I'll restore the other 23, maybe, at least to one of the two sites. Meanwhile, for anyone who didn't get the message:

This version of Walt at Random is ending.

The original Walt at Random will continue (with, eventually, posts from this one added.)

Here's most of what I said yesterday about reasons for this change:

As noted on what was, for a while, "the last Walt at Random post" at http://walt.lishost.org, I was invited by ScienceBlogs to join their newish Information Science channel, already populated by John Dupuis and Christina Pikas.

The invitation itself was an honor, particularly given the regard in which I hold John and Christina.

Even then, I was a little doubtful of my credentials as an information scientist. Quoting further from that post, under the heading "Information scientist? Moi?":

I've never claimed that title and don't intend to start now.

Still...

I believe I've done better (more comprehensive, more careful) research on liblogs and library blogs than I've seen elsewhere, even if I've deliberately stuck to meatball statistics rather than sophisticated analysis.

I've certainly written (and will continue to write) about open access and other topics that concern scientists.

My brother's a chemist. Does that count?

I was delighted when Dorothea Salo started a new blog on ScienceBlogs, after closing her old one. The Book of Trogool is an important new blog, one that I believe will have a real impact on data curation.

And, of course, both Confessions of a Science Librarian and Christina's LIS Rant continue to be fine blogs that enrich the liblog community and ScienceBlogs.

So why did I leave? It's complicated. Some of the factors (from a message I sent to ScienceBlogs' Erin Johnson):

• To the extent that I was reaching a new audience, it's outside of the library field--and, while it's welcome, I felt the need to explain things that I wouldn't explain to the few hundred people I know get my posts.


• I find an internal pressure (a) to write more posts, (b) to make them a little more formal. Neither of these makes much sense within my overall scheme of things....


• The split between old and new--in essence, between reviews of old flicks (and duplicated posts on new material in the Library Leadership Network)--seems artificial to me, at odds with the random theme of Walt at Random.


• I'm really not an information scientist; in fact, I've historically made fun of the term.


• I believe Dorothea Salo (whose star continues to rise), Christina Pikas and John Dupuis all make sense as ScienceBlog bloggers. I don't believe I do; I think I'm decidedly the odd blogger out in that community. (Note: these are all at least virtual friends--I don't know that I've met Christina in the flesh, but I have both of the others--and I think the world of all of them.)


• Given everything else, I'd just as soon have complete control of my own space. (And, given everything else, my dislike of the MovableType editing platform as compared to WordPress becomes significant.)

Walt at Random has always been a secondary outlet. Cites & Insights, my ejournal, has always been more important to me and, I think, to the community. I found it difficult to explain Cites & Insights within this space...

The randomness continues

I'm not wild about managing multiple blogs in any case, and between work and other things, I was handling four. Maybe with only three (and only one open to all that randomness), I'll do a better job. Maybe not.

In any case, you'll now find me there--not only the LLN and C&I announcements and reviews of old flicks, but all my posts.

Explicit disclaimer

I haven't been blogging all that much at either address. I'll continue resist the urge to blog for the sake of blogging.

Note that I am not promising to take up the slack. I'm in the midst of doing another liblog research project, and I've seen a few too many cases where a blogger, after an absence, says "I'll be writing a lot more..." and then is never heard from again.

I'll say this: I'll post when I have something to say that appears to suit the particular venue.

(That's not all the company does, to be sure, but I know them most for the "50 Movie Packs"--50 movies on 12 DVDs--of which there are now 23 examples. The company's motto is "changing the face of value entertainment!" and they're also doing other things, including TV series and documentary compilations.)

The gist of the earlier post: When I reached Disc 8 of the Hollywood Legends 50-pack, with The Town Went Wild and Man with the Golden Arm on Side A, I found that Side A was actually Disc 11 Side A. Since I paid $15 or so for the set and had had it for a year or more, I just sent Mill Creek email to let them know, in case there had been a general production problem. I didn't have a receipt, I didn't remember where I'd purchased the set, I didn't feel the need for compensation.

They responded the next day and mailed me not only the replacement disc but a couple of other (smaller) DVD collections for my trouble, along with an apology. That, I thought, was great customer service: Above and beyond the call, particularly for something so inexpensive not purchased directly from them.

(A few of you may also remember the contrasting post when one of the six discs in Angel, Season 4 proved to be utterly defective. The only way I could get a replacement disc is by sending the entire box set back to Fox, via insured mail, with a recent receipt, and waiting six to eight weeks. Oh, and the receipt needed to be dated within "a reasonable time frame," that time frame not stated. But hey, it's Fox.)

Getting past the preamble

So I continue to buy Mill Creek packs when they look interesting and Amazon has them at the right price--or at least I did when I was still using old movies to stay on the treadmill. (Each time I've seen all the movies on one disc, I review them--but I'm putting those posts on Walt, Even Randomer, since they're too silly for ScienceBlogs.) I'm still watching the old movies, even without the treadmill...

And I was intrigued by Mill Creek's ultimate repackaging attempts, the four 250-movie collections they produced for a while (and seem to have stopped, at least based on their website): 60 DVDs, 250 movies, selling at the time for around $50 at Amazon. Yes, of course those collections are repackaged compilations of multiple 50-movie packs (where they don't overlap, as sometimes happens), just as the dozen 100-movie packs are simply combinations of 50-movie packs. I purchased the Mystery Collection (the link here is to Amazon, which still has this collection but at a higher price lower price, although it was a higher price a couple of weeks ago). That was also a while back--probably at least six months.

