate, I think that a wiki would be one of the more useful "Web 2.0" features that a library could employ.

My favorite wiki (non-library) is the user-edited, reader-rated, pop-culture dictionary found at UrbanDictionary.com. Is there a slang term with an alternate meaning you didn't know? Look it up in UrbanDictionary! People around you raving about the newest Internet craze, and you feel foolish not knowing what they're talking about? Do some research at UrbanDictionary! Did you just get a slur hurled your way and don't know how to react? Figure out your response with UrbanDictionary!

UrbanDictionary allows users to add their own words/phrases and definitions, as if it were a standard dictionary. Any one term might have as many as 25 authors writing definitions for it, but the merit of a definition can be easily judged by how many "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" votes it has. Any reader can give it a rating; if you agree with the definition or find it helpful, give it a thumbs-up. If you disagree or know the definition to be false (or the examples are terrible), give it a thumbs-down. The top-rated definition appears at the top of the page. Also, a lot of terms have different meaning or connotations, and different authors will provide different insight. You can peruse the various definitions and determine which one fits the scenario you're in. (Just like a regular dictionary, considering a word's context clues is vital. Example: "No one knows this, but I was actually a Chegwidden/Mac shipper during the run of 'JAG.'"* What does this mean? Do you know what a "shipper" is? If not, click here. Scroll down to Entry 5. Which definition seems the most appropriate, Entry 1 or Entry 5? Based on ratings, which meaning of the term is the most common one?)

There are also tagging features at UrbanDictionary to help you search for and connect to related terms, and if an author references another entry, s/he can link the new contribution to the other term. (To follow up on the "shipper" example, look at the definition of fanfiction. Within the first entry, there are direct links to the terms "fandom," "het," "slash," "AU," "blog," and "zine." Considerate authors will have linked their entries so you can easily define terms you've never heard of before; just click on the linked term, and you'll go straight to that UrbanDictionary entry!)

In general, I think wikis are helpful tools and good ways to open channels of communication among different people. They can create communities where there otherwise were none, and they allow for the free sharing of ideas. I think their validity and usefulness is increased when someone ultimately has the authority to edit and monitor available information--like on UrbanDictionary, there are editors, and a lot of freedom is given to the public so that one can consider the "general consensus" definition of a term. (See wikiality.) So yes, wikis have a place in the future of libraries... as long as we're smart about how we use them.




*For the record, this is so not true.

If you haven't got a life, try a second one!

I, a person of uniformly little faith, have confidence nonetheless that, someday soon, there will come another "20 Things" assignment that will not make my skin crawl to consider. Until such a day as that arrives, however, allow me to blog my thoughts on Second Life...

My first exposure to anything like Second Life came from Snow Crash, which I read as a senior in college for my linguistics class. The class was "Babel to the Brain: The Origin of Language in Western Thought," and I think we were looking at it to project a future evolution of language and the agency of language (through the virus manifest, etc.), and I remember being creeped out by the idea of the Metaverse. I knew about RPGs--heck, my campus even had an active group of LARPers who held weapon-making workshops!--but I could not imagine a physical world in which such a virtual world existed. Oh, don't think me completely naïve: I puttered around The Palace for quite a while when I was new on the Internet and got myself into situations I shouldn't have been in at fourteen... but a completely made-up world patterned after our own? Ridiculous.

Or so I thought in 2005. The summer of 2006 introduced me to another aspect of Second Life when I met a man who encouraged me to check out Second Life--visit his shop there, chat. He was working for me at Kings Dominion and was about to start a messy divorce that he didn't talk much about. As his tenure at the park wore on, he felt increasingly more comfortable around me and eventually divulged that his wife didn't know he was leaving her, but he was in love with another woman and was moving to Texas at the end of the season to live with her. He would not be returning to North Carolina, where he attended school, and would not be reuniting with his wife and two children. No, he was giving it all up for the girl in Texas. When I asked if his wife knew about her, he said no. I asked where he had met her, if she was in school in Texas and he in NC. "Second Life," he said so quickly that the words just breezed past my ear. "Where?" I asked, thinking I had missed the name of a town or a university or a 4H conference. He told me again (and again and again until I finally caught what he was saying) and then revealed the kicker: he'd never met her in person. He was excited about his flight to Texas because he would finally be meeting her. That man threw away everything in his physical life to make his virtual one become a reality. To me, that went beyond creepy.

I am reminded of the Law & Order: SVU episode "Avatar" which is based on the premise of Second Life. Although that episode is generally lauded as one of the worst and least realistic (no puns intended) of the series (some even claim that's when SVU jumped the shark, if it has yet), it put a great big spotlight on problems similar to the one I mentioned above--the virtual world seeping into the physical. And I'll admit, watching the episode alone in the house where I was house-sitting, cut off from my friends and most of the outside world, there was a weak little part of me that thought, "Yeah... I'll just go online and create a personality for myself--the ultimate me. The person I should have been born but could never become!" But by the time I went to bed that night, that delusion had mercifully faded. There are some things that just shouldn't happen, and that's why they don't in the physical world. Give someone the ability to make it happen in a metauniverse, and you've just opened a can of flesh-eating worms--because no one's patrolling those things, no one is monitoring the RL users, there's no Jiminy Cricket standing by the users' monitors going, "Ah-ah-ah... you're about to log off this computer and re-enter your real life! Time to start thinking rationally again!"

