The clever maps and infographics in Geographies of the World’s Knowledge create a lot of impact but even this simple chart from the report can say an awful lot.
Confirmed: The Internet Does Not Solve Global Inequality
Alexis Madrigal writes in The Atlantic about Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, a new Oxford Internet Institute report on the distribution of online content.
If you live in a rich country, the Internet has probably changed the way you consume (and produce) information. But when you look at global-scale knowledge production, things are as they ever were: the Anglophone world dominates with the United States doing the lion’s share of academic and user-generated publishing.
In the book’s foreword, Corinne Flick of the Convoco Foundation reluctantly concludes that the Internet has not delivered on the hopes that it would make knowledge “more accessible.”
“Many commentators speculated that [the Internet] would allow people outside of industrialised nations to gain access to all networked and codified knowledge, thus mitigating the traditionally concentrated nature of information production and consumption,” she writes. “These early expectations remain largely unrealised.”
The ebook is available free for the iPad with all sorts of bells and whistles but you can also get the whole thing as a PDF.
Tumblr as a Commonplace Book
Thoughts on the history of commonplace books and Tumblr from The Millions:
But maybe we’ve been too critical of Tumblr. It may lack to scholarly direction of the commonplace book, but there’s beauty in minutiae. What seems to be trivial could be of utmost importance. At the very least, the indirect, more playful medium of Tumblr is not inconsequential — its value just may not be legible to us yet. As Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei famously declaimed, “In this material world, the space for thought is narrowing; the world is lacking in imagination and meaning. Stories, dreams, fantasies — they could all become vehicles for expression.” That China has blocked access to Tumblr testifies to the platform’s potency as a vehicle for expression. Maybe we’ve underestimated the power of the reblog.
Lots to chew on.
Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium
GIFs are one of the oldest image formats used on the web. Throughout their history, they have served a huge variety of purposes, from functional to entertainment. Now, 25 years after the first GIF was created, they are experiencing an explosion of interest and innovation that is pushing them into the terrain of art. In this episode of Off Book, we chart their history, explore the hotbed of GIF creativity on Tumblr, and talk to two teams of GIF artists who are evolving the form into powerful new visual experiences.
I can’t believe there are people out there who pronounce GIF with a soft g. What kind of world do we live in?
An App That Helps You Cozy Up to Strangers
Bloomberg Businessweek reports on Highlight, the ambient social networking app that got an awful lot of buzz at SXSW earlier this month.
Davison speaks eloquently about Highlight’s potential to create more meaningful connections than what serendipity normally allows for. “San Francisco is a city of 800,000 strangers,” he says. “When you walk by someone you don’t know anything about them.” It’s as if you were perusing Facebook, but a version where every profile is a single picture, with no names or bios or relationship statuses attached. “That version sucks,” says Davison. In the near future, he envisions a mother taking her child to a friend’s birthday party, checking Highlight as she arrives, and instantly knowing which other parents are already inside. It would mean never forgetting the name of a casual acquaintance, and maybe striking up a conversation with a stranger who, like you, is really into French films. Until there’s a critical mass of people on Highlight, though, using it is more like half-recognizing a pedestrian as you pass in the street—and recording that moment on servers that never forget.
Creepy? That brings us to the third thing to know: Davison is well aware that Highlight will make some people squeamish. (He’s quick to point out the obvious solution: If Highlight bothers you, don’t use it.) Which is not to say he’s worried. If you’re online and using social networks, you’ve already given up some control of your digital identity. It’s in the hands of people like Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, people who, over the past decade, have proven exceedingly capable of pushing society to new extremes of sharing. Perhaps Paul Davison and Highlight are the next shepherds. Or maybe someone else will dominate ambient social networking. Either way, the future sketched by Davison is coming, whether you like it or not.
Do take a look at Robert Scoble’s rundown of Highlight and Glancee on The Next Web while you’re at it.
I think apps like Highlight could become really useful where whole bunches of people converge in one location like at a conference or festival. Sort of an augmented reality Lanyrd maybe?
On the other hand, it could become Grindr.
Permission Taken -- a summary and outline
Tech writer Dan Gillmor is working on a book and web project about “freedom in technology and communications – a user’s guide on how to have it, and why you need it”.
Definitely worth a peek.
What I mostly see in the library blogosphere is a mix of celebration of our professional values in a less-than-substantial way; celebration of our pop culture presence; demonstration of our interest in pop culture; a rather immature obsession with our image in the culture; and general personal blogging under the heading of “librarian.” Because the library blogosphere has nearly replaced the reading of journals for most younger librarians, this content has to be seen as the material that now constitutes the self-conception of librarianship for the librarians who read it, education and work responsibilities aside, for ourselves and before the public. As a result of the interests of library bloggers, in a postmodern transformation, the profession of librarianship is being replaced by the signifier of librarianship. The implication for the problem of deprofessionalization is that the library blogosphere is unwittingly abetting it. The claim to professional expertise is slipping through our fingers, replaced by a mere claim to a cultural identity. A claim to a cultural identity doesn’t constitute a claim to professional autonomy, and professional autonomy is what is needed in order to advance the goals of the profession that we all celebrate.
Deprofessionalization and the library blogosphere
Contentious advice from Rory Litwin of Library Juice Press? He also adds that “the ‘librarian identity’ is a matter of expertise rather than something to do with Catwoman”. Ouch.
Edited at 08/03/2012 20:45
Pondering this today, I feel like I didn’t make my ambivalence clear enough. Be totes more profesh!
Readability vs Instapaper
The Readability iOS app was finally released last week and I thought I’d give it a spin.
My first impression is very positive: it’s free, it’s pretty and the whole user experience is nicely designed. Readability certainly does its job well - it strips out all the extraneous noise of a web page and transforms the article that you want to focus on into a legible and consistent format.
If you use Reeder (the Mac or iOS RSS feed reader app) then you may already be familiar with Readability’s little armchair icon since the two have been integrated for a while now. And you’ll definitely grasp the concept if you’ve ever looked at reading apps like Read It Later or Instapaper.
So how does it compare?
While Instapaper may not have as snazzy a look and feel as it’s newer rivals, it does have quite a bit of functionality that Readability is currently missing:
- RSS feeds for all of your unread, liked and archive articles and folders
- Ability to create folders to organise articles
- Ability to download your unread articles to both ePub and Kindle formats
- Pagination option for reading articles
- Tilt scrolling
- Indication of how long the article is and how much progress you’ve made
Personally, I don’t really care about pagination or ebook reader formats or stuff like that but I do think the RSS and folder options are important if you want to more ways to share or organise your reading lists.
I’m going to stick with Readability for a bit longer to see how I feel. If you’ve tried Instapaper or Readability out, I’d love to hear your thoughts on them.
For now, why not check out some examples of things you can do with Readability through ifttt?
Checking Out
Avi Steinberg writes about the history of librarian porn:
According to our porn books, the library, once a hothouse of eros and a laboratory of realism, has become a burial site. But somewhere on those shelves there’s still a memory of when books were really subversive, when being a libertine was actually about Voltaire and freethinking, and young girls were guarded from the corrupting influence of novels. The fantasy of awakening the librarian is also a fantasy of awakening the subversive power of the book, of excavating life from a dying cultural monument—or else scratching a bit of graffiti on it.
The library sex fantasy has, in other words, entered an apocalyptic period. “Throw me on my back in the dark room with the microfiche,” says the narrator of “Checking Out,” the final story of 2011’s Nympho Librarian. “Fuck me amidst the relics of a world that progress threw away.”
Are you worried about capturing the zeitgeist?
