Monday, February 24, 2003

redefining the exploded library This blog has changed a bit since I started it in August 2002. It's strayed somewhat from the original idea of a law library blog. It's now more of a personal blog by someone who happens to be a law librarian - who's also a Tasmanian living in Minnesota - who's left-handed and left of centre politically - who likes computers, especially Macs - Etc. etc., you get the idea ... This is an experimental weblog where I try to combine a wide range of my interests - from the professional ones, like law libraries, blogging and searching, to personal ones, like creative writing and my green left political views. There are topics like intellectual property and library privacy which straddle the fence between the professional and the political. This blog is not a place to get all the details about the latest developments in a particular field. Often I will mull over something before posting it. It's more important for me to reflect & contemplate than to be up-to-date. I am very aware of the problem of information overload. There is too much information and not enough time or energy to make sense of it. This is something I'm trying to do for myself here in the exploded library. This is why I try to limit my postings down to one per day - except on Mondays. I highly recommend that you take advantage of the exploded library's categories. Each of the categories can be subscribed to as a separate RSS feed. I have categorized postings by format as well as by topic. This means that if you are interested in my essays or comments but not my rants, it's possible to subscribe accordingly. The same applies with topics, if you are interested in my postings relevant to libraries, but not the ones concerning Tasmania or politics, you can filter those out. This blog is also mirrored on LiveJournal - which is now very easy to maintain thanks to iJournal. The LiveJournal mirror serves three main purposes. It will be a complete archive of this blog, even of the posts from the earlier incarnations of this blog. LiveJournal offers a few helpful features, such as better commenting system and mood tags. Finally, it's a good working backup, as simple as that. 9:53:48 PM     blogging etiquette - long items in news aggregators RSS Etiquette Questions. Long RSS Items "Are long RSS items rude? More and more people are reading inside of news readers and not bothering to go to the blogs themselves. (My logs show this.) Should we put full text of the blog entry in the RSS feed, even if it's long? It will surely slow your refresh rate. Has anyone written a style guide for RSS feeds? It's a moving target, but I would be interested to hear about how readers and writers are designing their RSS feeds. Obviously, the people who are reading this in their RSS readers are going to have to get up off their butts and click on my blog to comment... ;-)" [Joi Ito's Web] Joi Ito is asking about RSS ettiquette, just as I was last year. Luckily, Brent Ashley rode in on a horse and saved the day. I agree with the folks commenting on Joi's site - offer both! [The Shifted Librarian] 1:29:44 AM     Konfabulator - something added to my must-try list Konfabulator is here, Konfabulator is here!!! - Konfabulator is a Macintosh program-thing that works in OSX and was created by some Sun engineers.  It's javascript, and it works with XML.  If you have a Mac with OSX then go to the site now.  HURRY!.   You can try it for free, and then it's $25.  Konfabulator lets you create desktop widgets, which can do anything you want (i.e. have a little clock, or calender, or news).   The site already has a bunch of free widgets that you can download and try out. Leo Laporte of TechTV says these widgets are like what Active Desktop was supposed to be for Windows, "except this works."  Konfabulator uses quartz technology (which is built into OSX, which allows the widget to be semi-transparent, or to fade out and other really slick looking stuff). Oh did I mention that it uses XML and can do news feeds?  Let's see, what could that mean? I wonder how long it will take before someone creates a widget for news feeds?  Not long, because it is apparently pretty easy to write the widgets, even if you aren't a programmer. Goddammit.  I need a Macintosh! [Ernie the Attorney] 1:18:15 AM     creative commons licenses Questions about Creative Commons licensing. Tim Hadley has a good post, which he is going to keep updating, on legal issues regarding use of the Creative Commons license. [Ernie the Attorney] 1:14:49 AM     intro to RSS New uses for RSS. Those of you who read blogs on a regular basis should be familiar with the term RSS -- for those of you who aren't, RSS is simply a type of computer code that takes the "headlines" on a website and aggregates them for easy distribution to individuals or other websites. To read these aggregated headlines, you would need to use a "newsreader" program such as... [Inter Alia] 1:11:57 AM     copyright protection and economics Does Copyright Protection Make Economic Sense?. According to this Brookings Instititute paper, the answer is no.... [bIPlog] 1:08:29 AM     backing up a Radio blog Radio: How to backup and restore your weblog. [Scripting News] [A blog doesn't need a clever name] 1:05:22 AM     Legal Mac Finding US Code sections quickly with your Macintosh - Larry Stanton of Legal Mac blog has created an AppleScript that allows a user to input the title and section of the United States Code, then, after clicking the "Display" button, the default browser opens to a Web page with the requested statute displayed.  It is available for download.  Great job, Larry! [Ernie the Attorney] 1:02:30 AM

© Copyright 2003 Morgan Wilson. Last update: 5/14/03; 12:15:51 AM.