Last week, I neared the point where I'd start alternating discs from this megapack with discs from less massive collections. So I skimmed through the 60 sleeves, partly to see how many flicks are in color (most aren't, as I'd expect) and how many I've already seen (not many). And got to Disc 57. Which was actually Disc 59, both sleeve and disc. And there was also a Disc 59.

Well, hey, no big deal--but, given the quality of the previous response, I did send a quick email to Mill Creek, basically saying "don't need to send me any extras, but if you have another Disc 57 handy, I'd be grateful."

Next day, a reply, saying a replacement is on its way. How can you argue with service like this--where they trust me even though I've never had business dealings directly with the publisher? Sure, the discs can't cost them much, but handling--preparing the shipping label and paying MediaMail--is far from free and probably eliminates any profit they make from a typical 50-pack.

That was just before ALA. When I returned, there was a bigger box than I'd expected. That box included two 20-movie packs (4 or 5 discs), both of which I'll enjoy (one of 'em is 20 spaghetti westerns, only two of which I've seen: how can I go wrong?); a 50-movie pack I didn't already own (although, as it happens, it includes 19 of the 20 Hitchcock movies they sent me as a freebie last year)--and "Action Classics Disk 9" (in a previous incarnation, they had a problem with Disk vs. Disc, since corrected).

I sent a "thank you" email and noted that what I was missing was Mystery Collection Disc 57, not Action Classics Disk 9. And, the same day, got back a note: They're the same thing. (As noted above, I believe MCE isn't producing the 250-movie collections any more, so probably didn't have extra copies of the other sleeve.)

Conclusion

Mill Creek Entertainment didn't ask me to blog about it. I doubt that they're really aware of this blog. They just seem to respond to minor problems by going above & beyond...and assuming good faith on the part of the consumer.

Oh, I imagine that if I sent them six emails in a month saying I was missing six different discs, or that I had defectives from several different collections, they might raise questions--or at least I hope they would. (I'd like to see them stay in business; I believe these collections are, on the whole, Good Things, mining the public domain and also offering in-copyright material that original producers wouldn't deem worthwhile for DVD, always at extremely reasonable prices.)

So, on that up note, I won't go into the details of a last-night-in-Chicago incident that could be summarized as "don't pay cash in a lobby bar." Mill Creek had nothing to do with that little contretemps, which still hasn't been resolved...

If the programs I attended (and I attended more programs than usual) and the crowds I saw in exhibits are any indication, you were active at the conference, not just there for the sunshine. (Yes, "active" includes schmoozing; seeing e-acquaintances from all around the country face-to-face is certainly one big reason I've been attending ALA for the last 34 years...)

So here's a challenge for y'all:

What lessons related to leadership (or other topics covered on the Library Leadership Network) did you learn in Chicago?

There's a brief Letter from the editor posing that challenge and a skeleton article waiting for your contributions.

• If you're already a registered LLN member, log in and add your lesson or lessons.
• If you're not a registered LLN member, this is a good time to find out what you're missing--a wealth of material, free for you to use and comment on. (The registration process requires two email confirmations and an approval step--just to deter spammers--but you only need registration to add or edit material, not to read it.)
• If you'd rather not add text directly, feel free to mail it to me (waltcrawford at gmail dot com), or even add it as a comment on this post--I'll mark it up and add it.
• It's not just about leadership as such. LLN also covers aspects of management, innovation, technology, policy, marketing, services and people that leaders need to know about. If you don't see something discussed in LLN that you believe leaders should know about, great: You may inspire a new article or cluster.
• If (when?) the challenge shows good responses, I'll distribute some of them to other articles as appropriate, leaving links in the "Leadership lessons from ALA 2009" spot.

You can blame ALA Annual 2009 in Chicago for most of that. I (still) travel without technology, so no blogging from ALA--and also no keeping up with blogs, FriendFeed, etc. (but email once or twice in the hidden Internet room in the exhibits).

There's also getting ready for Chicago... and catching up from Chicago, which is likely to take another day or two. Particularly since it's mixed in with continued "trying to fix wifi/internet" (which may finally be fixed, by replacing both modem and router)--and dealing with people doing quotes for various household projects; you can't be showing someone around/talking to them while you're trying to catch up online. At least I can't.

Status: DSL maybe better. Household project quotes (roof, solar, heating/air conditioning, a couple little things), about half done. Work: Need to write up ALA notes and get on with other stuff. Post-ALA: Haven't even started to look at blogs, have realized it's futile to go back too far on FriendFeed, haven't started on notes.

One remarkable note: Even though ALA membership is down (2.6%), the annual conference was a new record high--and, indeed, the exhibits seemed more crowded at off-hours than I'm used to, and most programs I attended were well-attended. What this means about the future of P2P conferences, the "death of megaconferences," etc.? I leave to the observer...

Sidebar: One eccentric feature of this blog used to be the "treadmill movie reviews," brief reviews of movies from Mill Creek Entertainment's multidisc packs viewed while I was exercising. I've reviewed a little more than 300 movies over several years. In moving to this more august site, I left the reviews behind and am not posting new ones here; that's one of few things still being posted on Walt, Even Randomer. The treadmill's gone as well--RFI problems and other reasons--but the movies remain.

You can go to that blog for the reviews, such as they are--and you'll find a compilation of all four discs in a future Cites & Insights. The reviews aren't the theme of this post.

Legitimate?

That's the hook here: Was I watching a legitimate packaged set of old movies or is this set "dodgy"?

