 Thursday, February 06, 2003
1st Episode Of Animatrix Released
"The official Matrix page has word of the first officially released widescreen Anime episode of the Animatrix for download (in quicktime format). This is the first of 4 free episodes that will be released on the web. A total of 9 episodes will be availible for purchase on DVD within the next few months. The feature-quality anime shorts range in length from 6 minutes to 16 minutes. There's a trailer availible if you want to get a taste for what they will be like." [Slashdot]
Think DVDs last forever? Say hello to DVD Rot
"DVDs were supposed to do for movies what compact discs did for music-- provide a digital format for movies that never wears out and lasts virtually forever. Unfortunately, the Sydney Morning Herald reported over the weekend that DVDs are not as indestructible as you might think; unofficially between 1 and 10 percent are coming down with DVD rot." [kuro5hin.org]
I've been meaning to blog about this for a while. I've slowed down buying DVDs anyway because I'm tired of purchasing a movie and then finding a few months later that a more "special" edition has come out with even more extras.
How College Students Shop and What They Buy
"According to a survey of college students in the US, conducted by Harris Interactive for Alloy 360 Youth, 93% of college students go online in a given month. Harris surveyed over 2,000 college students between the ages of 18 and 30 and reported that college students were responsible for $210 billion in sales in 2002. As for their shopping behavior, Harris finds that 94% think that a good selection is important when shopping whereas just 27% are looking for specific brands....
College students are also highly likely to own a number of consumer electronic products. Harris determined that 88% have a personal computer (PC), 67% have a cellphone ad 85% own a television." [eMarketer Daily]
Even though this report was done for marketers and I never fully trust numbers that come from such studies, I'm fascinated by the statistic that more college students own a personal computer than own a television. And 67% of them have cell phones. In fact, if you visit the Harris Interactive summary of the survey, it elaborates on that last point to note that 67% of them have cell phones and 36% use them to access the internet. Do you know anyone that uses their cell phone to access the internet? I don't, and that includes me (yet).
Today at lunch, Diane, Kate, and I had an interesting conversation about when "instant gratification" became such a cornerstone of our society. Kate says it was the remote control, while Diane thinks it was computers. I brought up James Gleick's book Faster (which I highly recommend) and decided on the telephone. But imagine the changes we're going to witness when the current 67% of college students with cell phones enters the work force. As Carrie Fisher noted in Postcards from the Edge, "instant gratification takes too long."
These days, when I walk around the building at work or help staff members with computer problems, I see a lot more chat programs on their desktops. Chat programs that they've installed themselves in order to stay in touch with friends and family. Cross Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers, and NetGens with chat and cell phones and you'd better fasten your seat belt over the next couple of years.
So You Want to Start a Syndicated Revolution: RSS News Blogging for Searchers
"What's a blog? And what does RSS stand for? David Mattison answers these questions and more as he provides an overview of the software, tools, editors, aggregators, and search engines that are needed in this "brave new blogging world." [Searcher, via Catalogablog]
I haven't seen this article yet (do we get Searcher at SLS?) and it's not available online, but David Bigwood says TSL is mentioned! I'm glad to see library trade journals picking up on RSS!
Marylaine Block's current Ex Libris column, In Praise of Volunteers, includes an interview with Uber Volunteer Molly Williams from the Waterboro Public Library. In addition to maintaining the Library's overall web site, Molly started (and maintains at an incredible pace) its blog before she even knew she was starting a blog!
"The library's weblog evolved from a 'what's new' page, which listed only items new to the website, when a friend with a physics background created a science weblog in January 2002; although I had never heard the term weblog before that, once I saw his weblog's format and content, I knew that's what I'd been seeking for the library: a place to inform patrons, readers, librarians, educators, researchers, writers, and others about news relevant to reading, books, literature, libraries, bookstores, and to some extent, Maine, as well as to note our own website offerings, all in one place. Sometimes I also throw in news and information about my personal interests, such as gardening, botany,rural and coastal living, England, animals, sustainable living practices, and of course, crime novels and mysteries."
