This week’s post is a bit late because apparently there is something called “real life” that happens “outside”, occasionally in places where there are no “Internets.” Whodathunkit? Anyhew, I recently came across an article which noted that most conservative of corporations, Big Blue itself, IBM, apparently has had a policy since the mid-1990’s where they […]
The ALA recently released a survey of rural librarians with all kinds of interesting, enlightening and downright depressing comments and statistics. As someone who willingly chose to work in a rural library as my first job over a city position, this survey also hits close to home (although I do believe that the situation in […]
Wikipedia allows anonymous edits but it does track the IP of anyone who makes the edit. So a Cal-Tech computer grad student, inspired by news last year that Congress members’ offices had been editing their own entries, and curious whether other organizations were doing anything similar, developed a program to make it much easier to […]
How Swearing Works BBC’s List of Most Offensive Words (in ranked order) Urban Dictionary – a user-created dictionary of slang including many offensive terms. Great for understanding the latest teen slang. The Great Internet Swearword Project – picking between two choices helps define the “best swear words in the world“. Learn To Swear in any […]
Instead of relying on your friendly local library (who, let’s be honest, often has a policy of not letting patrons know about overdue books until, well, until they’re overdue), Library Elf is a neat little service that helps you track your due dates, holds and more. You can configure the service to notify you via […]
“In 1994, over 70 percent of total fiction sales were accounted for by a mere five authors.” Just in time for the biggest book release in the history of the universe, a contrarian view from the Washington Post. It’s out tonight at midnight but rumours of leaks have been happening for the past few days. […]
The author of the popular Freakonomics book looks at the question, “If public libraries didn’t exist, could you start one today?” “But here’s the point I’m (finally) getting to: if there was no such thing today as the public library and someone like Bill Gates proposed to establish them in cities and towns across the […]
The worldwide series of concerts known as Live Earth have started today in Australia and Japan and will be moving around the world for the next 24 hours. Although not directly related to Live Earth, there are a couple relevant sites you might want to check out: Earth Charter is “a declaration of fundamental principles […]
On late night TV talk shows, every show begins with the host inevitably saying something like “We’ve got a really good show for you tonight!” whether the guest is Tom Hanks or that guy who made the funny noises in the Police Academy movies. My Friday Fun Links are sort of the same thing – […]
In keeping with the topic of the day over at my other most favourite site on the Internet, LibrarianActivist, here’s a report on internet filtering from the National Coalition Against Censorship which is admittedly, a bit dated, having been produced in 2001. But it gives an excellent overview of many of the issues and problems […]