A couple of key points up front:

• I am not a lawyer. I'm interested in copyright and have written about it, but always from a semi-informed layperson's point of view. Let me say that again: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.


• Mill Creek Entertainment, successor to TreeLine Films, has been around for a while. The company--a division of Digital1Stop--has a street address. It is possible to contact them. The Hitchcock set's been for sale for at least two years, through such obscure distributors as Amazon.
  

Anyway...

When I posted my off-the-cuff reviews for Disc 1, one of my online correspondents from the UK objected strongly--that these movies were not in the public domain and that Mill Creek wasn't a known licensee. The post came from someone I respect, but I had to edit the comment, as it made legal claims I wasn't going to get in the middle of.

On the other hand, the post did alert me to something I'd never heard of before: Copyright restoration. Apparently, thanks to the wonders of international treaties, some UK material that was definitely in the public domain within the U.S. (and maybe even in the UK) had copyright restored retroactively--with a clause allowing distributors, who had released the PD material in good faith, to sell out existing stocks for a year after being notified by copyright-holders that the works were now once again protected.

So, well, other than saying "that's appalling if true"--as it seems to violate not only the spirit of U.S. law but also the Constitutional basis for copyright--I could only fall back on the second point above: The material's being sold openly by a legitimate company with a known U.S. address; if there's a problem, it's up to the copyright-holders to address it.

But wait! There's more!

Briefly, the 10th District Court found that the copyright restoration (Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements) was unconstitutional.

Which would appear to put these movies (back?) in the public domain. At least for now. At least in the 10th district.

Subject to appeal, of course. And to possible new Congressional acts--but it's getting a little tougher for Congress to keep imposing longer and tougher copyright in the assumption that nobody's looking.

Why the licensees might step back

I don't believe it should be legitimate to restore copyright in materials that legally, properly fell into the public domain. I believe copyright is too long in the U.S. anyway--and this particular restoration means that materials created by non-U.S. citizens actually have an advantage over U.S. creations, within the U.S. (The act didn't restore any native-U.S. materials to copyright.) That also seems odd.

But there's another issue to consider--namely, that for movies, at least, proper license holders with actual access to original materials shouldn't worry too much about public domain versions. Why?

Because the license holders can offer something the PD vendors can't: Fully-restored DVDs created from the masters, rather than from whatever prints happen to be available. The movie may be in the public domain, but the masters continue to be the physical property of whoever owns them.

Having watched the Mill Creek set of 18 movies, 2 TV episodes, and 19 trailers (the 19 trailers being one of the most charming aspects), I would think that any true Hitchcock enthusiast would spend the $156 extra to get the "proper" versions of ten of the 18 movies from Criterion, Lions Gate or MGM after spending the $8 for this set. You'd presumably get better print quality, extras and expert commentary. (Not that these prints are all terrible--most of them are actually pretty good.)

Would I pay the extra money? No, because I've realized I'm never going to be a great fan of early Hitchcock. But I wouldn't have paid that money anyway--and at least I've been exposed to some interesting flicks I'd have never heard of otherwise.

I don't believe the three words are directly related--but they all play into changes in articles in the Library Leadership Network over the past week.

It's been one of those weeks where everything's a change in existing pages articles than brand-new articles. Sometimes that's a tough decision, sometimes not. Last week, it was a split decision: One major commentary from a blog, and a smaller related commentary from a different blog, started out as a new article--until I realized, the same day, that they worked better as part of an existing article.

Anyway...

Hemispheres

Much of what winds up in the Library Leadership Network emerges through a two-step process. Leslie Dillon reads widely in the management literature and some other non-library literature, e.g. Harvard Business Review, MIT Technology Review and others. As a contributing editor to LLN, she excerpts articles that she finds relevant to LLN issues, posting the excerpts and her commentary to "Leader's Digest" as blog posts. (The Leader's Digest page shows the first part of the ten most recent posts--unfortunately, changes in RSS handling in MediaWiki software mean that the whole posts no longer appear.)

At the end of each month, I do wiki markup on the blog posts, categorize them as one of the major topics, sometimes add a little editorial comment, and combine them into a monthly article. Then, as time permits, I find homes for most of the items in other articles and change the items in the monthly summary into links.

Two of the items for June 2009 deal with brain hemispheres, although certainly not in any scientific sense. In one case, there's a claim that "facing tomorrow's challenges calls for right-brain thinking," added to Leadership issues. In the other, now part of Creativity and innovation, we're told that the fashion industry has a "both-brain model" for innovation that's important to other industries. (An advance apology to neuroscientists who may read this: I'm just noting what appears in other articles--not making any comment about the reasonableness of the "x-brain" usage.)

Triumphalism

Two items seem to reflect a sort of technological triumphalism that I find all too common: X (whatever X might be) is not only terribly important, it's vital for everyone in every field and has sweeping implications--mostly sweeping away the old.

This month's examples? In Innovation notes, a new section on "Crowdsourcing: what it means for innovation" assures us that corporate attempts at crowdsourcing aren't just ways to get free labor--they're important new ways of doing things that can solve increasingly complex problems through mass collaboration. And, as with most sure-fire ideas, the advice for planning is "just do it" and let curation handle itself.

The other one is a new section in Innovation lessons, "Twitter's ten rules for radical innovators," where we learn that this "revolutionary" thing is a "living expression of the new principles of organization and management." It vaporizes monopoly and shows how messiness is better than cleanliness--oh, and business models will create themselves. The list even seems to suggest that the financial crash wouldn't have happened if banks were run by tweets.

xCamps

LLN's growing section on conferences, presentations and alternative approaches to both has tended to lump unconferences and xCamps (barcamps, librarycamps, etc.) together--and most notes on how they work in practice have related to unconferences--one or two day events that don't include sleepovers or full retreats.