In case you missed the transition, note that the Library's site has moved to a new domain, but there doesn't seem to be an update for the RSS feed yet (darn).
"DON MCARTHUR has noticed yet another invasion of Internet privacy. I may amend my Terms of Use to specify that such 'bots are unauthorized and their users subject to suit for theft of services." [InstaPundit]
In order to help out those bots, I thought I'd reproduce part of Don's post here. :-)
"...so this bot visits websites throughout the Internet, poking around, looking for Intellectual Property Rights violations. Like a cop wandering town, sticking his head in everyone's store, "Shopowner, you involved in any criminal activity?" Interesting.
I'd sure hate to see them waste a lot of time following a bunch of false positives, like references to LordOfTheRings.mpeg files that don't exist, or RollingStones.mp3 collections that aren't there..."
Pat Kalaher, Donna Wentworth's brother-in-law, showed up in my Technorati Link Cosmos today. In addition to his wonderful Kalaher's Law of Obsessive XML Newsfeed Collection, he's trying his hand at punchlines:
"In response to One hour out of my day...
So the joke goes something like 'You know you're subscribed to too many RSS feeds when...'
... you need an aggregator for your aggregator?
...you need your own search engine?
...your network attached storage array can't keep up?
Of course, I'm the worst at making up jokes, particularly ones that would only be funny to a small number of people, if they work as jokes at all."
That last one is pretty funny, because we just got a huge network attached storage array at work to back up all of our servers. The big in-joke is that it's really just for my email.
Criminal, Basket Case, Jock, Princess or Brain?
"In 1987, Jacquelynne Eccles, a senior research scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, asked 900 high-school sophomores which of the five character types in the popular 1985 coming-of-age movie "The Breakfast Club" they most resembled: Jocks, Princesses, Basket Cases, Brains or Criminals.
Twenty-eight percent identified themselves as Jocks, 40 percent as Princesses, 12 percent as Brains, 11 percent as Basket Cases and 9 percent as Criminals. As it happened, these thumbnail descriptions were remarkably helpful in charting their lives after high school and college, Eccles reported in a recent issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research.
Half of all Brains went on to graduate from college, compared with 17 percent of the Criminals, 29 percent of the Basket Cases, 30 percent of the Jocks and 36 percent of the Princesses. One in four Basket Cases said they had gone to a psychologist by age 24, compared with only 6 percent of the Jocks.
Jocks, particularly female athletes, were earning more money at 24 than any other group, Eccles and her research team found. But Jocks also had their problems: They were more likely to be in alcohol recovery programs (5 percent) than any other group except the Criminals (11 percent)." [The Seattle Times, MetaFilter]
Brewster Kahle's Librarian Rant
"This 1h+ Real video of Brewster 'Internet Archive' Kahle's address to the Library of Congress is utterly inspiring. Brewster's utopian vision for universal access to all of human knowledge is librarian-porn at its finest, and his transgressive, heretical means of accomplishing it -- scanning and posting, P2P, white-box PCs and commodity hard-drives -- is pure nerdy visionaryness. (Thanks, Stephe!)" [Boing Boing Blog]
I haven't had a chance to watch this yet, but if your employer lets you surf the net, you can watch it at work!
Breithe lá sona duit,
Breithe lá sona duit,
Breithe lá sona duit dear Kate,
Breithe lá sona duit!
The proposal to cut the University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science made the Arizona Daily Star. Rightly so, since we've seen far too many LIS schools close over the last decade.
Students Defend UA Programs
"The school is one of 16 programs Likins and Provost George Davis have proposed eliminating....
Lisa Bunker, a recent graduate of the School of Information Resources and Library Science, told Likins its supporters have been "working feverishly" in the past week since he challenged them to find a way to save their program.
