omg, scratch

Scratch!
OLPC type thing, like Squeak?
Easy to use.
Fun to use.
Uses for teaching info literacy?
Critical thinking?
Social networking aspects.
Fun to use.
Sharing tips, sharing knowledge, groups learning together (yes, social networking!)...
I like.






[found via Spencer]

French comics culture

If you look further you will see that the BD section - pronounced Bay-Day - is in fact sub-divided into several categories.

There will be classics - Asterix, Tintin, Lucky Luke, the cowboy who shoots faster than his shadow - plus many that never made it out of Franco-Belgium, like Rahan - l'enfant des ages farouches or child of the age of savagery - about a Tarzan-like figure from prehistoric times.

There will be the latest best-sellers. Top of the book lists this month - beating Harry Potter and the latest on President Nicolas Sarkozy's love life - has been the last in a long-running adventure series called Thirteen about a man trying to rediscover his identity after losing his memory.

There will be the American comics section, the Japanese Manga section - this one getting bigger and bigger because they are getting more and more popular.

There will also be the adult section, with works of quite astonishing vividness.

And then, pride of place, the section for what the French call "les Auteurs".

Here, the most highly regarded authors are catalogued by name.

This is the art-house end of the market.

An album in this section may sell only a few hundred copies - compared to half a million for the latest hit - but the true connoisseurs will know all about it.

Here, experimentation and the avant-garde allow the Bay-Day fan to see him or herself as more than just a consumer, rather as a cultured devotee of a thriving art form.

[BBC story: link]

Thanks, Heavy D.

band names 9

The Norman, Oklahoma Blood Quantum & Bling City Review

nighty, night for WikiLeaks

If you bothered to get excited about the implications of WikiLeaks, you can stop.

It's killed.

Unless:

SUPPORT OUR FIRST AMENDMENT CASE TO APPEAL BUSH APPOINTEE JUSTICE WHITE'S ORDER TO CENSOR WIKILEAKS.ORG!
Back our defense fund by emailing supporters@sunshinepress.org with your pledge!

george dyson's mad infoskillz

Anthropotek has this video [link] of George Dyson at TED. I'm really dumbstruck by the man's infoskillz... he found so much on Project Orion that NASA ends up buying thousands of pages from him. Now that's a helluva historian. NASA, he says, continues funding a small contingent to work on this emergency evacuation of the planet contingency... Amazing.

Oh, here's his book on the subject [link].








{also: Long Now lectures}

word has it

Woody don't twitter.

band names 8

The Real Goods

lecturing the choir

Do folks (besides librarians) really want to sit around in seat-spots pretending to be good while some expert whinges on and on about the terrible state of gender inequity in virtual economies? Or what? When folks can fly, wouldn't they rather be flying and maybe catch the lecture on their virtual headphones? Or what? I mean, is that what we really reckon our patrons want to do... when they could be flying?

institutional license?

Wonder if libraries could get some kind of a 4 or 5 device unlimited access variation agreement going? Use the keitai to push and pull info with patrons' keitai. Kaywa tag bookclub selections to discussion forums, a webliography... build and push mobile catalog search widgets... that kind of thing.

second skin

Unfair, maybe, to bring it up based only on two minutes of trailer for the film... but what about ethnicity?



Looks good. Hope to see it.

fbi to create biometric database w/ tattoo mapping

...scar imaging, retinal and fingerprint scans, all of it [link].
Bioinformatic dominance in the name of security.
[via BoingBoing]



"Papers please! Paperless persons are illegals. Now you wear your papers. Your tattoos are taken under immanent domain as intellectual property of the state!"

Imagine librarians freelancing, nights, as pattern snoopers in a database of body smells.

info tools at AFCEA

Just noting the 'products, services, and solutions' for battlefield and support at AFCAE West this year includes:

• Battle Damage Assessment
• Biotechnology
• Bandwidth Compression and Synchronization
• Collaboration & Collaborative Tools
• Combat ID Perimeter Security
• Common Operating Picture (COP)
• Data Architecture
• Data Encryption
• Data Manipulation and Analytical Tools
• Data Mining & Warehousing
• E-Commerce & E-Business
• Electronic Warfare Equipment
• Electronically Enhanced Education
• Enterprise Architecture
• Global Positioning Systems
• Information and Intelligence Fusion
• Information Operations, Assurance and Security
• Interoperability – Joint and Coalition
• Knowledge Enabled Logistics
• Knowledge Management & Leadership Decision Making
• Nanotechnology
• Network Centric Warfare
• Shared Intel Databases at Multiple Security Levels
• Simulations & Modeling
• Streaming Video
• Visualization Technologies
• Voice over IP
• VTC – C2 System
• Wireless Solutions, Networking and Security

and several other info-heavy tool suites...

Of course, STAR-TIDES is there representing. Much respeck.

library interaction GOLD

info layout

Thinking about info architecture, but down real basic-like.

Take the page. Most folks on the Earth can deal with a page -- they've got some kind of cultural place for the page, even if not for print or for books. We can sort a page out -- right-to-left, left-to-right, up or downwise, lots of us have context for markings on a page.

Web browsers are new, computers are new, and as common as they seem to us in the bizzness, plenty of folks yet have zero context for making sense of the computer. The mouse? Keyboards, more common. Web browsers? Web pages?

Folks'll be thinking "Where is this page, like? On web-what?" Does it go forward-back, back-forward, front-to-back? Which way am I moving through it? How do I get to where I began, and how do I know where to go next?

Old territory for some of you. Usability stuff back to Nielsen. Peter Morville and info-structures.

But let's look at this anthropologically, culturally. How do grammars affect layouts? How do kinship models affect category trees?

band names 7

False Flag

sugar hiccup

Tonight was a B- movie with my lovely wife. We watched and laughed at the almost-working jokes, had some IPA once the boy was snug in bed, and generally felt cozy under the light of our little LED-lit tree. It's the solstice, and I've laid down new cider. It's the solstice, and already the days are getting longer (but tonight TONIGHT, I'm enjoying the long dark). The dark is good for listening to Cocteau Twins and starting my new book. But here's The Rosebuds, and I'm bored (because they're approaching Rykarda Parasol but... but they're not Rykarda Parasol); yeah, it's time to get back to it. I'm calling in some Erik B. and Rakim. The topic is 'library 2.0', so respeck some classic as we go, yo, cuz age don't count in the booth when ya flow stay submerged in the fountain of youth.

I'll not let too much more darkness pass me by now. Goodnight, and merry all and all.

Really. Goodnight.

band names 6

ghost party

band names 5

In the ongoing effort to help bands by freely giving of cool band names that I make up, here's the next:

Incendiarians

(Sam and his fellow rockers get first dibs on that.)

star-tides linking

Linking here to STAR-TIDES.NET.

writing, writing, writing

Working on a project now about making the 2.0 stuff work for libraries -- advanced tools, qr code, smart xml schemes, social books, wanding w/ arphids. Trying to gather all the thoughts together, lay them down in one spot with some order. Will be making some notes to myself here and there.