Unconferences in practice: Notes and resources now features a thoughtful, interesting report on something that's distinctly an xCamp, the Creativity and Collaboration retreat in Monterey, CA. Nina Simon's report includes some of the things that probably wouldn't happen in an unconference.

Direct member participation

When the precursor to LLN began (before my time), one assumption may have been that library leaders themselves would provide most of the editorial matter--that's one reason it's a wiki. Part of my job was to check on new editorial matter and manage it coherently--editing as needed, adding subheadings, combining or separating items for better flow, avoiding spam.

That hasn't happened so much. Library leaders and managers are busy people, so LLN comes closer to the "990:9:1" version of the Nielsen ratio for network participation than the usual "90:9:1" ratios. (One good statement of the Nielsen ratio, from Jakob Nielsen himself, comes in an October 9, 2006 post at Alertbox.)

In fact, a few LLN members have contributed text directly--mostly via entries on talk pages--but most member contributions are indirect, via blog posts that I harvest for worthwhile material. For a while, I was pushing for more direct activity, including more discussion on talk pages--but it seems that such activity only grows at its own pace.

Still, if you have thoughts to add to something you find on LLN, you're invited to add your thoughts--directly on talk pages or by writing a new article. (If you detest MediaWiki markup or want an editorial eye, you can also just send me your material marked as intended for LLN, with a note on where you think it belongs--mailing either to waltcrawford at gmail dot com or to walt.crawford at lyrasis dot org.)

This one's 32 pages, PDF as usual, but those who detest PDF or otherwise really need HTML can download the three articles separately.

The issue includes:

Perspective: Writing about Reading 3

The theme for this installment: Rethinking books and rethinking reading. Which means most of the long essay is about ebooks and ebook devices. (How long? A little more than half the issue, that's how long.)

Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Comedy Classics, Part 1

What's funny is generally in the eye of the beholder, although I suppose there may be objective criteria for labeling a flick a comedy. Watching the many early shorts and early movies in this first half of a 12-DVD collection was sometimes hilarious, frequently a little painful. (If I never see another East Side Kids "comedy" that will be just fine with me.) There's some gold here--and some dross as well.

Making it Work: Library 2.0 Revisited

A large handful of items spread out over almost two years--very much a once over lightly. (Yes, Library 2.0 and "Library 2.0" continues to be downloaded almost as often as any current issue. $0.25 for each copy downloaded would nicely cover sponsorship for the next 18 months...)

But then got to the actual ratings--and noted a lot of chains with black dots (the worst rating) for taste, some also for service, mood and choice.

And thought, "wait a minute: Why do people go to restaurants if they think the food stinks?" These aren't fast-food chains; these are all sit-down, table-service restaurants. Starting the guide notes, I see that the chain with the most visits reported is one with the worst rating for taste. What? Are people all masochists? As it happens, it's a chain I've eaten at sometimes, at conferences or other situations where I'm not sure of the local choices--and while I'd never call the food first-rate, it's solidly in the "not great, not terrible" category. (And, to be sure, I'm likely to eat at airport outposts of two of the other chains, one with worst taste rating, one with next-worst, because they're there. And the food's usually adequate.)

The key is midway through the second paragraph of the guide, which isn't tiny print but is still more than you might read:

Scores for taste, value, service, mood and choice are based on the percentage of readers who judged the chain excellent for each. Those scores are relative, reflecting how each chain differed from the overall average.

The second sentence certainly clarifies the presence of so many black dots, particularly in the Family category (as compared to red dots, the highest rating, in Traditional American, Seafood, and Italian categories): Grading on the curve.

The first sentence makes me wonder, though. If I responded to the survey (which I may have), assuming there are the usual five Likert-scale choices, it's unlikely any "Family" or "Pub style"--or, indeed, any--chain restaurant would get an "Excellent" for taste. (Haven't been to Morton's; it's out of my price range.) I find it odd that, apparently, it makes no difference whether you think meals are very good or poor--if they're not excellent, it doesn't count. I guess I would have assumed the use of weighted ratings--e.g., 5 for Excellent, 4 for Very Good, and so on, with the total divided by the number of responses.

No great meaning here. Although, frankly, as a sometimes respondent to CR surveys, I'm a little peeved at the idea that there's no point in distinguishing between levels of quality other than excellence.

The blog in question is now entitled "Walt, Even Randomer" and combines four years' of Walt at Random archives with the occasional new post that isn't right for the new home of Walt at Random--e.g., reviews of old movies, ALA schedules, pure copies of posts from other blogs (except for the announcements of new Cites & Insights issues, which do appear on both blogs).

The semi-dormant blog was averaging 3,000 page views per day when the active portion moved and has a Google Page Rank of 5 (sometimes 6, if the wind's blowing in the right direction), so it's a target for spammers, particularly link spammers. It also has Spam Karma 2, so very few spamments get through. (Notes also automatically disable six months after a post appears, since many link spam attempts are on very old posts--and I disabled linkbacks long ago, since the spam-to-signal ratio was just too high.)

The settings for Spam Karma 2 are severe enough that, once in a while, a legitimate comment gets moderated, so I try to check the spams before deleting them or letting them get deleted. (So far, that doesn't seem to be either an issue or a possibility at ScienceBlogs--and one spam comment, a very clever one, did make it through to one post already.)