I loved the videos I watched on YouTube. I watched some of the joke ones, of course, and I also watched the intro vid that sounds like it's being narrated by Thomas Sangster circa 2003. Cute stuff. Knew about the product placement in Second Life, didn't know about the things like Harvard lectures.

Does Second Life have a place in libraries? I feel like it has to, otherwise the question wouldn't be asked, and we wouldn't be exploring it as an exercise. Of course, I imagine that a library could set itself up as its own business in Second Life and serve the users who were interested. But... since I don't see the point of using Second Life in the first place, I'm not sure I see the point of libraries doing the same.

DRAAAIIINAAAAGE!!!

Is the Library an insect incapacitated by a Web? Or is the Library the spider?

I tried to be judicious and read the entire OCLC Next Space Newsletter. A few of the perspectives were more intelligible than the others, and some were more interesting and readable.

Rick Anderson writes: "[...] If our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons." I like this sentiment. I agree with it. I consider Pamunkey's typically helpful and well-intentioned classes for the public on all sorts of topics--and even Pamunkey's own staff training--and am left wondering how far over we need to bend to serve our patrons. Libraries are supposed to provide access to information, and if we can't provide straight-forward, self-explanatory online resources and databases for our patrons, what does that say about us? Fortunately, I think most of the electronic resources that PRL uses are very easy to understand and manipulate. At times, I wonder why we put forth such a massive effort to teach people how to use them. (Psst... Go to the site: follow the directions. The end.) But then, I also worry about the people who can't even use a computer. How are these people supposed to keep up with Library 2.0? These are the people who come to the library looking for books and books alone--or who never come to the library, because they feel daunted by the presence of so much technology. And these aren't just the elderly. Are we supposed to believe that further alienating them is fine, as long as it's in the name of progress? I'm not hesitant about the future just because it's the future; I'm hesitant because I think we're going to lose a lot of people along the way if we keep going at our current unyielding pace.

Dr. Wendy Schultz writes: "[...] As more information becomes more accessible, people will still need experienced tour guides—Amazon’s customer recommendations are notoriously open to manipulation; tagclouds offer diverse connections, not focussed expertise." This sheds light on one of the main problems I see with the libraries venturing into a future world mandated by the web, connected by common people with PCs and Internet connections and, with that, the self-delusion of authority--that online resources are not always reliable. That's not to say that books are entirely trustworthy--consider the works of any medieval court historian, and even the recent hullabaloo over A Million Little Pieces. But I've always believed in the value of the printed word and have grown up in the age that saw Wikipedia stumble at the hands of practical jokers, and yet you'll still get Wikipedia entries among the first ten results of almost any Google search. There's some reassurance of truth when you pick up a book that has been written, selected for publication by a third party, edited by someone, reviewed publicly by other established authors, and then carried by a vendor. There's even more of such reassurance when people who have been trained to gather and evaluate information (i.e., librarians) have deemed the book worthy of their collections. Readers are conditioned to be wary of self-publishing authors, but why does everyone willingly believe in the Great Truth of the Internet?! I trust books that come from libraries far more than I trust things I find on the Internet. Maybe this is naïve and too 1950s of me, but that's the way I feel. I think Schultz recognizes this problem and is challenging tomorrow's librarians to steer the public in the right direction, electronically. I think we have tried to do this--that we are doing this--but even our noblest efforts can't stop the flow of all the other crap that's out there.

And so I don't know about the place of libraries in a world becoming increasingly digital. If human society survives for another two hundred years, what will people say when they look back at our ideas of what libraries should be? "Books! Think of all that wasted paper!" will they scoff? "They had computers, and networks, and the know-how to do it, but they still opted to print and mass-produce their prosaic novels and travelogues and cookbooks and bind the pages together? What a waste of technology! Did they think books would last forever?" Sadly, I fear I can hear my descendants chiding me already.

Perhaps I'm just not cut out for the future, because I really like my privacy.

I can see why businesses and self-important attention whores would want to tag their sites or blogs for others to find and read them, but why would the average person want such a thing? I like my privacy, or at least the illusion that I have of it (as in, what I don't know they know about me can't bother me), so the idea of someone being able to search for something I've thought, written, or posted to the Internet really creeps me out. That's part of why I don't use my real name on myspace and why I keep my privacy settings the way they are on Facebook.

I actually searched on Technorati for the common tag I've given my "20 Things" entries--and I got several hits from my own blog! I couldn't believe it. I felt so violated. (Which I realize is dumb, because anytime you put anything onto this vast web it becomes public by default... but still. I didn't tell Technorati that I wanted it to find me. I was using my tags for my own benefit, so I could organize my blog and view just library assignments when necessary.)

