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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 in the …
The other day, I got an e-mail from a reader of my blog: “You mentioned in one of your more recent posts that you’ve learned what works and what doesn’t in “selling” information literacy to faculty. Could you elaborate? I suspect that I will have to be doing a lot of that in the near …
For those of you who missed my wiki talk last week and wanted to watch it later, the archived presentation is up and is available as a podcast or as a video with the slides and audio. There are a lot of terrific presentations in the SirsiDynix Institute archive by some of the great thinkers …
I’m on vacation in Florida this week and have happily been away for the computer for long periods of time, so I was very surprised to find all of the comments on what I had written a few days ago on skills for the 21st century librarian. I guess it really touched a chord (it’s …
A few weeks ago, I finished a chapter I was writing (not for my book — another one) on the topic of technology in LIS Education. I think Rachel asked me to write it because I had complained about my own library school education in the past and the fact that many schools create this …
Here are some links for those of you who are attending (or have attended, depending on when you look at this) my SirsiDynix talk today. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to post them in the comments section of this post and I’ll answer them as soon as I can. Better for …
What: Wiki: The Ultimate Tool For Online Collaboration When: Thursday July 13, 11 am Eastern, 8 am Pacific. Where: Online! Via the SirsiDynix Institute. Who: Me! Why: Because you want to learn more about wikis and how they can be used in libraries. Wiki is a social software tool that allows for unprecedented online collaboration. …
Good news! David Rothman, whom I recently wrote about here and Michael Stephens wrote about here, has just started his own blog (davidrothman.net) on medical librarianship and technology. He is doing some really cool things with using RSS to provide outreach to busy clinicians and I’m sure will have a lot of great practical insights …
Lilia Efimova, who herself has written some really fascinating studies of blogging, has collected papers from Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs and the 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem. There are some really interesting studies in there, including Discovery of Blog Communities Based on Mutual Awareness and Browsing System for Weblog Articles based on …
On Friday, I had a meeting with the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies to discuss future plans for integrating information literacy instruction into the curriculum. On several occasions I brought up issues that involved communication problems between the programs and the library. In response, he discussed the internal communication problems he’s seen. He …
It’s funny for me to think back to one year ago when you couldn’t have paid me to speak at a conference. Between now and November, I’m going to be giving at least 8 talks (2 virtual). Even now that I feel better about speaking, the thought of giving so many talks makes me a …
I recently revamped the subject guide for our Information Assurance (basically Info Security) masters program. One thing I did was mix together several info security news feeds into one using RSS Mix and syndicated it on the Web page using Feed2JS (which we now have installed on our own server — makes it MUCH faster). …
When I graduated from FSU with my MLIS, I didn’t come out of it with job searching tips, an alumni network or really any help of any kind in finding a job. The College of Information, as it is now called, wasn’t great with the mentoring, networking, support stuff. So when I saw the Prospectus …