On a related note, I've talked about RateMyProfessors.com on this blog before but have you seen RateMDs.com which is similar except when somebody gets a 0 rating, that usually means they've killed somebody or otherwise, majorly screwed up. Kinda puts FIMS in perspective, no?
Shea was rapidly catching up to me so I've spent the last couple hours ping-ponging from person to person's friend lists on Facebook madly adding people I know (and knew and wish I knew).
Here are some random thoughts from the process…
– In “The Tipping Point“, Malcolm Gladwell uses the term “Connector” to define one of three types of people who create situations where ideas/products/whatever “tip”. Finding someone who has this characteristic (Kitty Lewis from Brick Books with her nearly 400 friends after only a few months on Facebook is a good example) is a great way to lead to lots of others you will know. (In all modesty, I'd probably put myself in this category too. I'm sitting at over 400 friends but probably 1/4 are people I've never met but that I connected with via my Saskatchewan Mafia group on the site. Actually anybody who has over say, 200 friends on Facebook – that they do know in real life – is probably a good bet to be a connector.)
– that also makes me think what the optimal number of friends to have on Facebook? I'd suspect it's close to the figure cited as the ideal number of people to have in a community which was presented in a similar book to Gladwell's called “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki. That number was somewhere around 150 and after that, the claim was that you were stretched too thin trying to maintain and track all of the various relationships that your group/community will fall apart.
– If I were to analyze it, I'd say I have three main “circles” of friends – “librarians/library students”, writers/publishers” and “high school/college/hometown” mixed with assorted others who I know in other ways.
– the number of friends I have is partly a reflection of my personality (I “collected” friends long before Facebook existed simply because I'm interested in pretty much everyone I meet.) and partly because I've lived for significant lengths of time in three different provinces, often in positions where I was in a spot that was a sort of “hub” in some ways (especially at the Writers Guild of Alberta where my office was one of – but definitely not the only – main hubs for activity relating to all kinds of literary events in the Southern half of the province.)
– I'm debating doing a longer post on “The Most Famous Person on Facebook” but let me just say that once you start seeing who (and I say this with all due respect) mid-level Canadian authors link to that you start finding well-known authors (notice how I didn't identify which writers I class in each category in case they read this? ). Which can lead to authors who are also singers. Which can lead to rock stars. Which can lead to NHL hockey players. Which can lead to sitting Canadian MP's who used to be hockey players. Are all of these profiles legitimate? If I just did a search for “Wayne Gretzky” and a legit looking profile turned up, I'd be doubtful. But because of the chain of connections that brought me to some of these celebrities (and the fact that privacy settings were often ramped up quite high), I have very little reason to doubt that they're not legitimate.
– this leads me to other thoughts about the nature of celebrity in our culture. What does it say about celebrity (which is based in large part on someone being removed and remote from the plebians like you and me ) when, for example, the singer with a Canadian rock band that had a few hits in the early 1990's is directly connected to a woman I went to high school which means there is only one “step” between us? I have some problems with Facebook but how it may lead to a “flattening” of our societal hierarchies is one potential good thing.
– I wonder what it will be like for somebody like Pace (assuming Facebook is still around) where you grow up with a site like this always being a part of your life and by default, everybody you know being on it instead of the mixture that I get – a lot of surprises but definitely not everyone I've ever known or even everyone I would expect to be on the site.
Anyhow, just some random thoughts, way past my bedtime on a Saturday night/Sunday morning.
I just had it brought to my attention that Bloglines isn't reading my feed (and hasn't since July 18 – wow, my birthday post helped knock out part of the Internet!). If you subscribe to this blog via Bloglines, hopefully you've realised this and are checking in directly or reading this via another RSS reader (Google Reader is popular and I personally use NetVibes). I've started doing some investigating and hopefully I can get it figured out soon.
Also, I've updated the Spirit of Librarianship page as promised in a recent entry. I also created a Facebook group for former nominees and winners so if you search for Spirit of Librarianship, you should find it.
I've written before about my interest in Digital Footprints, the information about ourselves that is online, both intentionally and unintentionally. This is an interesting series on the same topic (though he calls it Digital Breadcrumbs.)
This letter is the very entertaining response from a smaller Australian book distributor when an Australian bookstore chain tries to charge them to make up for the “unacceptable profitability level” that stocking their books creates. (Wouldn't that be great in any business? If you're not making enough profit, charge your suppliers to make up the difference!)
A discussion of library fines at Librarian.net. I've mentioned in passing that the system I work for doesn't have overdue fines and I think that's about one of the most progressive ideas libraries can pursue. There are some who say that it's charges for losses and damages that are the real barriers for a lot of disadvantaged people but I think those two issues are intimately related. Put another issue on the list of “topics I wish I'd written about in library school but never did.”
Spock is a new people-centered search engine. It's a good idea in concept but quite lacking otherwise, at least so far. For example, I'm definitely not going to give anyone my LinkedIn password just so I can “claim my profile” on your site. So for the time being, I think I'll continue to use Facebook to find people from my past.