Supporters want to appeal to the school's 1,900 alumni, and could ask for more time from an accreditation agency that said it must add faculty to its master's program and keep building.
The library school is one of the largest graduate schools on campus with more than 200 students.
On Monday, Likins announced he would ask the regents to approve a special program fee of $100 per credit hour for resident students and $400 per credit hour for non-resident students, beginning this fall if the school survives." [Thanks for the pointer, p.e.!]
Libraries On PBS Bill Moyers Transcripts Online
"As a follow up on This One, on Friday, January 17, 2003, at 9 P.M., on PBS , NOW with Bill Moyers took a look into the digital future of intellectual property and the debate that has pit private control against the public domain. If you missed the show, like I did, you can now read all about it." [LISNews.com]
Question for anyone in or who has graduated from second grade - what is wrong with the following sentence?
"JACK VALENTI: A 12-year-old with a click of a mouse, can send a movie hurtling to all the five continents."
BostonWorks - Software Engineer Jobs
"Software Engineer Job Listings from BostonWorks and The Boston Globe." [Recently approved feeds from Syndic8.com]
This is a great idea. I hope to make our Career Central databases of library-related jobs in the Chicagoland area available via RSS at some point. Ideally, you'd be able to subscribe to a feed of new listings for public library reference jobs, special library jobs, youth services jobs, etc. - your choice.
Update: others are way ahead on this one. Ben Hammersley points out Jez Higgins' work in this area using JobServe2RSS:
"So you're looking for a new programming job. Maybe you're a contractor, perhaps you've just got itchy feet. There are scads of jobs being advertised on Jobserve, but frankly it's a pain in the backside checking it all the time. Well, through the power of software, you can have this little script do the checking for you. It scrapes Jobserve, generating an RSS feed of the jobs you're interested in. Point your favourite RSS aggregator at it and Bob's your mother's brother. Fresh job ads, delivered to your desktop.
It's a Perl script that munges the Jobserve HTML in an RSS 0.91 feed. Set up a scheduled job and fresh job ads are yours. It's available from here (link fixed)."
Side note: you can now pre-order Ben's book Content Syndication with RSS!
Ad Aware 6 Released
"The long awaited (at least for me) king of spyware detectors is now available for download." [MetaFilter]
This is a great program for detecting spyware and adware on your computer - highly recommended!
Who's Sneakier? Spy Toys Differ for Girls and Boys
"' We've done an enormous amount of research,' said Nathan Keker, the company's marketing director. 'For boys, it's more of a role-playing concept. They want it overt.'
For girls, he added, 'it's more something they do with friends and they like the toy to be hidden.'
The company's newest spy toys, which are scheduled to be in stores by August (more information will be available at www.wildplanet.com), reflect those differences.
The Spy Gear Spy Stealth Communicators, marketed principally for boys, has a special pair of glasses with a tiny liquid crystal screen that serves as a kind of heads-up display. Using a wrist-pad keyboard, the would-be spy composes a message that appears on the display, where it can be read through the glasses. Messages can then be transmitted to an accomplice wearing an identical pair of glasses. The set will cost $35.
The main unit of the $20 Undercover Girl Action Tracker resembles a hand-held computer but works as a surveillance tool. Using signals from three wireless motion detectors, it warns of activity with a blinking light-emitting diode, a voice message or both." [NY Times]
Emphasis above is mine, mainly so that these toys get added to my wish list. So basically, we have the start of wearable computers for children, and they'll totally grow up used to this stuff.
Last week, we took the kids to the store to let them each buy any one item of their choosing. Brent picked a video game (was there any doubt?), but Kailee found a Palm PDA for girls. That's pretty much what the box said - it had a Palm logo on it and the box was pink. It looked like the M500 series with the curved bottom. She thought it was a fully working Palm, as did I until I grabbed the box out of her hand to look it over in amazement.
