The New Readers

Do you ever wonder how reading print and reading online differ? Click on the above image to enlarge the confusing diagram.

From the New York Times article "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?"

My Portfolio

I wouldn't say that I have necessarily "seen the light," of the participatory web. It's clear that it is a powerful tool to create, communicate and learn with and it is essential for the future of libraries. But I still think it's important to remain critical about issues like privacy, literacy and how the Web is changing the way we think.

Please enjoy my portfolio of work.

Genius of the Shore

Please enjoy Thoreau - Now with links!

Errata: My external style sheet does not work. Does anyone out in the interworld know why?

Please take a look at my code if you've got a moment.

My undying thanks to the wiz who figures this one out.

Addendum: The error in my code has been fixed! Many thanks to my friend Laurie for her sage advice:

Remove the two "style" tags from the CSS sheet, because "an external style sheet ... should not contain any html tags." (http://www.w3schools.com/CSS/css_howto.asp)

"Yay, collaborative coding" indeed.

Rolling up Our Buffaloes

As I dip my fingers (gently) into the sea of computer programming, I have uncovered decades-old frustration linked to grade school math class. I never quite understood the basic math concept--that problems were abstract ways of thinking about moving units around. I always treated arithmetic like it was a passage of poetry I had to commit to memory. I didn't fully understand the foundation. Moving on to more complicated levels of math left me feeling lost and irritated. Because computer programming relies on math to function, similarly it builds on previous algorithms and formulas.

I felt quite frustrated using Google Page Creator because in its effort to be user friendly, it hid all of the html and CSS language. I felt lost because I didn't understand what the program was doing for me.

Inspired by my friend kinaka49, I decided if I were ever going to be able to understand programming, I was going to have to learn how to make a website from scratch like she did. She checked out some books from the library, read a few tutorials from W3C and taught her own damn self. How punk is that? I did the same and under the virtual tutelage of Dave Raggett, I made a simple site using TextEdit. What follows is an excerpt from Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, formatted to recreate the look and feel of an early edition of this work. Confession: I don't find its 19th century look too convincing and I don't expect my readers to either. Baby steps people:

Daxsu's Old-timey "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"

photo from Bold as Love

Drawing a Line Around Your Space

Using this icon on your website says:

1. You are opposed to the use of corporate advertising on blogs.

2. You feel the use of corporate advertising on blogs devalues the medium.

3. You do not accept money in return for advertising space on your blog.

The creators of Ad-Free Blog believe we "live in a culture where advertisers directly influence and in some cases control and create the culture at large." Rejecting ads preserves the credibility of your blog and ensures that you actually believe what you are writing and you are not just selling a product.

Get your icon here. (<-----is this an ad?)

Let's Get Digital, Digital

The digital catalog at The Free Library of Philadelphia "lets you download bestselling audio books & music to your PC anytime you want. Titles can be transferred to supported portable MP3 players and many can be burned to CD. Now your library never closes!"

Maybe someday it will work for Macs.

I wanna get digitaaaal!

Scroogle Scraper: Ethical Searching

Scroogle intends to do exactly what its name implies--screw Google. Scroogle offers an add-free search, called the Scroogle Scraper, which boasts "no cookies," "no search-term record," and "access log deleted within 48 hours." This means Scroogle can show you Google's search results without their ads. Their Secure Socket Layer encryption protocol option allows you to block your computer with the same little yellow padlock you see when shopping online.

"For Scroogle, SSL is used to hide your search terms from anyone who might be monitoring traffic between your browser and Scroogle's servers. This encryption happens when you send your search terms to Scroogle, and it also happens when Scroogle sends the results of your search back to you. No one snooping between your browser and Scroogle can figure out what you were looking for, because the information is encrypted and looks like gibberish."

Scoogle says showing Google's results without their ads is a political statement. The action protects users' privacy and helps prevent click fraud. Scroogle intends to pressure Google to develop more socially responsible sources of income.

Gotcha! Adeona Fights Laptop Theft

These fine young gentlemen were caught red-handed with a stolen (or lost) laptop. The owners used Adeona, an open source system for tracking the location of a lost or stolen laptop. It works by storing location information (like IP addresses and local network topology), that can be used by the owner to determine its current location.

"The Mac OS X version also has an option to capture pictures of the laptop user or thief using the built-in iSight camera and the freeware tool isightcapture. Like your location information, these images are privacy-protected so that only the laptop owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can access them."

Adeona is the first open source tracking system. Users do not have to rely on a proprietary service. Just install and go!

Thoreau

I've used Google Creator to format a fragment of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Creator does not give you much freedom to experiment with the page's look and feel. I intend to experiment with Kompozer this weekend.

"We rowed leisurely up the stream for several hours, until the sun had got high in the sky, our thoughts monotonously beating time to our oars. For outward variety there was only the river and the receding shores, a vista continually opening behind and closing before us, as we sat with our backs upstream; and, for inward, such thoughts as the muses grudgingly lent us. We were always passing some low, inviting shore, or some overhanging bank, on which, however, we never landed."

My Most Secret Shelf

My most secret desire is to fill my meatspace bookshelf with these comic books. Until then, please peruse my virtual shelf in Koha, an open source ILS.

Epileptic, David B. ~ Maus, Art Spiegelman ~ Maus II, Art Spiegelman ~ My Most Secret Desire, Julie Doucet ~ Ice Haven, Daniel Clowes ~ Girl Stories, Lauren R. Weinstein ~ Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel ~ Fun Home, Alison Bechdel ~ Palomar, Gilbert Hernandez ~ Locas, Jaime Hernandez ~ The Art of Jaime Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez ~ The Crystal Ballroom, Frank Thorne ~ 100% Pope, Paul Pope ~ Stylish Vittles, Tyler Page ~ The Ganzfeld 4, Dan Nadel ~ Art Out of Time, Dan Nadel ~ Notes for a War Story, Gipi ~ Houdini, Gipi ~ Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware ~ The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware ~ La Perdida, Jessica Abel ~ Hey Buddy!, Peter Bagge ~ Scream Queen, Ho Che Anderson ~ Black Hole, Charles Burns

Understanding the Spime

Mr. Bruce Sterling helps explain the spime in relationship to the Web 2.0 meme.

Photo by Mr. Sterling.

Google Prostate

Techno Tuesday knows the haps on the latest apps!

Filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.

Google may not only be changing the way we search. According to Nicholas Carr, Google could be changing the way we think. In a recent essay in the Atlantic Monthly, he worries that Google is making us stupid.

"'We are not only what we read,' says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. 'We are how we read.' Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts 'efficiency' and 'immediacy' above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become 'mere decoders of information.' Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged."

14 Days to Have Your Say

Western Libraries asks:

"What would make our library perfect?"

Book 'Em: Books-to-Prisoners

Bookem' is Pittsburgh's radically awesome Books-to-Prisoners program. I saw this video at Progressive Library Skillshare 2007.

Go Steelers!

OFFSYSTEM as a World Library

OFF is blowing up copyright.

"OFF, or the Owner-Free Filesystem is a distributed filesystem in which everything is stored in reference to randomized data blocks, as opposed to a 1:1 copy of the original data being inserted. The creators of the Owner-Free Filesystem have coined a new term to define the network: A brightnet. Nobody shares any copyrighted files, and therefore nobody needs to hide away.

OFF provides a platform through which data can be stored (publicly or otherwise) in a discreet, distributed manner. The system allows for personal privacy because data (blocks) being transferred from peer to peer does not bear any relation to the original data. Incidentally, no data passing through the network can be considered copyrighted because the means by which it is represented is truly random."