The quote that gives this post its title comes from Sue Gardner who is Wikipedia’s Executive Director and who Fast Company magazine recently called “The Librarian to the World“. Most of the time, I have a very positive view of Wikipedia – in fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the […]
It’s a rare post that allows me to combine the three pillars of this blog – libraries, technology and politics. But today, the Canadian Library Association released their analysis of the various party platforms, identifying the areas which would be of specific interest or have an impact on libraries. (Now if they’d just included a […]
I’m very interested in the impact of e-books on libraries and have been doing a lot of reading on the subject lately. I came across this article about the unprecedented fall of Blockbuster (which is contrasted with the rise of NetFlix) and it makes me wonder – are libraries more like Blockbuster? Or are they […]
A few random thoughts on Internet (or lack thereof) during our recent week-long holiday in Cuba… I am happy to report that I didn’t have any seizures or meltdowns after a week without Internet access of any kind. (In comparison, even when we went to Mexico in 2003, I ended up going to a nearby […]
What Man Understands That He Is Dying Daily? – great carpe diem article about life, love and fatherhood (via RM Facebook post) The Economy of Cuba and Cuban Convertible Peso – insight into how the Cuban economy works 2011 : The Year of the Librarian – The Atlantic makes the connection at SXSW 2011 Behind […]
Last Friday, I wrote about Chat Roulette Love Song which was the extremely successful proof of a guy’s Masters thesis on viral video. Speaking of Friday, another recent viral video that blew up even bigger than Chat Roulette Love Song is the video for “Friday” by Rebecca Black which has gained over 30 million (!) […]
If you’re not familiar with ChatRoulette, read this old post first. As I say in that post, a good portion of Chat Roulette’s participants appear to be young men looking to expose themselves to unsuspecting (although if you’re on ChatRoulette, it won’t take long to become “suspecting”) viewers. Occasionally though, Chat Roulette breeds some incredible […]
Brad Wall has 666 followers on Twitter!!!, originally uploaded by headtale. I did a similar post pointing this out about Dwain Lingenfelter’s Facebook page during the leadership race so I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I just noticed Brad Wall currently has 666 followers on Twitter! (The big difference is that […]
No, that post title is not a joke. (Well, mostly not a joke.) The reality is that I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that I find Justin Bieber and his recent rise to stardom fascinating. There’s the fact that he’s from Woodstock, ON, just down the road from London. [Edit: I’m obviously not *that* fascinated […]
A generation ago, one of the biggest insurmountable challenges in computing was writing a chess program that could beat the world’s best human player. That eventually happened in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue beat the greatest Grandmaster of all-time Garry Kasparov (of course, computers had been beating inferior players for much longer – including ChessMaster 3000 […]