Anecdata

That's what this is, to be sure--at best, anecdotal data or anecdata*. It has all the scientific rigor of talk radio.

That said, and (as regards the lead sentence) noting that I don't do emoticons, here's a few notes on the varieties of spam encountered over a brief study period.

Very informative!

Complimenting the blogger seems like one common way of ingratiating spam. For example:

I found walt.lishost.org very informative. The article is professionally written and I feel like the author knows the subject well. walt.lishost.org keep it that way.

This might work better if the domain name was the name of the blog, to be sure: "I found Walt at Random very informative" is a tad more convincing. Six payday loan companies offered this sentiment.

I Love the way you write

You can't be too effusive. This comment continues "...thanks for posting." You're certainly welcome, even if you're commenting on entirely bland announcements with no writing style at all.

Twentyfive people love the way I write--and, oddly enough, although each person has a different name and gmail account, there's the same URL for all 25. (In the case of all 25, that URL is on a blacklist. On the other hand, the posts to which these comments were attached would tend to make me wonder just why my style was so admired--and why posts arrived in pairs, but with identical text.)

Other compliments and apparently specific questions

"What is captcha code? pls provide me captcha codes or plugin, thanks in advance." Sorry, yet another payday loans company, but I don't provide that service.

"hey .. way to go with this post .. i'll need more tips tho so [remainder omitted]" Much as I'd love to help out a low-cost loans provider...

"good work, hope you make more related posts! will keep an eye on this blog ;)" Given the nature of the URL provided, you're too busy eying sexcams, I'd think. (Two of these, different gmail accounts.)

"walt.lishost.org - da best. Keep it going! have a nice day" Some Russian company that can post within five seconds of reaching the form.

"I always enjoy finding a 'good' blog. Thanx and I'm going to add you to my RSS feed." Another mystery "Flash Gordon" poster--and it may be worth noting that most of these were on LLN Highlights reposts.

"great stuff thx things make since now hehe good concept" - This one, linking to a supposed boot seller, starts to move over into the dada area...

"This is a fast loading page, do you know who the webhost is and if they are cheap?" Nah, yet another sex seller, the blog's just there--that URL with "lishost.org" in it is meaningless.

"Hi, I love your work." Concise, if from another sex seller (and on an oft-spammed post that should have no comments at all).

The dada element

I think most of the spamments fall into this category--text that's hard to take seriously if you actually read it. Just a few examples, including only the first few words of what are sometimes lengthy (lengthy--typically around 2,400 characers) spamments:

• "Stone happy rich source chemical formula..."
• "Within the blew and terbinafine..."
• "Parry con had agreed free circus..."
• "Bill heard through this denavir cream..."
• "Unless they destroying their altace photo..."
• "They gave horrific implicatio chemi..."

Most of these also seem to link to a single URL or one of several related URLs. I lost count of how many there were--let's just say dozens (scores, probably--more than half of all the spamments).

If someone was willing to accept all these comments, then filter out all the obvious spam words (drug names, etc.), you could make some interesting found poetry from the remnants. I can just see someone with a goatee and a beret, sitting in a smoky Berkeley cellar reciting the results...a few decades ago.

Flat-out spam. Deal with it.

These are the comments that start with a link and are, in essence, nothing but links. Some include long lists of links (43 seems to be typical), some only a few. In a way, they're the most pathetic form--easiest to block and obviously spam. Only about half a dozen of these, once all the dada-found poetry entries are eliminated.

Ah, but there are three variations:

• "x nude" followed by URLs (where "x" can be some surprising names): Half a dozen.
• Some nonsense word (eldbberyj, tdofnnkw, kxxlxhud...) followed by URLs: Another half dozen.
• "x" Sex Tape, or just "x" followed by URLs (where "x" can again be a little odd): Only five of those.

The rest...

What else? There's a long, long story about a kid and his computer; I saw that one three or four times. There's a string of nonsense characters followed by "Comment 1" or "Comment 3" or "Comment 5" or whatever--apparently testing to see whether anything makes it through. (If you're doing blog searches for the result, well, sorry, Charlie, it didn't and won't.)

Serious conclusions

1. Spam is a damn nuisance. In four short years, a blog with modest readership in a narrow area had more than 31,000 spam attempts...and counting.
2. Spammers are remarkably amateurish. Even the social-engineering spams were so badly done as to be laughable. If you're going to flatter me about my writing, at least choose a post with some vague evidence that I actually wrote something!
3. It must work somewhere! If spamments weren't improving link scores and Google page ranks, they would disappear.

Now, back to skimming each day's set and sending them off to perdition...

Some weeks, most new content goes into existing articles. Some weeks--this past one, for exmaple--most goes into new articles. And some weeks (also including this past one), a new article emerges from pieces of old ones.

For the record, the new articles for the week ("week" being last Monday-Friday, June 22-26, 2009):

• Advocacy and marketing begins with thoughtful commentaries on advocacy from Leigh Ann Vrabel and char booth.


• In the interests of coherence and article length, commentaries on problems with ebook readers now appear in Ebook reader problems and issues--including a major new section on DRM and how it's biting some Kindle fans.


• Charging for services offers a new take on a long-standing issue, along with a fair number of comments on "Freemium" services.


• What makes an innovative idea actionable? Nina Simon offers a thoughtful new perspective on that issue in a new addition to Innovation and control.

That's three new articles and one updated article. What does this have to do with words and their meaning?