Over the holidays I reconnected with an old friend who became a Master of Entertainment Technology in 2006 and now works as a programmer for a government contractor outside of DC. He was talking about "Web 2.0" and the hundred-dollar laptop (which he bought so he could hack and create new software and give it away for free) and the chumby, which one of his friends helped develop, and also about the future of the world with free Internet access everywhere for everyone. We went out with another friend of his who has an iPhone, and Charlie said he was planning to get one himself because he had created some sort of widget with Flickr and embedded it in his blog to provide instantaneous feeding updates. He explained how, with an iPhone, he could take a photo of me while we were having coffee and then update his blog with "Having coffee with Devon," and the picture he had taken would automatically appear with the post. To me, that makes the Internet too immediate.

I also recently had a conversation with an English teacher at my old high school, a gentleman whose tenure at the school was interrupted for six years, spanning the four during which I attended, and so whose official acquaintance I had never really made before yesterday, and who also happens to be the alumni coordinator for the school. We were talking about the quality and character of the students--he wondering if I thought it had changed, and I elaborating on how disturbing it was to walk into a classroom and find three students using their personal laptops without asking permission or if anyone minded--and eventually got onto the topic of the future of technology. He has set up a Facebook account for himself to help track alumni, and he asked if I could show him a few features on the site, since I knew my way around it better. Somehow we got onto the issue of photos, and I showed him the "untag" feature on Facebook, which he had not previously known about. After untagging himself in a particularly unflattering picture, he made the offhand comment, "Of course, this will only be help until they market the technology to run facial recognition on all public photos." When I looked at him like he was crazy, he explained, "I have a very paranoid friend who's into government conspiracies and cover-ups and all that. He also believes that, one day, as soon as a digital photograph is taken, it will transmit the data to a satellite so that if there were, say, hit-and-run out on Leigh and Lombardy, the authorities could search satellite hits to see if anyone happened to be taking a picture at the time of the accident." And though I know it's possible, the idea blew my mind. I'm just hoping I'll be dead before all of that starts to happen.

But now for the exercise:
1. I assume that individual blog post search results are returned under "Posts" tab, and that blogs in the "Blog Directory" are found under the "Blogs" tab... but I can't figure out a way just to search for tags. Guess I'm just stupid like that. Maybe the Internet is not for me. I got about 3000 returns under "Posts" and only about 1000 under "Blogs." You know, my friend Finale is an engineering PhD candidate at Trinity/Cambridge right now, having graduated from MIT some years ago, and she works a lot with AI. She was able to come home briefly after coming back stateside for a conference in Florida, and we got together this past weekend. There was a time, she said, when she used to get excited about technology and new advancements and whenever a friend was able to hack a new device and manipulate the software to improve it, but now that she does that all the time as part of her job, it's not fun anymore. She has been inundated with technology--with all of its massive leaps and exponential bounds in the last few years--and it just isn't the same. That's sort of the way I feel with the "Web 2.0" phenomenon, I guess. Parts of it are cool, and then the rest is just... too much, too fast. Seriously, it's not even very fun to be on the Internet any more--not with everyone spying and watching your every move, all in the name of community. I had a theory several years ago--long before everyone over the age of nine had a cell phone and laptop--that our humanity peaked around the Industrial Revolution, and we've been on a rapid downhill course since then towards destruction. Think about the boom of technology that happened in the twentieth century alone: the first viable aircraft in 1903, stealth planes by 1989; the first commercial electronic calculator in 1961, the first graphing one in 1985 (and now a standard requirement for any high school math class); the first commercial televisions in the 1930s, and flat-screen HDTVs within seventy years; computers the sizes of full rooms in the 1950s, the IMB PC in 1981, and the BlackBerry introduced in 1999. It's frightening to realize how far we've come in such a short time when you consider that mankind has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. And consider the "progress" we've made in this new century: iPhones, 2G flash drives the size of an eraser, HDTV becoming standard broadcasting by 2009--that cathode ray tube TV you bought two years ago won't pick up anything at all with that ol' antenna anymore! And look at this invasion of privacy that everyone encourages and watches (exhibitionist reality TV is an entirely separate beast!), now picking up momentum on the Internet. We're all snowballs in an avalanche, folks. Hope you're ready for the crash at the end of the slope.

2. I explored some of the "popular" things. I should make it known that I've never read Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code for the very reason that they were "popular." I typically avoid "popular" things. These are pretty much no exception. None of them were very interesting. Most of them were technology sites. And you know how hot the prospect of new technology gets me...


3. Ta-da!


Look, I'm sorry to be so negative all the time. Really, I am. I'm not against new things; I'm not against learning. There are just some things that I don't like giving up--like my right to privacy (which I know isn't really guaranteed anywhere). I am a private citizen in this country, and I expect to be afforded some privileges as such. I'm not a convicted criminal, I'm not even a suspected criminal, and so my own honest privacy should be something I can be trusted to maintain until such a time as I no longer spend my life as a decent, law-abiding citizen. To everyone on the Internet right now: stop caring about what everyone around you is thinking and doing! You guys are the collective Gladys Kravitz of the twenty-first century! And I refuse to play into those manicured hands of yours!