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Archive for February, 2008

SCOAP3: High energy physics goes open access

Friday, February 29th, 2008

SCOAP3 -
Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics at UC Berkeley, February 29, 2008. Converting an entire discipline — high energy physics — to open access. Live Blogging.
Rick Luce, Emory Univ.:
Open access has been seen as a solution to the pricing crisis. But over the course of a [...]

Open Access, re Journals vs. Books

Friday, February 29th, 2008

The Inside Higher Education link that Peter Brantley recently sent to a list, regarding the open-access Museum Anthropology Review, reminded me of some distinctions I like to make, when given the opportunity, about the culture of journals vs. the cultures of books. It pertains to the drivers of the different products, and the people [...]

Writing the web into the phone

Monday, February 25th, 2008

There’s a wonderful piece at Mobile Opportunity that analyzes the slow demise of the hand-tuned mobile application for dedicated stacks.  The punch is in the last paragraph, and there are analogues here between mobile carriers and all other last-gen sectors that market and provide information - publishers, libraries, newspapers.
In the mobile world, what have we [...]

In the context of living

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

Through an announcement from the I-School at UC Berkeley, I was alerted to an essay in the online magazine Bidoun. The essay, by Binyavanga Wainaina, forces one to rethink and reconsider how technology might be truly transformative by placing the emphasis on how people actually live their lives, leveraging how information is already used [...]

The first song to “go viral”?

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

Beautiful piece, on Bob Edwards Weekend, on Pete Seeger, one of my heroes.
He tells the story of Woody Guthrie’s writing This Land is Your Land. I paraphrase:
“A few teachers started singing it, and it just got sung. It was never sold, it was never distributed, it was never played on the radio, it just passed [...]

Horizontal to vertical redux

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Michael Cader was kind enough to alert me to a Forbes story about Nike http://www.forbes.com/sportsbusiness/forbes/2008/0211/082.html
This demonstrates another aspect of a theme I think is the dominant reality of how media is changing, from the 20th century’s “horizontal and format specific” to the 21st century’s “vertical and format agnostic.”
The post explains that Nike used to [...]

A reader’s delight

Friday, February 15th, 2008

I was Googling for something completely different today, using four terms and a “quoted phrase,” and had pared down the jillions to only 38 results. At the bottom of the first page of results was an oddity: My Favorite Books. I happened to notice the url:
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/booklist.html
And thought: Stanford, Sergey…. and clicked on it. And [...]