Advocacy, marketing and ebooks

In the case of the Charging... article, not much. Discussions of whether and how public libraries can or should charge for "premium" services date back many years. I've always had the same response: "Premium" is a slippery slope for a public institution, with "standard" likely to become worse and worse as tax dollars get scarce--and that worsening baseline hurts the people most that public libraries specifically need to serve. Hmm. Maybe that does have something to do with words: what does "premium" (or, Gaia forfend, "freemium") really mean in a public library setting? Is it possible to charge for some services (or faster access to existing services) without directly or indirectly damaging those who can't afford the premium?

But two other articles are the focus of this post.

Advocacy and marketing discusses advocacy for libraries by librarians--and, oddly, is the first article in LLN with advocacy in the title, although I'd guess at least half a dozen of the 39 articles in the Marketing category are primarily about advocacy, not marketing.

Is there a difference? I think so. I don't see how you could call arguing for the use of one particular brand of deodorant over another "advocacy," but you can certainly advocate for the worth of libraries and need for their support. I don't think advocacy requires branding, much less the tendency to regard everything (including ourselves) as brands. The first of the two commentaries in thenew article doesn't find huge differences between "marketing" and "advocacy," but I believe the difference is significant--not only in the lack of pure commercial intent where advocacy is involved, but also in the nature of support. And that's enough for here--go read the article.

The other case is a little different. Ebook reader problems and issues combines some commentaries that were previously in other articles with a new commentary on Kindle-specific DRM issues. The key here, though, is "Ebook reader"--an explicit recognition that a fair amount of confusion is caused by the use of one word for two concepts. Ebooks--let's call them "book-length texts delivered digitally" (although in past years many so-called ebooks have been article-length texts delivered digitally) don't require dedicated reading devices. Ebook readers--dedicated reading devices such as Kindles and Sony Readers--can be used to read things other than, well, ebooks.

But most of the time, in most media (mainstream or otherwise), "ebooks" (or e-books or eBooks or E-books or...) is used to describe both. That's not helpful and can get in the way of understanding.

I'm trying to disambiguate the term, at least at LLN.

I think that's more feasible than any foolish attempt to get people to stop using "leadership" when they mean "management." One of the recent Leader's Digest items summarizes an article about leadership failure--and, as far as I can see, it's really an article about why some managers fail to be leaders. But the magazine in which the article appears has consistently used "leaders" and "leadership" when it means "managers" and "management," and I don't think that's likely to change any time soon...

Anyway, that's this week's musings about how LLN works and changes. (I did mention that it's free and not restricted to librarians, didn't I?)

By itself, while it's noteworthy, I probably wouldn't post about it. The writer isn't going away, the archives aren't going away, and the circumstances may be unusual.

But there's a context that might be worth discussing and pursuing further--actually two contexts, one only marginally related.

Direct context

One comment on this shutdown said that, according to the writer and a colleague, this particular blog was the only consistent liblog around (not in those words)--in essence, that most liblogs (blogs created by library-related people but not as official library blogs) aren't showing much action these days.

I didn't take offense at the remark; this blog hasn't been consistent since it began, and has never had a steady stream of meaningful posts. On a more general basis--well, I think the finding's a little uncharitable, but I'm not sure it's entirely wrong.

Fact is, a fair number of experienced libloggers have cut way back--disappearing for weeks or months at a time when they previously posted something every day or three. How many and to what extent? That's a tough one; see below under "Documenting whatever it is." I don't think it's entirely anecdotal, but that's an anecdotal judgment.

Indirect context

Setting aside liblogs, what about library blogs--blogs created by libraries?

There seems little doubt that quite a few library blogs started without much planning and were deserted early on. Whether or not anyone actually said "Every library should have a blog" (Steven Cohen is on record as saying he used to ''think'' that, but the direct statement, in so many words, doesn't show up as a first-person statement, although James LaMee comes very close), that was certainly the implication of some early Library 2.0 statements. (Oh, look: Cliff Landis apparently did say every public library should have a blog, unless he's misquoted here.)

But saying that lots of library blogs have been abandoned is, at best, anecdotal. (If you use the informal measure "One, two, three, lots" then all you need do is find four abandoned library blogs: Easily done. If by "lots" you mean "some substantial percentage of all that were created," that requires something more than anecdotal evidence.)

Slightly better than anecdotal

In preparing the two soon-to-go-out-of-print books on library blogs, I looked at how 231 academic library blogs and 252 public library blogs were doing in March-May 2007. While certainly the largest sets of library blogs ever studied in any detail, neither set was remotely comprehensive, and that was deliberate:

• All blogs had to be in English.
• Blogs had to have started no later than December 2006.
• Blogs had to be "reasonably active" in early 2007--that is, at least one post in two out of three of the study months (March, April, May 2007).
• Blogs had to be reachable in mid-2007 (June-August), when I was doing the studies.

For public library blogs, I began with a set of 360 English-language candidates, of which at least 68 were defunct, 19 more weren't reachable, 16 were too new--and at least 29 didn't meet the "reasonably active" mark.

For academic library blogs, I began with a set of more than 400 blogs--of which at least 54 were defunct, 23 more were unreachable (or not blogs at all), 23 turned out not to be in English, and 22 weren't "reasonably active."

So, realistically, my studies excluded around 30% of "visible" public library blogs and 42% of "visible" academic library blogs, keeping the more robust specimens. ("Visible": There were probably scores and possibly hundreds of other library blogs I didn't know about, because they weren't in one of the wikis tracking these things or otherwise evident.)

