Odyssey Online

This is the concluding post for the blog Odyssey Online…not that I’m going to stop blogging, that will, however happen at the blog for the Friends of the Owen D Young and Launders Library.  Visit with us there, and also the SLU Libraries web site where we plan on having a much more active announcements section…

…an interesting piece in the Huffington Post by Peter O’Dowd on ways companies and candidates bury themselves in Google. That is, folks such as eMarketer who will help you not only maximizes your Google presence (there are dozens of books on this kind of Google hack) but minimize at least part of your Google presence so unflattering accounts of your company or candidacy will be well down a Google results lists.  On a certain level this kind of manipulation really is just a day at the office, but it makes the days of information wants to be free seem far away…

Walt Crawford is a long time and very interesting commentator on librarianship, and for years has been publishing his own newsletter, Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.  In the most recent issue, he has a piece called “There is No Future” (it starts on page 3) where he cites to comments on a thread about the future of libraries that recently tied a bunch of library oriented blogs together.  What Crawford does that’s so good is contextualize this particular discussion by describing how many of the opinions blogged fall into patterns common in the literature of librarianship. He’s good at separating the wheat from the chaff…so if you are interested in reading an involved (it’s a bit long) librarian to librarian dialogue on what the future seems to hold for libraries as institutions, and a dialogue that includes both the thoughtful and reactive, give Walt a read…

…a couple of interesting things out there about living and writing online.  Elizabeth Stone has a very interesting piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about how Facebook may be changing the concept of grieving (for those who spend their time on Facebook). On Techcrunch Michael Arrington suggests that the Internet’s ability to be a conduit for gossip may change the concept of reputation such that it becomes a null set. Also, Thomas P. Barnett has an interesting piece on blogger as writer in World Politics Review, where he reflects what he can do with a blog, and how it has changed him as a researcher and commentator.  One might not agree with all the conclusions, here, but worth a read, all three.

…while I spent much of the summer running up and down the shelves looking for books to recommend, it didn’t mean I wasn’t near obsessive about following blogs…couple of interesting pieces from that sphere…firstly a nicely titled Are Kindles and iPods the End of Culture Snobbery? which investigates…contrasts…books with content.  The piece also has an interesting take on how we translate people by what they read.  On a like topic the author of that piece, Derek Thompson, reports on Amazon’s trials and tribulations establishing the user-license that will to Kindle content bring. One of the elements to Kindle that may substantively change the human relation to discourse is whether, if the Kindle becomes norm, one will in fact own the book, I mean content, once it has been Kindle-ized.

Also, to file under knowing blogging, before retiring from Obsidian Wings Hilzoy (pen-name) wrote blogged Good to Know, a narrative about how an unsubstantiated report moves around the blog sphere. For all that is good about the “new journalism” which blogs create/inspire they are still a buyer beware market that beg critical reading…

…Walt Crawford is an articulate commentator on issues related to libraries, book publishing, and everywhere those two institutions intersect.  He Writes Cites and Insights–a one man operation in which he examines issues of the day. I came across a piece he wrote back in 2007 where he agues convincingly for librarians and the study of librarianship that blogs are now the “most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today.”  No equivocating, take that RSQ.  The reach of blogs as the literature of futures has a grasp on fields other than newspapers, so says Crawford, and I find I agree.

…in celebrating its sixth birthday James Joyner on his blog “Outside the Beltway” writes:

The rise of RSS readers and aggregators like Memeorandum mean that fewer of us are using our blogrolls or just keeping a log of interesting things we’re finding on the Web; instead, we’re much more apt to write about what everyone else is writing about.

One also wonders about RSS feeds and serendipity.  If “we” are all using RSS feeds, if we are all using one of any number of technologies to deliver microcontent about an interest, or point of view, or time of day what possibility is there of making the chance encounter with information. What becomes of positively judging a book by its cover, and thus meeting a new writer, style of writing, or idea. This is the trade off in customizing…that with the ability to take only what one wants from the information hog-wallow otherwise known as the Internet, we mish the chance to stumble, to stumble upon something we didn’t know existed but, once discovered, proves useful.

The answer? Browse shelves…the browsing collection between the computer labs and the faculty carrols…