Is referrer spam getting you down? Killing refferer spam has become an obsession for Dorothea at Caveat Lector over the past week, and she shares some useful tips on how to eradicate it, along with a narrative of her own experiences. Don’t know what referrer spam is? Here’s a definition from Wikipedia: When someone accesses …

According to Techdirt, a California state senator has introduced a bill that threatens developers of file sharing applications with jail time. John Borland at CNET, writes, “if passed and signed into law, it could expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don’t take …

I will be flying up to freezing Chicago next week for a second interview for a job I am absolutely dying to get. I’d have to be VERY interested in a job to be willing to fly to Chicago in January! This job could hardly come closer to my description of a perfect job for …

According to the New York Times, ETS has developed a test to measure a college student’s level of information literacy in order to determine how well schools are preparing students for a world where IT literacy is increasingly necessary. The test is designed to show how well a student is able to use critical thinking …

While I’m kind of bummed about not making it to ALA Midwinter, I’ve gotten to hear all about it from the PLA Blog, Library Techtonics, and It’s All Good. A lot of what I’ve been reading has been very encouraging in terms of librarians and libraries embracing change and new ideas. Alice from OCLC wrote …

Jessamyn said “learn this word: folksonomy” and I make it a point to always listen to Jessamyn. 🙂 Actually, I’ve been hearing quite a lot about folksonomies lately, between my Theory of Information Retrieval class last semester and the recent discussion on Slashdot. Folksonomies are the taxonomic vocabularies generated from such sites as del.icio.us and …

IBM is making 500 of its patents available for free to people doing open source projects. Rock on! From the New York Times: I.B.M. executives say the company’s new approach to intellectual property represents more than a rethinking of where the company’s self-interest lies. In recent speeches, for example, Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.’s chief executive, …

David King wrote two responses to Michael Stephen’s 2005 library tech predictions. The first one highlights the importance of user-centered technology planning and implementation. This is something that cannot be stressed enough. There are libraries that are completely adverse to change and to technology, and there are libraries that are so tech-forward that they pass …

I just discovered Spectacle today. It is a gorgeous site with lots of links to the coolest web design resources. From there, you can see Forty Media’s web design predictions for 2005, which list the trends they think we will see in web design this year. You can also find the CSS Playground, which shows …

The PLA Blog is now up and running! It will have some great public library-related reports from the ALA Midwinter Conference by some very familiar faces in the library blogging world. It’s almost as good as being there! I’d wanted to go, but couldn’t really justify the expense considering my current lack of employment. I …

I find myself often linking to Michael’s posts on Tame the Web. So much so that I would urge all of my readers to subscribe to his blog (most of whom already have, I’d bet). Instead of looking back at 2004, like so many others have, Michael listed Twelve Techie Things for Librarians 2005, which …

Dorothea has written a very interesting post comparing the ALA to the guild system in the Medieval world. She makes some great suggestions and observations about the ALA’s mission and whose interests they should be serving. I agree with her 100% that if the MLS is to mean anything, programs need to become far more …

Wow! This has got to be one of the most useful sites I’ve seen in a long time. Susan Herzog, a librarian at Eastern Connecticut State University, has created BlogBib, an annotated bibliography of all things bloggy, with a special focus on library/librarian blogs. It’s quite a resource — a one-stop shop for articles, studies, …

I’d mentioned in a previous story that i’ve set out on the horrid task of digitizing about 5,000 – 6,000 of my family’s 35mm slides, dating from the early 1960s until the present day. I want to free all our old pictures from the prison of the slide carousel, where they’ve sat for – literally …

I may not be online too much over the next few days. My grandfather is in the hospital, probably with a stroke, though they haven’t figured it out yet. When I visited him on Sunday afternoon, he was almost in a coma, and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to talk with him again. …

Peter Suber at Open Access News pointed me to a very interesting pre-print article about the citation impact of open access journal articles. Citation Impact of Open Access Articles vs. Articles available only through subscription (“Toll-Access”) is still in the analysis stages, but they seem to have found that with physics and mathematics journals, those …

Here is an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that has been causing some controversy on the library-related listservs. Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions rails against the traditional ideas behind information literacy curricula. While I disagree with much of what the author has written, he does raise some interesting points. I’ve never …

John Batelle offers up an interesting model for generating revenue with online open access publishing in an article in this month’s MIT Technology Review. Batelle makes the suggestion for “an alternative economy in which the long-standing imbalance between publisher, audience, and advertiser could be corrected.” It’s a short article and definitely worth a read. [via …

Techdirt reported today that the New York Times is considering charging to allow people access to their website. Really really bad idea. It seems that the newspaper, like many others, doesn’t know how to adapt its business model to the current information provision environment. Here’s an excerpt from Techdirt’s coverage. We’ve already explained how the …

It’s like a TiVo hack created by TiVo themselves! TiVoToGo is their newest offering, a free service that allows users to transfer the shows recorded on their TiVo to their computers (via your wireless or wired network). It’s only for series 2 TiVo’s and currently only works on computers with Windows 2000 or XP, but …