Odyssey Online

…Odyssey Online’s editorial team (me) is having a day devoted to shot transmissions, pulled teeth (literally), and stranded spring break college students. Amidst the chaos, there is the blustery just- slightly-evocative-of-spring day all around us, which, in an effort to calm myself, brings me to the thought of books about country life in cold places, places like St. Lawrence County. Spring nearby?

• Living North Country: Essays on Life and Landscapes in Northern New York Edited by Natalia Singer and Neal Burdick
• The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir Of Living Off the Grid by Baron Wormser
• Here at Eagle Pond by Donald Hall
• A Stone Bridge North: Reflections in a New Life by Kate Maloy
• Epicurean Simplicity by Stephanie Mills
• Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life by John Ivanko and Lisa Kirvist

…Daniel Indiviglio makes the case at Atlantic.com, note in particular reason number two.  For years people with a vested interest in networked information technology have made the case that not providing students with digital technologies will mean they are left out or left behind (or suffer both fates).  The case has also been made that extensive use of digital technologies can mean less costly education as it will mean you need fewer people to teach.  The problem is networked information technology requires an infrastructure and this infrastructure costs money.  The problem is, networked information technology has a short shelf life (or cycle as technologists would say), and expensive computers must be replaced.  While Sergey Brin may opine that books are as transient as the rising tide, the fact of the matter is even paperback books last longer than e-book readers of any ilk.  Digital technology has a built in obsolescence which manifests in upgrades–in short, Indiviglio is right that an education immersed in digital technologies is going to be considerably more expensive than one that has at least one foot firmly on the print, one hand holding a piece of chalk…

…I know, I know, I’m blogging this…

…while this article from PC World is largely about Microsoft, it does give current browser share numbers. In a word, more good news for Firefox and Chrome.

One of the real joys of Firefox are the add-ons. Recent news on new Youtube add-ons for Firefox has just come down the pipe…for an overview of Firefox add-ons see the notes for a presentation back a year or two ago, but still current in terms of the add-ons as concept, and the add-ons it covers.

For information on what Chrome is and how Google is positioning it to be a web-based operating system, see these powerpoint notes for a presentation I did last December. Even though it’s a powerpoint it will still provide commentary on what Google is up to (warning, some sardonic comments about Google along the way…)

…they might be going straight to the Bloody Mary’s in Mountain View.  Firstly there is the continued negative reaction and bad press surrounding Google Buzz (this is CNN’s version of the poison), and the Washington Post is reporting that the Google book settlement, amidst criticism from just about everyone, is back in limbo…

Karen Coyle has insightful commentary on the DOJ’s latest assessment of the Google Book Settlement…

Ben Parr at the blog Mashable reports that “user[s] spends more time on Facebook than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Amazon combined.” Wow.  He’s got the numbers to make his case…I was wondering the other day if Facebook doesn’t take the place of postcards. That the sort of stuff we might have dashed off on a postcard is now the stuff of a Facebook post. That’s a lot of postcards. Of course, you can’t collect Facebook posts, whereas you could collect postcards. I can remember one of my mother’s neighbors who had a collection of Manchester New Hampshire postcards that numbered into the hundreds. I can remember some of the cards and I can remember him but I usually don’t remember what I do on Facebook…

…Google Buzz is certainly proving to be an interesting bee. It is Google’s social networking software that is built right into G-mail. This merging has been called Simple Genius and a Facebook killer (more on the killer stuff here).  However, no sooner did buzz leave the hive that it was discovered to have serious privacy problems, serious vulnerability to hackers…these issues chronicled here, here, and here.  My advice? Leave Google buzz until spring and read instead:

• Spring Without Bees: How Colony Collapse Disorder Has Endangered Our Food Supply by Bill McKibbon
• Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism by Jurgen Tautz
• A Keeper of Bees: Notes on Hive and Home by Allison Wallace
• Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World by Holley Bishop

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece over the weekend, on a signed Abraham Lincoln document here in the SLU Libraries Archives, and it’s new “place” in a national digital collection of Lincoln’s papers…they are literally looking to scan anything he signed or touched!  Our Curator of Special Collections Mark McMurry has some interesting commentary on this document, and the ultimate “place” of the document now that it has a digital doppelganger…

…with Valentine’s Day Sunday you had to see this one coming from Odyssey Online.  Without further ado, and like a box of chocolates, here is an assortment of collections and volumes of love poetry:

• Sappho Translated by Mary Barnard
• Elegies II: Tibullus Translated by Paul Murgatroyd
• Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr
• Granted by Mary Szybist
• Loose Woman: Poems by Sandra Cisneros
• The Love Poems of James Laughlin by James Laughlin
• The Love Poems of May Swenson by May Swenson
• Portable Kisses: Love Poems by Tess Gallagher
• Theater of the Night by Alberto Rios
• View from the Middle Way: Poems by Thomas Centolella
• Surrealist Love Poems Edited by Mary Ann Caws
• Love Songs of Man’y oshu Translated by Ian Hideo Levy

…a well written and challenging piece in the Boston Globe by Lawrence Harmon on youth services in the library in Mattapan Massachusetts. Challenging in that it challenges the notion of if-you-build-it-they-will-read, and eloquently details what the Youth Services Librarian (and presumably Youth Services Librarians anywhere) actually have to do.  Challenges the notion that given the realities of staffing, they can function as working bibliographers.  It’s a lucid piece, and if you are interested in libraries, one to mull.

…Virginia Postrel has an interesting piece in Atlantic Online about e-book prices, arguing that “E-books aren’t really cheap.” Frankly, I can’t get past the faint cold fear that e-books are going to all about control, and that we are going to find the purveyors of e-books putting all kind of stipulations and restrictions on e-book content that simply don’t (can’t) exist with print books.  I can’t get by the faint cold fear that the companies like Google, Amazon, etc., treat all text as information and that in this scenario Catcher in the Rye is treated as being identical to an advertisement that the opportunity to possess the e-version of this text won’t exist in any meaningful way.  I ccccoooouuuulllldddd be wrong…