j's scratchpad

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For Friday’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Vincent Kiernan reports on whether open-source software can effectively solve the problems of unsoliticited e-mail at colleges and universities. Focusing on SpamAssassin, Kiernan discusses why institutions turn toward open-source solutions and what some of the commercial competitors are. The statistics about spam on college campus show how overwhelming the [...]

I call it a “pitch.” In the news environments I’ve worked in, we call explaining to a news outlet, media organization, whatever, why they might be interested in covering something “pitching.” It doesn’t matter if someone from a news organization contacts us first to inquire whether anything of note is happening. Any time we try [...]

Ryan, whom I met several years ago when I was in grad school, is one of the few audience members who publicly admits he attended my blogging talk in Wisconsin and learned something from it. He was inspired to start playing with Bloglines. (Reading his post made me realize I forgot to talk about Share [...]

A Wikipedian wanted me to post something about their fundraising efforts. I told him I try not to post notices about fundraisers on my blog because I don’t think they fit with the mission and purpose of my blog. I found his words quite appropriate in light of the discussion of what’s happening at the [...]

several people said something to me about soft porn regarding my blog post yesterday. Who reads my blog and who admits to reading my blog really surprises me sometimes.

Julia Habermann, a student of information science and economics, is writing her thesis about the usage and value of weblogs as a source of business news and information for information professionals and knowledge managers. I am posting this noticed about her survey (linked above) on her behalf. She would like to survey information professionals and [...]

Save the date announcements went out tonight regarding the Special Libraries Association Boston Chapter program about blogging and feeds that will be at Mount Holyoke College on Saturday, October 30th. Kris Liberman, who I hope will be blogging by then, will moderate. Garrett Eastman may talk about blogging in his organization, how he got started, [...]

Shimon Rura and Josh Ain, who work on Frassle, will be making a presentation about interpersonal content management and, well, Frassle at Thursday’s blog meeting at 7 pm at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Baker House, 1587 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts. I usually take notes during the meeting. A link to [...]

Angelica, who has a fabulous title graphic on her blog, wonders if she’s trying to enter the wrong profession in light of the note we saw today regarding the situation at the Rocky Mountain News. Two years ago, the newspaper had seven librarians. Because of budget and staff cuts, the number has dwindled. The last [...]