(Speaking of, this is probably crossing that line between things I should keep for my personal journal and things that are appropriate for the blog but I feel compelled to mention that I stumbled across the Facebook profile of the charitable young woman to whom I lost my virginity to many moons ago. I wasn't stalking her (honest!) but she'd joined a Facebook group for a resort area near my hometown that we'd both grown up with and the only reason I recognized her while scrolling through the list of group members was because she listed her maiden name (or may be going by a hyphened name now – hard to tell.) To be honest, I haven't searched for any of the women who've been similarly charitable to me in my past – not sure why that is and I don't feel like doing the self-analysis needed to figure it out, thank-you very much. Still, it's yet another way that Facebook can re-unite you with your past in ways you least expect.)
Putting Things In Perspective – an interesting article espousing the idea that, no matter what you're doing and how mundane it may seem, you should envision yourself as an elderly person looking back on yourself doing it and no matter what the activity is, you'll appreciate it more.
We did a day trip across the border to Williston, North Dakota on Wednesday (it's a long story as to why we had to go mid-week, I'll tell you over a beer sometime) and the highlight for me was finding an old department store that had been converted into a place that sold all kinds of antiques, collectibles and souvenirs on the main floor. As for the basement…well, the sign said “books downstairs” so I was expecting a few old copies of Readers Digest Condensed Books, maybe a bunch of shelves stuffed full of tattered Harlequins.
Instead? The entire massive basement was crammed with books of all shapes, sizes and ages. Although it was lacking in newer books, the selection of strange and obscure older titles more than made up for it. Plus (and this is huge), there was not a single employee in the basement at all so I had the equivalent of the entire basement of a typical city department store (think of the Bay or Eaton's that every city in Canada has downtown for an idea of the size) all to myself! (I'm honestly surprised I'm not still there.)
This is a photo from the stairs leading to the basement. It's a bit dark and doesn't really do the place justice but hopefully gives you a small sense of what I'm talking about.
They sold their books by the pound on a sliding scale – up to 5 lbs was $0.99/lb. 6-10 lbs was $0.89/lb. 11-15 (which is what I walked out with – hey, no different than carrying Pace, I figured) was $0.79/lb. In their language/books/writing section, I found a number of old LIS textbooks which are all pretty cool to page through.
Here's a sampling of the titles I bought… “Intro to Cataloguing and Classification 5th Ed.” – Wynar (1976) “Planning College & University Library Buildings” – pamphlet (1981) “So You Want To Be A Librarian” – Wallace (1963) “Guide To The Use of Books and Libraries 3rd Ed.” – Gates (1974) “Supervisory and Middle Managers in Libraries” – Bailey (1981) “Library Work With Children” – Broderick (1977) “Educating the Library User” – Lubans (1974) “Building Library Collections” – Duncan-Carter (1969)
Total damage for all of these plus a bunch of other books on everything from parenting to philosophy to non-fiction classics such as Studs Terkel's “Working”? $12 and change.
Oh, and the teasing title for this post about every librarian's fantasy? Just a little theory I came up with at FIMS and which was fleshed out by many of my colleagues I tried it out on, namely that, just as every English major is a closet writer, all librarians secretly want to own and run a used bookstore.
The end of the semester at FIMS looms and for various students, the end of the program is near as well. On that note, Michelle L. has a list of Library School Advice from an Almost Librarian that's worth checking out.
Congrats also to Barb Janicek who won the Spirit of Librarianship Award for the Summer 2007 semester. (That's a nice segue because Michelle won it the semester before and now I have double the reason to finally update my Spirit of Librarianshippage!)
Hearing the news is also kind of bittersweet in a way – Michelle and Barb were two of the closest friends I made at FIMS but after next semester, my connections to the place will be all but done as I'll have been away from the place for a full year (!) and so, for the first time, will not know any of the incoming students.
Okay, that's not completely true – I'm (virtually) meeting the occasional incoming student who stumbles upon my blog and contacts me. I'll also have connections via various part-timers who are still around. And even the line of close friends winning SoL might not end – I've got high hopes for the newly minted Master Philosopher, the returning Quinn Dupont to sweep to SoL glory in his final term at FIMS!
TinyURL is a useful site that helps convert some of those mega-long URL's that some web sites give to their pages into something that's way more manageable.
The site doesn't re-use their shortened versions and doesn't delete them (although some you click on may be expired at the source) so naturally, somebody has come up with an algorithm to view random TinyURL pages
After five random tries (not counting expired pages), I got:
1. a Bible passage about adultery
2. a guide to shopping in Dallas, TX
3. an aerial photo of a beach in Spain
4. a job posting at Cornell University
5. an E-bay auction for a Dell laptop
It's a great time waster to see all of the pages that people are converting (often to e-mail to others). If you like looking in people's windows late at night, you'll enjoy this site!
I'm standin' on the corner of a pair of country roads I am carvin' out my daddy's name on a little stone And though I couldn't always talk to him, but if was here today I think I'd know exactly what to say
CHORUS: I'd say the weather's been hot The hay is almost in And if it holds my next week We'll be bailin' again The wheat is good The corn is high Sure could use your advice On how to raise a couple o' kids I'm tryin' to raise 'em just the way you did
I'd tell him 'bout that early frost early last fall And how for awhile it looked like we wouldn't make it at all I'd tell him how it all worked out just this past spring And if he was here I'd tell him everything
CHORUS
My daddy never said goodbye One day he just up and died and left me here to go it all alone And sometimes I wish I'd hear his voice Helping me to make that choice between giving up and carrying on
CHORUS
I'll try to raise 'em just the way you did.
