Social Networking, Steve Jones, VOA radio

The Radio Service, Voice of America featured Communications Professor Steve Jones on their program "Talk To America" yesterday. Web 2.0 social networking is the topic of conversation and the 50 minute program is available as real media or an mp3 download here: http://www.voanews.com/english/NewsAnalysis/TTA-New-Past-Shows.cfm
Steve Jones has published a number of studies on young people Internet activities in conjunction with Pew Internet & American Life project

short hiatus

I haven't posted in a week because my wife and I arew negotiating for a house. Cross your fingers for us!
brantles

Ajaxwrite and other ajax apps.

Check out "AJAXLAUNCH ajax applications for everyone". AjaxWrite is the first major launch, but as ajax applications are developed, ajaxLaunch will publicize and provide them. Ajax or "asynchronous javascript and xml" is a web application development script incorporating javasvcript, CSS, and xml to allow a great deal of manipulation of content and layout by the user.
From the Website: "ajaxWrite is a powerful word processor that can read and write Microsoft Word formatted documents. Anytime you need a word processor, need to open a .doc file or edit a .doc file, simply point your Firefox browser at ajaxWrite.com and in seconds a full-featured program will be loaded. For 90 percent of the people in the world, the need to buy Microsoft Word just vanished. This won't make Microsoft happy, but software users should be very excited that software just got cheaper, immediate and modern."
As has been stated so often before, the commercial model for software development and distribution is changing rapidly. No longer will companies be able to charge expensive porices for software products when people can use opensource products or simply point their browsers to a Web service that provides most if not all the same functions for free.

Sunshine Week

One of UIC's incredibly well informed and dynamic librarians, Aimee Quinn, hosted a forum on secrecy in government as part of Sunshine Week: Your Right To Know!. Sunshine Week, March 12-18 2006. The first Sunshine Week was March 13, 2005. It was initiated by a group of jounalists, publishers, librarians and academics to promote the idea of open government for a healthy democracy. A brief clip from their 'about' page is pasted below:
-snip-
During Sunshine Week, participating daily and weekly newspapers, magazines, online sites, and radio and television broadcasters run editorials, op-ed columns, editorial cartoons, public forums, and news and feature stories that drive public discussion about why open government is important to everyone, not just to journalists.
Backed by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami, Sunshine Week's success was due in large part to the many journalism groups, media companies, state press associations, open-government and First Amendment advocates, librarians, civic groups, educators and student journalists who participated. Sunshine Week 2005 exceeded expectations, with more than 730 participants producing thousands of articles.
Sunshine Week is an offshoot of Sunshine Sunday, which began in Florida in 2002. Led by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, Sunshine Sunday was developed in direct response to moves by the state legislature to severely restrict public information after the terrorist attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
-/snip-
pasted from http://sunshineweek.org/sunshineweek/about accessed March 14, 2006.

I recorded the class I taught today.

I want the real thing!

I want the real thing!
Originally uploaded by MFinChina.

One of the oldest jokes around, but still funny! Found in the Yunnan University Guesthouse. - from MF Capiello, she do rock.

Preaching Gaming to Academic Audiences

Yesterday at our all-staff meeting I gave a presentation summarizing the "Gaming in Libraries" symposium from Chicago in December.

I work at a large academic library and many people were confused about how understanding videogame culyture and videogamers could be instructive in our setting.

I think they liked it because we had a long dicussion afterward about ways to make our web presence better more interactive and ways to appeal to native gamers. Many closeted gamers spoke up and we had a sort of "AA" type confessional. "Hi I'm J. and I'm a Gamer."

Libraries are the places one goes to get "correct" information, as my colleague Francis Kayiwa stated. If we can appeal to a gamer generation mindset wherein shared information is valuable, and correct information is the best, then we can communicate more easily with gamers as a "clan leader" as opposed to an authoritarian defender of the secrets.

Users expectations are changing

Will library users in five years expect to search our visual media collections and retrieve specific clips? Will I be able to search google video or yahoo video and find the "You talkin to me" scene from Taxi Driver? Will I be able to do that in my Library catalog? Truly a can 'o' worms, but I think the fluid transition from text and image based content to high resolution audi and visual media on the Internet is charging fullsteam ahead, and tomorrows sophisticated searchers will expect a much more granular searhc capacity to the Library's content. Here is a current result set for the search "you talkin to me" from regular google: http://tinyurl.com/kck4g
google video: http://tinyurl.com/hrns9
and yahoo video: http://tinyurl.com/z7g3s