I'll blog what I can, but you can definitely expect an in depth article on everything I learn upon my return. This is the first conference I'm going to where I'm footing the bill myself. It definitely changes your perspective on things. I'm alot more motivated to make sure I get my monies worth.
A quick follow up to the thing I posted the other day about the ALA president who doesn't get the digital revolution. There's a great response to him from Karen Schneider, a librarian, on the ALA mailing list.
Thanks to Kevin for the link to the mailing list.
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I just updated to OSX 10.3.8 and now my fan comes on really loud at very odd times. I'm running a Dual 2ghz G5 with 1.5gb of ram and the fan is coming on when I'm just typing in this text box. Arghhhh. :-(
[]: http://www.ianlandsman.commac_big.jpg
Dave points to this guy from the "old world". There are so many quotable pieces, but here's a few just to wet your appetite:
"In the eyes of bloggers, my sin lay in suggesting that Google is OK at giving access to random bits of information but would be terrible at giving access to the recorded knowledge that is the substance of scholarly books. I went further and came up with the unoriginal idea that the thing to do with a scholarly book is to read it, preferably not on a screen. It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief."
"The Luddite label is because my mild remarks have been portrayed as those of someone worried about the job security of librarians (I am not) rather than one who has a different point of view on the usefulness of this latest expression of Google hubris and vast expenditure of money involved.
I'm no Antidigitalist
If a fraction of the latter were devoted to buying books and providing librarians for the library-starved children of California, the effort would be of far more use to humanity and society."
I'm actually not a huge Google fan, but to think that the world would be better if the only way you could access scholarly information is in Libraries is really insane. What about people who don't have access to libraries? What about the fact that most libraries have only a tiny portion of all knowledge even if you only consider "scholarly work"? What's wrong with reading on a screen if that is your preferred method? Why would Google want to spend money buying books for only the children of California when by digitizing them they can reach HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of children around the world?
Found this in my referrer logs today. When a site is called www.cheeseandpants.com you're compelled to visit.
Must be something in the air. This is why you cough up the few bucks for a designer, the bad press just isn't worth stealing it.
"And now they think it's clearly different, clearly theirs. That is clearly ridiculous. There's a difference between influence and theft, and to me it's clear which side they come down on." (AGILECOpy: The ultimate home page rip-off)
"After reading a pretty amusing post over at 37signals about someone copying their home page and content I decided to check out if I had any impostors.
Using a site mentioned in their comments I found this site which is not only a blatant rip off of my past copy, but a total rip off of our design and style sheet!" (Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery?)
"Well, I've entered a logo design contest recently, being voted upon by registered members of a community. As it turns out, the leading logo candidate may have been done with the use of a cookie-cutter logo from a logo-off-the-shelf website. I was amazed that someone would copy a logomark, verbatim, and try to pass it off as a unique submission!" (Just Good Business)
I'm not sure how I missed this, but my designer has just redesigned his weblog. A nice clean look to it. I especially like the thin orange line at the top. He's also at 2 years blogging. Congrats Mike!
*[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]*
Jason keeps a very nice blog over at Kottke.org. He talks alot about NYC, Blogging, the world, web development, etc. He's the guy who got in a bunch of trouble for posting audio of the final Ken Jennings match on Jeopardy.
Anyway, he's quit his web design gig and is now attempting to blog full time as a career. He's currently doing a 3 week fund raising drive and hopes to raise 1/3 to 1/2 half his previous salary. He's really taking this seriously as anyone starting a business should, he has moved out of his expensive apartment, stopped eating out, and generally cut back on spending.
If your starting a business or thinking of starting one, I suggest you go give it a read. There's lots to learn from in there.
[]: http://www.kottke.org/05/02/kottke-micropatron
Ross has an interesting post based on one by Scoble, about how MS Office needs a "save to web" feature.
I couldn't agree more, but I would go a bit farther than he does. I've worked with literally thousands of technology challenged folks in my previous jobs. As Ross says even basic web pub tools like frontpage are just too hard. The challenge is that even a new reworked "save to web" feature in Office would require a question that basically says this:
How would you like to publish your page? MetaWeblog API, FTP, SFTP, SOAP. Please enter your hostname and login information below.
Uh oh. That's a deal breaker right there.
I think Microsoft needs to go farther. I believe that every registered copy of Office should come with 100 mb of web space. Maybe it's part of spaces or maybe it's somewhere else, it doesn't matter.
Microsoft can move the file however it wants and the user doesn't need to know a thing. No questions to answer at all. You click "save to web" and presto your document is online. MSN takes care of the organizing features. This would allow alot of very cool things like easy synchronization, document permalinks, and so on.
It would have to be free to really work but that's OK because MS wins in 2 ways. First this might drive some more corporate sales of Sharepoint. Sharepoint could become the big brother to the free hosting. More importantly though is that the service would only be available to licensed Office users. This gives users a real reason to purchase Office as opposed to just copying the disk they use at work.
If MS wanted to be really cool about it, they could use an existing spec for the publishing or make their custom spec open. This would allow other hosting services to use the spec and they could have a simple preference that let you change your publishing location from MS servers to Blogger for instance.
I just heard from my designer tonight that the article I wrote up about the design process for my companies logo has gotten him several logo design gigs already. A little more proof that some of what I talk about here works. Encouraging blogging about your product equals sales. It's that simple.
Mike was enthusiastic to let me show off his work and now that's paying off for him. Do you encourage your clients to blog about you?