(Disclaimers: My dad's still alive, I do talk to him regularly and I'm not actually a farmer in any way, shape or form. But I love this photo and thought the lyrics were a good match.)
Shea's been resisting for a long time but while attending a 65th birthday party last night and hearing various parents discuss whether or not they should join Facebook like their kids, Shea decided she'd rather lump herself with the younger generation than the older one and has thus, finally joined Facebook.
I was happy to see her do this, at least partly for the completely selfish reason that it gave me a reminder of the initial sign-up process I went through over a year ago when I first joined (back in the good old days when only people with official college e-mail addresses could join! </snob>)
I don't really remember much about when I signed up (not realising the transformative power that Facebook would hold over our entire society just over a year later ) but a few things stood out as Shea went through the sign-up process…
– the privacy settings are right there during the set-up to be configured as tightly as you want although, to be honest, the defaults are probably a bit “looser” than they should be, especially that default that anyone of your friends AND anyone in your network can see your profile. When you're in a network the size of a city, that's a lot of people who can peer at you!
– I could've sworn there was a menu of choices for “Religion” just like they have for “Political View” but nope, religion is fill-in-the-blank. (Maybe politics should be too?)
– having been a bit overwhelmed lately with all the apps I see on people's profiles (including my own), it was pretty nice to remember how clean a Facebook profile is when first created. Since the launch of Facebook Applications, the site is like MySpace Lite in terms of the extraneous crap that's all over it (and frankly has lost a bit of its appeal in my opinion because of this.) If you feel the same way (and use Firefox), the Face Off extension might be of interest. It removes all third-party applications from any Facebook profile you view.
– the biggest change I noticed was that Shea had to provide a mobile phone number to authenticate her account. Until she did that, she was having to fill out a captcha every single time she added someone. I'm pretty sure I never had to do this when I signed up so that's a major shift and quite a frustrating one too – maybe everyone in the Facebook target demographic has text messaging access (but I doubt it.) And up until a couple weeks ago, we didn't have a cell phone either so would've been out of the loop on this feature completely (okay, we could've “borrowed” the text-messaging feature of somebody's phone easily enough to get our confirmation password. But the point stands – not everybody has a text-enabled cell phone – even in this day and age – so why not provide an optional way to confirm that you are indeed a real live person?)
– It was interesting to see how Shea, as a female and as a mother and as a medical professional, handled some of the decisions about what information to list versus decisions I made with my own profile/account. She didn't list her current or any former workplaces for instance and tightened up some of the security settings from their defaults as well.
– a couple of the failings of Facebook I knew about but which weren't as much of an issue to me jumped out when Shea created her profile. She used the workaround of creating an account with her maiden name listed as her middle name to help people who knew her before she was married to find her. That works if you're already married when you create your account but what if you're single now and get married someday? Or reverse it – what if you get divorced? You've got this profile you've likely invested a great deal of time and energy into building and now, you're unable to change your name on it?
– the other issue that jumped out was multiple schooling locations which again, wasn't an issue for me since I went to Indian Head schools all through my life. But Shea did her schooling until Grade Nine in a small community called Creelman then went to Weyburn for high school. Facebook makes it difficult (though not impossible) to add multiple schools to your profile, especially if they're not already in their database (which Creelman school, now closed and with a total village population of 87) definitely isn't.
– I briefly thought about creating an account for Pace but realised that they only have as recent as “2006” for the years you can choose for your birth date. (Oh, also that this would be a cute idea initially but is probably pretty dumb otherwise.) But yeah, why would they allow accounts to (conceivably) be created for one year olds but not babies born within the last year? Strange. I expected the cut-off to be 13 years old for new accounts (1994) as I think that's the age commonly used in US law for young people to create their own accounts with online services. (If somebody wants to try an experiment, try to create an account as if somebody was born in 2006 and see what happens!)
Okay, those are some random thoughts. If you're on Facebook, feel free to add Shea – she thinks she can catch up to my num
ber of friends within a week or two. “Plus they'll all be real friends, not like all the “Facebook friends” your account is full of!”
Kinda puts FIMS in perspective, no?
). Which can lead to authors who are also singers. Which can lead to rock stars. Which can lead to NHL hockey players. Which can lead to sitting Canadian MP's who used to be hockey players. Are all of these profiles legitimate? If I just did a search for “Wayne Gretzky” and a legit looking profile turned up, I'd be doubtful. But because of the chain of connections that brought me to some of these celebrities (and the fact that privacy settings were often ramped up quite high), I have very little reason to doubt that they're not legitimate. 
) when, for example, the singer with a Canadian rock band that had a few hits in the early 1990's is directly connected to a woman I went to high school which means there is only one “step” between us? I have some problems with Facebook but how it may lead to a “flattening” of our societal hierarchies is one potential good thing. 
