Archive for August, 2006

Happy Blog Day!

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

Today is Blog Day, ostensibly because the date sort of looks like the word blog (3108) if you squint or perhaps are a really creative-minded person. It’s a day where lots of bloggers will will highlight five blogs that they think we should know about. I was thinking of highlighting some of the new blogs [...]

Why my (and probably your) congressman voted for DOPA

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

This is why. You’ve got to check out the actual ad; it had me half laughing half furious.
I don’t write much about politics on this blog, but I have to admit that this has gotten me kind of riled up. Vermont just isn’t the sort of place where people have really vile, manipulative, negative campaigns [...]

Confused thoughts on gender, libraries and tech

Sunday, August 27th, 2006

There’s been a whole lot of hubbub about those crazy articles on Forbes.com about wives being compared to whores and the appeal to Forbes’ male readers to not marry a career woman. Honestly, how they allowed this insecure misogynist to publish this garbage, much less to become an editor at their magazine, is beyond me. [...]

Introducing Five Weeks to a Social Library!

Monday, August 21st, 2006

Remember way back when I was talking about wanting to do some sort of a free online educational extravaganza? Well, the wheels have been turning behind the scenes, but I didn’t want to announce anything until I had something concrete. This summer, I asked five other amazing women to partner with me in creating [...]

More wiki links and resources

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

While we’re on the subject of wikis, here are some wiki-related links I’ve found recently that I thought you might want to know about:

LIS753wiki – Even though they got my name wrong (grrrr…) [update: thanks for fixing it, Laura], the students who developed this class project in Michael Stephens’ GSLIS class created a very nice [...]

What are wikis good for?

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

Karen Coombs beat me to the punch with an excellent post on a Web4Lib comment I had noticed recently as well:
“I am repeatedly impressed by how often, when librarians consider wikis, their first thought seems to be of access control. The idea of “just anybody being able to edit our Web pages” seems somehow innately [...]

Things I wish I’d known about before I finished my book

Friday, August 18th, 2006

I must apologize for not writing much lately. I really believed that when I finished my book I would have lots and lots of spare time, but then the speaking engagements came rolling in and the professors in the graduate programs at Norwich suddenly “got religion” regarding information literacy. All good things, but they take [...]

Public libraries using 2.0 technologies

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

I got an interesting question from a reader that I really wanted to open up to the community on my blog rather than pretending that I’m knowledgeable enough to answer this question by myself:
I have been reading your blog and since you have expertise with wikis I am seeking your advice. I am applying [...]

Wikimania Day 2: What’s Cooking in MediaWiki

Saturday, August 5th, 2006

Brion Vibber is the CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation.
OMG, there is a serious lack of women in this room!
This talk was about improvements in the pipeline for MediaWiki, so I didn’t want to miss it since most of my wikis are MediaWiki wikis.
User accounts: The problem is that there are too many accounts. Each [...]

Wikimania Day 2: Wikis: Enabling Library Knowledgebases

Saturday, August 5th, 2006

Our talk today went really well! Considering who we were up against (Yochai Benkler!!!), I was surprised and pleased that we had a pretty decent crowd at the talk.

Update: Audio from our talk can be found here in the Wikimania archives. I had no idea we were being recorded.
I was so thrilled to organize [...]

Wikimania Day 2: Library conference planners take note!

Saturday, August 5th, 2006

Can I tell you how nice it is to have free wireless EVERYWHERE at this conference? Not only that, but the seats are comfortable, and the desks or armrests have power adapters in them. Every conference should be at Harvard Law School.
Seriously, if you want bloggers to cover your conference, make it as [...]

Wikimania Day 1: Non-Wikimedia Wiki Projects

Friday, August 4th, 2006

Considering that I have initiated many MediaWiki projects of my own, I was very excited about hearing from other folks who have experienced the highs and lows of running a wiki.
Transitioning to a Wiki: The wikiHow Experience
Jack Herrick is the owner of wikiHow. Their mission is to “provide useful instructions ot help people solve the [...]

Wikimania Day 1: On Accuracy and Authority

Friday, August 4th, 2006

Sins of omission? An exploratory evaluation of Wikipedia’s topical coverage
Alex Halavais & Derek Lackaff
Looking at authority/authoritativeness of wikipedia articles. Accuracy is obviously an issue, but authority is more than that. It’s also about breadth, timeliness, etc. Encyclopedias are thought of as being authoritative, but what about the Wikipedia.
Halavais and Lackaff took three encyclopedias and compared [...]

Wikimania Day 1: Jimmy Wales

Friday, August 4th, 2006

Our Movement: Past, Present, Future
Jimmy first showed the “Wikiality” clip, which I highly recommend you check out for a laugh.
Fundamental Mission statement: imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
Milestones of 2006:

More than 1 million articles in English
Germans passed 400,000
Siegenthaler [...]

Playing catch-up

Tuesday, August 1st, 2006

I haven’t been able to blog as much as I’d like to lately. Between trying to get a million things done at work before the students come back — wasn’t it just May yesterday? — getting ready for my talk this weekend at Wikimania, and actually enjoying summer in Vermont, I’ve been wicked busy. Since [...]

DOPA: Contact your senators!

Tuesday, August 1st, 2006

I Want you … to Drop DOPA!
Originally uploaded by davidking.
I haven’t written much about DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act), though I certainly made my opinions about social networking software clear in my megapost on the subject. I was appalled, but not surprised, by the overwhelming support and passage of the bill [...]