Similarly, while The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 includes 607 liblogs, it excludes more than a hundred other English-language liblogs.

I did recheck the blogs that were in the study in a quick visit done while preparing for the 2009 OLA SuperConference. The results of that recheck appear in the February 2009 Cites & Insights, or separately as "Shiny Toys or Useful Tools?"--PDF rather than HTML because it was too much hassle to try to get the eight graphs into an HTML version.

Briefly, here's what I found in terms of survival--from May 2007 to December 2008 for library blogs, from May 2008 to December 2008 for liblogs:

• Of the 231 academic library blogs, 17 (7%) had disappeared entirely--but of the remaining 93%, more than three-quarters had at least one post within a month before the date checked and fully 92% had at least one post within 120 days.


• Of the 252 public library blogs, 15 had either disappeared, gone behind a security wall, or changed into parking pages or non-blogs. Of the remainder, two-thirds had at least one post within a month before the test date and 89% had at least one post within 120 days.


• Of liblogs--where some were already moribund by May 2008, and where I'd cut the list down to 570 by excluding a handful of non-English blogs and ones that had already disappeared (entirely, including archives) by March 2008--some 70% had posts within a month of the test date (47% within a week), and 87% had at least one post within 120 days.

So, at a gross measure, it's fair to say that library blogs and liblogs that were established in early 2007 or early 2008 respectively had not, by and large, been abandoned by late 2008.

But those are gross measures and don't say much about the reality of the blogs.

Additionally, there's a bunch of anecdotal evidence that blogs may be suffering more over just the past few months, thanks in part to competition from Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook et al.

Documenting whatever it is

In December 2008, I posted a note citing a kind comment from Kathleen de la Peña McCook, who said "I think maybe all this (blogs) may fade and that your books may document the movement."

At the time--way, way back in the dusty distance of six months ago--I said:

I think blogs are already fading in one sense, but I also think it's unlikely that they'll fade away any time soon--no more likely than, say, the end of mail lists or email itself. I believe they've become reasonably well established as one medium; the uses for that medium are changing as other media emerge--so, for example, Twitter and delicious are probably reducing the number of pure link posts.

Now? I have no idea...and I'm intrigued on a couple of levels. Maybe (maybe) intrigued enough to waste a little more time on the subject. (Yes, I'd still love sponsorship for research--and more book buyers. No, I'm not holding my breath. I'd rather have a sponsor for Cites & Insights itself...)

That time wastage might come in two varieties:

• A quick-and-dirty, but non-anecdotal, sweep of the 483 library blogs studied in 2007. For this sweep, I'd probably just look at, say, May 2009, and measure things that take almost no time to measure--most recent post (in days), number of posts in that month, maybe number of comments in that month (if any). I might also reclassify each blog as to whether it's a "functional blog" (where the blog is really a publishing mechanism that's embedded on the library's website and has little or no separate presence--e.g., new events, new books lists).
• A more substantial repeat visit to the trimmed list of 570 liblogs from the 2007-2008 study--anywhere from the q&d approach mentioned above to a full-scale study, or possibly something in the middle that pays more attention to how individual blogs have changed and, specifically, how "established" or "name" blogs have or haven't done.

Are liblogs, or particularly the old reliable big-name liblogs, fading away? I honestly don't have a good sense one way or the other.

Are library blogs surviving or prospering? Ditto.

Does anybody care? Damned if I know.

That trigger--once again, wondering whether my humanities background (rhetoric major, math minor) leaves me simply unable to cope with the true Scientific Mind--regarded the format used for publication.

Or, to put it another way, the widespread and vehemently-expressed view that PDF sucks (to use a polite version).

What I saw, in several conversations, was a seeming demand from text-miners that everything must be in HTML (or, better, XML) so it was easy to mine, with a complete disdain for layout and typography as irrelevant. (I can only imagine Donald Knuth's response to the concept that typography and layout don't matter...)

Why some of us humanists use PDF

Because we care about typography. Because we care about the presentation of what we've written. Because PDF--and, of portable formats, only PDF--can assure us that the typefaces and layouts we've chosen will be rendered properly for the reader.

And because it's easy--pretty much automatic on the Mac, and not difficult on the PC (there's a free Office download to define a PDF printer; I use Acrobat because it produces much smaller PDF files and because it can combine many PDFs into a single file, but for 95% of users, the free download's good enough).

Getting from there to HTML

So you want HTML? Make it easy. Actually, for Word2007, it isn't bad: Save as Web page (filtered), and you get not-too-ugly HTML. (Since .docx is actually an XML package, it probably should be better than it is.) But you have to tune an HTML-version stylesheet if you really want to do both well--one that only uses "easy" typefaces, for example. It won't be elegant HTML, but it will work.

But, even here, what's in it for me? Can you demonstrate that I'll get more money, more fame, or even significantly more readers by taking those small steps?
"It makes it easier for me to plunder your text for my own purposes" is not, I hate to say, a terribly convincing reason. It might be for you, but it isn't for me.

Still...after years of doing only PDF for my own peculiar ejournal, I started doing Word's filtered HTML for most essays, because it did seem to serve some subset of readers--and it didn't add substantially to the production task. But whenever I read one of the HTML versions, I wince a little: It's just not as good as the PDF.

Going beyond HTML

But, you know, I think you want more than HTML. I think you want semantics--XML or better.

Provision of good-quality HTML from a regular writing-and-layout stream is at least plausible, with no real extra effort on the part of the writers and editors.

