Odyssey Online

…the revised Google Book Settlement is due out Friday. I will be driving across Vermont’s pleasant hills and greenswalds on Friday, but trust me I’ll blog like a son-of-a-gun on this next week. In the mean time here are a couple of posts offering preliminary analysis based on what has been leaked so far:

• Electronic Freedom Frontier offers a fairly optimistic take on the revised settlement, although notes concerns over Fair Use Guidelines and Google Books, as well as “one interface to rule them all” worries…
• Karen Coyle–whose writing about the Google Book deal as been excellent so far–articulates concerns about what Google Book means, or pointedly doesn’t mean, for libraries…

More next week…

…reported from the Atlantic, both Firefox and Chrome continue to elbow into IE’s share…

…from the Washington Post, a well written article about twenty-somethings who do not social network. While it is not Civil Disobedience there are some interesting comments made about social networking platforms–what they are and what they result in–by “ordinary folks,” not professional commentators.  A very useful article in terms of how people define genuine experience…

…back to blogging, and with October break here plenty of blogging time. Network Neutrality is back in the news…a few weeks back we mentioned Network Neutrality here and linked to Edward Felten’s fine guide to what it is.  Network Neutrality is back in the news with a number of prominent Republican Senators asking FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s decision to create new network neutral rules, note here and here. Which perhaps caused the appearance of a few interesting commentaries on the whole thing–Preston Gralla details how Network Neutrality issues are playing out between Google and AT & T, and  interesting commentary in the Wall Street Journal by Holman Jenkins Jr. on how hand held digital technologies may turn the whole issue on its head.

….this is banned books week…locally the Rensselaer Falls Library has organized an event for teens to think about what this means, and our friend Jessamyn West who writes the blog Librarian.net has a list of things on the web about banned books. Very useful.

The slogan over at Librarian.net is putting the ‘rarin back in librarian and for that reason alone you’ll find a link here under Other Blogs to Note…

…as you may or may not remember we have a SLU Libraries Facebook page, with our Catalog and ConnectNY front and center (under the boxes tab), and now JSTOR.  So, along with all that a Facebook enthusiast might do, you can simply click to our Facebook account and sample the academic journal literature.  Librarians have been thinking about Facebook…quite a slew of libraries have Facebook accounts and friends like the Librarian in Black have argued seriously and with verve that libraries need to be in Web 2.0 places, because, well, that’s where the clientele is.

…on the other hand there is a sense of encroachment felt by students as institutions and well, parents, make their way to Facebook. My in-laws are all avid Facebook habitues, not so much their kids, mind you, but the parents.  Is Facebook a place where colleges students want to think about research? Perhaps not “to be or not to be” as far as important questions go, but the attempts at translating libraries to Web 2.0 spaces ask interesting questions about what people want out of libraries, and what people want out of life online…

…in what amounts to big news, the FCC today affirmed Network Neutrality, and began to organize itself to enforce said.  There are proponents of this decision, and their are critics (this article from PC World nicely sketches both sides).  Network Neutrality is all about keeping the infrastructure providers, literally the folks who own the fiber optic cable, from using their conduit technology to establish different levels of web service.  Of course, being something, in this life, it’s not that simple–Edward Felten wrote a good primer several years back on what Network Neutrality is, who the players are, and what the consequences might be.

…ah Friday and autumnal rain.  It was widely reported last week that Facebook has now a membership close to the population of the United States and for the first time, it turning a profit as a company (here is the CNN version of the story). And moving from social networking to social reading, Nina Siegal has offered an interesting essay call Thoughts on Bestsellers, which is about reading, readers, and the future of literature. It’s an analysis of the New York Times Best Seller list over the later part of the twentieth century, and this essay (which is long) is an usual but engaging mix of optimism and pessimism on the future of literary fiction.  Great reading for a rainy September Friday…

…not entirely sure why this title “came to me in the night” but Baron Wormser, a Maine resident and a fine poet, wrote a memoir titled The Road Washes Out in the Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid, and as the title suggests it is much about “living off the grid.”  This is a very well written book, and a good study in self reliance, circa, 2009.

…also, here is a quick piece from the Boston Globe about what students have been reading at brother and sister institutions around the Northeast…

…according to published reports (now there’s a way to start a blog post) Google has altered it’s basic search.  The LA Times reports Google has incorporated Orion search technology which, PC World explains, means Google is trying to expand into being a semantic search. Semantic search is something of an El Dorado of web searching…given that in theory a semantic search would search for concepts through the constructs of language. It would be, effectively, talking one’s way through a search. One small step, one wonders…

…although PC World also notes that as a company Google is taking a very conservative approach on other things…