j’s scratchpad

Nicholas Lemann writes a piece for The New Yorker looking at citizen journalism, its growth, and its value during the last few years.

Check out Andy Carvin’s great news about his new job with National Public Radio! How exciting!
Kudos to Andy for getting a position with such a fine institution and kudos to NPR for moving into the realm of journalism and Web 2.0 stuff!
(OK, I admit that I feel a twinge of jealousy ’cause his job sounds […]

Rich wrote to tell me The Atlantic Monthly has an article about Wikipedia.

I would like a recommendation for an e-mail client. I am not at liberty to discuss what’s going on in great detail here, but basically I’ve been using elm for a particular e-mail account because of certain features it has I haven’t been able to find in another suitable client. The server this account and […]

Jill Carroll, a freelancer for The Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped while in Iraq and held hostage for 82 days. The Christian Science Monitor and Boston Herald are printing her story as a serial.

One of our community members at Simmons College’s GSLIS (Graduate School of Library and Information Science) told me about a blog some students are using for a summer project in Nicaragua. The students and professor are there doing some volunteer work and learning about Nicaragua’s libraries. The blog is used by others doing international work, […]

Yeah, ok, this post is slightly off-topic for this blog, but when I saw this article about typewriters, I couldn’t stifle the desire to post it.
When I first learned how to type, I favored typewriters over computers, although I had been using computers longer. There’s something nice and productive feeling about pressing a key and […]

I realized I never wrote about Lawrence Lessig’s talk at Wikimania and now I realized I lost my notes from the talk.
I really enjoy Lessig’s presentation style. For most of his talk, I was sitting there admiring his style and dreading that I had to present in the time slot following his talk. For the […]

One Laptop Per Child is a project affiliated with MIT’s Media Lab that seeks to produce inexpensive computers and distribute them with content to children around the globe. Wired magazine published an article about their work recently.

I can use some levity, so perhaps you can, too. Here’s a quiz asking if something is a Star Wars character or a Web 2.0 gizmo*. I thought I was doing ok on the list until the friend with whom I was skimming it informed me I either need to spend more time watching Star […]