City Guide Meets Blog

"Veteran blogger John Hiler of Corante and Microcontent News has launched a city events guide in blog form for New Yorkers, CityBlogs: New York. The site and e-newsletter focus (initially) on event listings for cinema, book readings and talks.

Hiler explains the concept this post, Bringing the Power of Blogs to a City Near You: 'I started devouring the local listings guides to find more events: the Village Voice listings, the Time Out NY events calendar, the New Yorker's Goings On About Town. I found the hundreds of events in the listings overwhelming: what I really wanted was someone to find the most interesting events and tell me which ones to go to. I wanted that someone to be an expert in their field. And I wanted that someone to cover niche categories that just weren't in the local event listings: jazz jam sessions in the Village, kickboxing matches in Queens, or Haitian dance classes near Union Square.'

He also defines the the advantages of blogs over local listings:
• Personality versus Dry Descriptions
• Useful Recommendations versus Overwhelming Comprehensiveness
• Readable by Anyone versus Accessible Only to Experts
• Niche Coverage versus Mainstream Coverage
• Local Stringers versus No Followups

'This is what Jeff Jarvis calls the killer app of weblogs: local coverage of events,' Hiler writes. 'Bloggers can provide the sort of distributed coverage of local events that newspapers can't even dream of.' True. This is an exciting venture, one well worth watching. And Hiler definitely has a handle on a successful value proposition — niche events listings and coverage." [Hypergene MediaBlog]

I just know that John is going to include events sponsored by the New York Public Library, RIGHT JOHN? I mean, how can you have a "book readings" category and NOT check in with NYPL? Why, I'll bet Carrie Bickner (drat - her site seems to be down at the moment) or one of the many other fine folks at NYPL would love to help out with this project. After all, I really like the idea behind CityBlogs, and I hope he's trying to start a Chicago version.

As for asking John why his blogs don't have RSS feeds, don't get him started. We debated this during dinner after the Yale conference, and John has his reasons for not providing feeds for his own work.

It's a crying shame, though, because it means I can't keep up with all of the great work that he and the other Corante bloggers are doing, although that wouldn't stop someone else from scraping their sites, now would it?

Samsung Offers a Peek at New Pocket PC Phone

"Samsung Electronics has taken the wraps off a prototype of what is likely to be the most fully-featured PDA phone it has yet produced when it goes on sale early next year.

The SPH-M400 is based on Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition, Microsoft's operating system for PDA phones, and runs on CDMA 2000 1x EvDO networks. Such networks, which are already in commercial service in South Korea, are capable of data transmission at speeds up to 2.4 mbps. It was unveiled at Telecom Asia 2002, which officially opens here on Monday.

Looking much like a conventional PDA, the handset has a large thin film transistor LCD that can display 65,000 colors, voice recognition and a text-to-speech engine, a TV tuner, GPS satellite navigation, an infrared port, and a Secure Digital card slot with support for the SD I/O standard for plug-in peripherals....

The prototype was on display alongside four other PDA phone handsets that Samsung is preparing to put on sale overseas.

They were the SPH-i700 and SPH-i600, which are based on the Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition and Windows Powered Smartphone operating systems respectively, and the SPH-i330 and SPH-i500, both of which run the Palm operating system.

It is due to go on sale early next year in South Korea. Details of launch plans for other markets was not available." [PC World]

Which is why it's not a particularly good time to buy a PDA/cell phone combo right now. Next year will make this market much more interesting. Odd that there's no Bluetooth for a headset, although I suppose you could purchase a S/D peripheral for that.

'The Hidden Staircase' by Carolyn Keene

"The Nancy Drew story began in 1930, with the publication of 'The Secret of the Old Clock,' the first book in the series. Nancy Drew was the invention of Edward Stratemeyer, owner of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and also the creator of the Tom Swift and Hardy Boys series.

The author name 'Carolyn Keene' was likewise an invention. Stratemeyer hired Mildred Wirt Benson (nee Wirt), a young journalist, to ghostwrite the new mystery series for young girls. Benson earned $125 per book for her stories about the girl detective. Stratemeyer died the year the first one was published, leaving his daughter Harriet Adams to supervise the series and later write many of the novels herself.

Actress Laura Linney reads from the second book in the series, 'The Hidden Staircase,' courtesy of Random House Audio." [Salon.com]

You can download the 3.1MB MP3 file or listen to a streaming Real file. The clip is just over seven minutes long, and you can purchase the complete story from Powell's for $18. Unfortunately, the part that makes absolutely no sense about this is that you'll be purchasing an audiocassette version that will be shipped to you in 1 to 3 days, rather than obtaining a less expensive, more sensible MP3 version that you could listen to right away.

I'm especially disappointed in Random House for not offering this title through Audible since they have an exclusive agreement with them. Imagine how many young adults libraries could hook by circulating MP3 titles such as the Nancy Drew series.

Actually, "disappointed" isn't a strong enough term.

'Spam' Likely to Clutter E-Mail for Some Time

"The average American will get more than 2,200 spam, or unsolicited bulk e-mail, messages this year and 3,600 by 2007, Jupiter Research forecasts....

