scratchpad jr. (2nd import)

So, every so often, I think about getting blogcards, especially those with gapingvoid comics. But the problem with that is that I might have to choose which one I’d like on the card. There are too many good ones. This one is now under my consideration:

"It’s all about thriving in markets that are smarter and faster than you are. It’s all about being utterly fucked if you don’t know what I’m talking about."

As is this one:

the future belongs to the geeks. nobody else wants it.

Sure, we all know newspaper clippings are valuable. I attended a lecture at the Fogg Art Museum tonight by Anke te Heesen of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science called Clipping Culture in Art and Science. She touched on “… the cultural and scientific significance of collecting and deploying newspaper clippings in the modern age,” focusing on the work of several specific clippers. She also showed slides of many art works that made use of news and magazine clippings, like collages. When she projected an image of a scrapbook, the man in the audience in front of me remarked that it’s like a text-based aggregator.

Te Heesen remarked that people often save news clippings to collect items on a particular topic or person. Just like blogging, right? A person’s clipping collection and how s/he uses the clips says a lot about her/him, which is also similar to what you can learn from someone by reading her/his blog.

For a few months short of three years, I was in charge of a clipping library that contained thousands of files of ephemera. Let me tell you: I miss that collection dearly. It was so rich with history and valuable information. I still haven’t found something that compares to it. The Internet is wonderful and everything, but it just isn’t the same.

The lecture accompanies an exhibition, but I couldn’t find information about it online.

At the Berkman Center for Internet & Society right now, David Weinberger is talking about authority and Wikipedia. http://harmony.law.harvard.edu/webcast.s… is the webcast link. The talk should last until approximately 7:30 pm.

We spent a few minutes talking about the value of names and why many people uses pseudonyms in the Wikipedia community. I’ve been thinking about the concept of someone’s name as I meet more and more people who go by nicknames, online names, etc.,–names other than what is on their birth certificate. What is someone’s name?

Reliability, liability, consistency, and, well, authority all mingled in the discussion. Is reliability better than authority? What are the differences?

There’s an amazing showing from the local Wikipedia group, of course.

Addendum 3/16: The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, reports on the talk.

So I’m listening to Dan Gillmor’s talk: part 2 of Engaging with the News, Part I: The Daily Me and We. You can, too: http://harmony.law.harvard.edu/webcast.s…. I’m not sure if an archive might be available.

The man sitting to my right has a really amazing looking gadget that seems to be a cousin of this computer marketed to car dealers. It’s smaller than my laptop. It has a screen with lines similar to a sheet of paper. He writes on it with a stylus like what people use for personal data assistants. It looks like it has a built-in camera.

I am going to take sparse notes.

One point Dan made a few minutes ago that I think is worth pondering is that he believes in many communities, the citizen journalism is better than the "professional" journalism.

He suggests that news organizations try to get involved in some citizen journalism efforts and try bottom-up journalism.

Once again, I got to explain what OPML stands for (outline processor markup language). (Oh, you heard that? Yeah, that was me.)

People learn to txt msg, er, text message by following and writing newspaper classified ads, he jokes.

The major news in the United States for the media industry is McClatchy’s purchase of Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion plus $2 billion in debt for a total of $6.5 billion. Both are huge media companies that own many news outlets. Based on daily circulation numbers, McClatchy will become the second largest newspaper company in the U.S. after some of the dust settles. It’s going to be interesting to watch what happens in the next few months.

McClatchy’s press release
Knight Ridder’s release

I wish all of my colleagues in these companies the best.

Google launched Google Mars, a mapping tool for the Red Planet a few weeks ago. I wish this mapping service would have been around when I did my thesis on Mars.

So, yeah, so you’ve noticed I don’t have as many speaking gigs this spring as I did this past fall. Nonetheless, when I read these guidelines on being a great moderator by Guy Kawasaki, a blogger whose name I’ve heard a lot lately, I thought I’d stick them here. It’s close to conference season. Maybe some of you have to compile panels.

from gapingvoid

Over the next few weeks, the magazine BusinessWeek is offering a series of courses about making great presentations. The courses might only be available to subscribers. I took the first segment today. It provides a good introduction to presenting and emphasizes the importance of knowing the audience and the space. I think I worked through it in less than twenty minutes.

gapingvoid explores how financially supporting bloggers can change the blogger-reader relationship with a conversation snippet. That’s not to say people shouldn’t financially support bloggers. It’s a caution that bloggers and readers should be aware of how their relationship might change when money enters the picture.

Note: Some people might find the language in the cartoon a little crude for work.

Speaking of the Friday Five, The Redhead is back in the blogosphere with her new blog Very Well Red–a fabulous and quite fitting name.

I’ve missed you, Redhead. It’s been way too long.

Before Gary Price began his talk on Wednesday, he showed me some really cool mapping services. I use Internet mapping services very often and haven’t really been happy with them, so I appreciate learning about new and nifty sites.

One of the things I’ve always wished for is a service that distinguishes between walking and driving directions, since lots of times I’m on foot. Ask.com’s new mapping site makes that distinction. It also allows users to drag and drop the end points of the route and automatically adjusts the directions. Like some other popular mapping services, it has illustrated, aerial, and mixed views. Warning: It doesn’t work so well with Netscape 7, my usual browser. It seems to work much better in Firefox. Despite that, I think I’m going to be using this site regularly from now on.

A9.com Maps offers street-level photos of several cities, including Boston. When I was giving someone directions the other day, it was great to be able to plug in an address where I’d only been once before, look at the street, then let someone know whether public parking is available. Nifty! When I’m going somewhere, I like to look for landmarks. This site will give me an idea of what my Boston destination will look like and what I might pass along the way.

Windows Live Local has some amazing bird’s eye view images. I was playing around with some maps of Boston and suddenly realized I was looking at a building that could very well be the Posted in Tools | 1 Comment »