j’s scratchpad

I saw on LISNews that David Sifry of Technorati is doing his blogosphere checkup.

Part 1
Part 2

Brett pointed me to Comedy of errors hits the world of Wikipedia in The Sunday Times, which focuses on vandalism related to entries of prominent Brits. The Independent has its own version of the article. As I was cleaning off my desk, I found a Joseph Janes column* in the October American Libraries about [...]

Part two of The Boston Globe’s brief series on Wikipedia ran today–just in time for our event at Simmons College tonight at 7 pm. One article includes brief profiles of several local volunteers. David Mehegan didn’t mention that Aaron Swartz is actually famous enough to have his own entry in Wikipedia legitimately. sj, of course, [...]

In response to library staff sharing video with the authorities of a patron doing something illegal in a library elevator, LISNews has an interesting thread about what a patron record is and when sharing customer activities becomes a violation of their privacy.
Some people are relating this incident to the recent one where librarians refused to [...]

"Can [Wikipedia] stop sabotage and distortion without losing the freedom and openness that made the reference possible?"
asks David Mehegan in part one of a 2 part series about Wikipedia in The Boston Globe.
"I think that global universal access to basic information can have a transformative impact on the world,"
explains Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about why [...]

People often ask me about the process of how I blog, so here’s a bit about that.
On my laptop, I use NetNewsWireLite as my main aggregator. I can update the contents, they store automatically (some indefinitely, some for a specific period of time), then return later to read them and blog. At last count, I [...]

My laptop had a bad evening at blog group. It took the entire meeting to boot. Now, it won’t recognize the hard drive. I think it’s going into the shop sooner than I was thinking it would.
Diagnostics I ran this afternoon indicate the problem is indeed a failing hard drive. When I tried to run [...]

I heard MC Lars’ Download This Song on the radio and liked it a lot, so I did. It’s kind of an “in your face” piece about copyright law, music, downloading, and the recording industry. Not to mention that he samples Iggy Pop’s The Passenger, too.
Chances are pretty good MC Lars might have been a [...]

Two exciting presenters, Dan Gillmor and Cory Doctorow, will be at Harvard next week. Dan speaks on Monday (2/13). Cory speaks on Wednesday (2/15).

Dan Gillmor on Monday (2/13) - “We the Media: The Rise of Grassroots, Open-Source Journalism, and the Coming Era of the Citizen Activist,” 7 pm, Kennedy School of Government, Malkin Penthouse, 4th [...]

*j whistles
Feedster’s new look is pretty sharp!