'It is worse. Newer tactics include harvesting attacks, which are trying to find out names and addresses of people who live in this enterprise,' said Joyce Graff, analyst at Gartner. 'It's like a virus game, so if you don't have a lab looking for new ploys -- whatever you implement won't be working for you in six months.'

Brightmail said its recent data shows that spam has gone up from 8 percent of all Internet e-mail to about 40 percent." [Yahoo! News, via LawMeme]

That 3,600 statistic is kind of scary, but then how much print junk mail do you get at home, even when you've asked the Direct Marketing Association to remove your name from mailing lists. (I'm not knocking them - they do try to help.)

We've been getting a lot of complaints at work lately from staff at our member libraries because the amount of spam they are receiving is going up, especially messages that contain viruses, and especially messages that contain viruses and have forged headers. Unfortunately, they don't understand that there's nothing we can do about this, so I'm going to suggest that we print copies of this story and hand them out at this week's Administrators Quarterly meeting.

Do you think the irony would be too thick if we sent it out to the membership as an email?   :-P

Using RSS: An Explanation and Guide

"I wrote a little piece on RSS for Information Outlook Magazine, the trade journal for The Special Libraries Association. The table of contents is available from the site." [Library Stuff]

Have your local librarian order a copy for you. I know I will! Congrats, Steven!

And speaking of RSS and Steven Cohen... we got the preliminary program for the Computers in Libraries conference in DC in March, 2003. My name is in there with Mr. Cohen for a program on RSS, so circle that one on your calendar now if you're attending the show. During our brief 45-minute presentation, I hope to demonstrate the grant software SLS is having written since it features individual and group news aggregation. Here's the description of our program:

"Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a form of XML that is used to syndicate content from thousands of Web sites into an aggregated news feed. RSS feeds have begun to attract the attention of those in the fields of content delivery and management. Content from numerous sites can be delivered to one place (an aggregator), saving the precious time of visiting these sites frequently throughout the day. This session covers how to get started in the world of RSS feeds, including a review of the major players in the field, resources to help locate feeds, and what the future will hold for RSS—plus practical advice on how to utilize feeds."

There are lots of other interestingly-titled programs in the guide, starting with Wednesday's Keynote speech by Michael Schuyler titled "Library as Implant: Librarian as Cyborg." Here's the description of his talk:

"The future will be more futuristic than you ever thought possible. Librarians seem to feel that the future will be a little more automated, a little more wireless, and a little more online, perhaps, but otherwise libraries will provide the same kinds of service they do today and become community centers as well. The problem is, this view is too introverted. It fails to place the library in the context of the future, which may turn out very differently than we understand today. Futurists are predicting that 10 years out, we may be right, but 20 years out, we may see a future that is so vastly different, we cannot imagine what it will look like. If you think of technological progress as a gently rising curve, the only way you’ll find the future is by looking straight up. The future library may very well be an implant; the future librarian may not be a Homo sapiens."

And if I play my cards right, it looks like I'll get to see Peter Morville and Gary Price again and meet Pat Delaney and Tim Bray. I'm looking forward to this one already.

On the drive to Thanksgiving dinner last Thursday, I took the opportunity to introduce the kids to the "Grammar Rock" and "America Rock" videos from Schoolhouse Rock (I'm missing the other two videos and I haven't purchased the DVD set yet). Sheree thought I was nuts and that they'd be bored silly, but they loved all of the skits, as I knew they would.  :-)  I told her about my American government class in high school... how you could hear everyone mouthing the words to The Preamble during tests.

Then this afternoon, Sheree called me to ask for the definition of a predicate. Kailee was doing her homework and in true fashion, the unit was covering the kind of knowledge that you learn in school but never really use in life. Before answering the question by singing the chorus from The Tale of Mr. Morton, I paused for a moment to extoll the virtues of Schoolhouse Rock and wax nostalgic.

Nielsen and Ucentric to Track PVR Usage

"Nielsen Media Research and Ucentric Systems today announced they have agreed to create television audience measurement software that will track usage of personal video recorders on multiple television sets.

Under the agreement, Nielsen software will be integrated into the Ucentric Multi-TV PVR applications that power many digital set-top boxes, enabling Nielsen to collect tuning, recording and playback information from every TV connected to the Ucentric system.

The company said the software would be used only by Nielsen Media Research to retrieve data from Nielsen sample households, and only with permission from the household. The software would be inactive in non-Nielsen homes.

Digital set-tops that run on Ucentric's Multi-TV PVR solution allow TV viewers to control individual video recordings from a single in-home recording library shared among multiple television sets." [allNetDevices Wireless News]

Of course, this doesn't say if they'll be tracking how many commercials a household watches, which is a big sticking point these days. But it's good that they're finally recognizing PVRs as a viable statistical audience. Imagine all of the niche shows that are going to begin appearing on weekly lists! I hope they maintain separate "Top 20" shows just for PVRs.

For those of us that couldn't make it to the LITA National Forum back in October, Rick Roche has written a summary in the current SLS Points of Reference newsletter. He attended sessions about the notebook computer checkout program at Cook Library in Mississippi, eBooks in academia, what sounds like a great session with Carrie Russell (Copyright Specialist for the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy), digital reference, XML for cross-database searching, and multimedia for instructional applications.