Amazement that faded when I saw the price tag - $9.95. I was hoping that Palm had devised a brilliant strategy to hook kids on pared-down PDAs, but alas this toy only lit up and emitted sounds when you pressed the various buttons. When I demonstrated this to Kailee, she immediately put it back on the shelf. She doesn't want a fake Palm, she wants a real Palm.
So she chose a paper sketch pad instead.
Tim Quirk on Music Labels
"I asked Tim Quirk, songwriter and musician for the pop group Wonderlick who is known best as a member of Too Much Joy, about the future of the music business in the age of P2P downloads, etc. He gave some lively and insightful answers....
'I think what p2p has done is destroy a lot of the value of the catalog they'd amassed previously, so now they're not going to be able to re-sell us our record collections a third, fourth and fifth time. But digital distribution in general could as easily have saved the labels as killed them -- on the one hand it's much cheaper to produce a high-quality recording, and should be much cheaper to manufacture and/or distribute that to the public, so margins should have gotten better, while the fact that any schmoe can now make his own record, as I said above, should make the majors' marketing muscle that much more valuable. But there are so many parties with a stake in the status quo -- producers, studio owners, managers, publishers -- that the business was fatally slow to adapt to the new reality. We tried to build a subscription service in 2000, but it was impossible to get licenses. And there was definitely a point where Napster could have charged people $5/month to use the service and the music business would have grown as a result. I'm convinced of that. I'm also convinced there's still time -- if Rhapsody or Emusic or whatever service could offer folks everything rather than just that subset we manage to negotiate licenses for, and let them download at will rather than pay .99 a track and/or accept some kind of drm with the file, people would sign up in droves, they'd discover more new music than is possible on unlicensed p2p services, and they'd pay for the privilege....
Even worse, they stop printing records once they fall below a certain sales threshold, and that threshold keeps getting raised. But then they often refuse to license those out of print recordings to other folks. This is the situation I'm in. Indie labels have approached Giant/WB about getting the out of print TMJ records, but Warner won't even talk to them unless they're willing to pony up a $50,000 advance -- which is more than one of those records would likely gross if it *were* re-released. The corporate reasoning as its been explained to me is that it's not worth the paperwork if it won't make at least that much money. (This reasoning usually comes with several helpings of complete and utter disdain that you would even waste their time asking if your records are so worthless.) But will they give me back my supposedly worthless copyrights? Nope. Because it's a corporate asset, and who knows if somebody will want to use a track on a movie soundtrack one day.
Still more infuriatingly, they won't even license the out of print titles to services like Rhapsody, because they're only doing the paperwork for records that are currently in print. Does that make sense? Of course not, and a lot of folks at the labels realize this. Unfortunately, they're not in the departments that are currently responsible for clearing digital rights. This is the kind of stupid corporate bureaucracy that the majors have saddled themselves with....
I don't know that it's wise to generalize from the few young people I've encountered, but what the hey. I defnitely think they don't fetishize physical objects the way my generation does (hell, I still mourn the loss of 12" lp covers, cuz the art was so much better). I know young folks who download more than they could ever listen to, which seems like some weird kind of hoarding behavior to me.
But the thing you can always count on about young people is that they turn into old people. Eventually, they have more money than time, and that's when you can sell them music as a service rather than music as a product. The biggest effect I think they'll have isn't so much their demand that music be free, but their demand that you offer them access to EVERYTHING. And as a guy who grew up lamenting the fact that radio always played the same damn groups over and over again, I love them for that.' " [Siva Vaidhyanathan's Weblog, via FurdLog: A Digital Intellectual Property Weblog]
That's the point I'm at - convenience. Cris and I were just talking this morning about downloading music and I noted how I'd pay per download if a site would just offer a service that lets me own what I buy, make mixes, and take the files with me on a portable player. It's been more than a year now since I basically stopped buying CDs, and I'm still waiting for the music service that wants my money.
I also couldn't resist pointing to this interview because it's Tim Quirk of Too Much Joy!!! Thank heavens I bought the group's CDs when they first came out.
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