Provision of semantics, though--that's a huge additional effort, and I don't believe it's one that's readily automatable for non-trivial instances.

Which magnifies the question: What's in it for me?

I'm honestly interested in the answers. "Some neato research down the line that will earn someone else grants and tenure" may not be a wonderful answer. Just sayin'

Update, June 25, 2009:
Based on one comment (not here--ah, the multifarious conversational channels!) I should stress that, when I say "What's in it for me?" I'm not suggesting that there are no reasons to use HTML. Of course there are. (Hmm. I'm writing this in HTML, because it suits blogging--and, unlike WordPress' editor, this editor is pretty much raw HTML, other than automatic paragraph breaks.)

I'm suggesting that there are also legitimate reasons to use PDF.

Really, "what's in it for me?" (a phrase I rarely use) has more to do with demands for HTML--not for readability, but for text-mining--and pressures to do more than HTML. And the constant "PDF sucks!" refrain.

As noted above, I do provide HTML versions of (most) Cites & Insights essays (except for a small number that just don't work well that way and one "print bonus" feature that appears sometimes)--because some people asked me nicely to do so as an alternative for those who really want to read online, and because it had been a while since people were demanding that my free publication should be revamped to suit their own preferences.

(Yes, I do mean demanding, in at least one case with fairly strong language. My standard response, after the unmailed two-word/seven-letter one, was that there are lots of other things to read on the web...)

Over time, I've tried to distinguish the two. The standard shorthand for that distinction is, I think, a bit too simple:

Managers get things done right. Leaders find the right things to do.

Another simple distinction is that managers have subordinates, while leaders have (willing) followers. If you have subordinates who wouldn't willingly follow you, you may be a manager but you're not a leader--and you can be a leader without ever managing anybody. ("Thought leaders" in particular may have millions of followers but may never have managed anyone in their lives.) So far, two essays directly discuss the distinction

The wiki currently has 66 articles tagged with the Leadership category, 52 tagged with Management. Of the 52, only 18 are also tagged for Leadership--so there's relatively little overlap between the two (perhaps less than there should be).

Most of the new material this week falls squarely into the Management category. There's a new article "On orientation and retention," concerning how library managers should make new hires part of the team. A new section of "Management notes" discusses the somewhat heretical possibility that most "secrets of success" management books--the ones that supposedly prove why certain companies do better than others--may be fatally flawed and that luck may be a key reason companies succeed. And there's a wonderful life story added to "Qualities of successful managers," leading up to the importance for managers of stepping outside your comfort zone.

Material aimed at leaders--including managers who lead and leaders who aren't managers--covers a much broader area, most of it not tagged in the Leadership category. One addition this week adds some interesting (or bemusing) items to "Leader's guide to open everything," an overview article that points to some of LLN's coverage of open access and open source--but also to a rather large set of other concepts aiming for the positive influence of the "open" label. Being "open" may sound great--but it doesn't necessarily mean free, and sometimes not even all that open.

I wonder sometimes--both about the field called "information science" and about whether what I do fits within it.

A snarky way to put this might be:

Can you do information science if you're not part of academia?

Or,

Can it be information science if it doesn't appear in the form of proper scholarly articles in proper refereed journals?

Not that I haven't had articles in refereed journals. I have--not many, but a few.

But most of what I'd call research, particularly in the past few years, hasn't appeared there. (Actually, my major research projects in previous decades didn't result in scholarly articles either. That's another story.)

Research?

What I can say about the research behind the two library blog books and the liblog book:

• I'm transparent about methodology.
• I'm scrupulous about following the stated methodology.
• I don't discard "outliers" or otherwise manipulate the evidence to suit any hypotheses.
• I use statistics conservatively and, I believe, appropriately--particularly in The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008, which includes a lot more statistical analysis than the others.
• When I state hypotheses, I spell out the extent to which the evidence does not support the hypotheses.

OK, so some statisticians would say I barely use statistics at all in the last-mentioned book, but that's another discussion.

Outsider research not properly reported?

On the other hand...

• My reports on the research don't include literature surveys, extensive notes on previous related research (such as it is), the rest of the scholarly apparatus.
• My reports appeared as books (later articles in Cites & Insights) rather than as articles.
• Nobody's vetted the research or replicated the work.
• Most importantly: The work hasn't been cited by any information scientists, as far as I can tell.

If research falls into publication and none of the scholars in the field cite it, does it exist?

I don't have answers. I don't fancy myself a scholar. I do dignify the work I've done as research, and believe it's a lot more carefully (or at least exhaustively) done than some of the stuff I've seen Properly Published. (And I know from this and other projects that I could gather "statistically reasonable" samples that would prove almost any set of hypotheses I cared to offer.)

Comments?

And yesterday I found myself wondering whether I had any business being here--although the thought was more along the lines of "Holy cr*p! What's going on here?" The situation had nothing to do with this blog--and a lot, I think, to do with culture clashes along the lines of that half-century-old notion of the Two Cultures.

The trigger

The trigger was a cluster of conversations taking place on FriendFeed and in blogs, some of them on this platform. It had to do with the propriety of liveblogging talks during a conference, talks not explicitly labeled as secret or closed. And after reading some of the conversations, I realized that, for all my decades as a systems analyst/programmer, I'm on the "humanities side" of this particular gulf.

The odd thing is that I'm not a big fan of liveblogging as a technique, for a couple of reasons:

• As explored at length in "Speaking and attention: It all depends," as a speaker, I used to have trouble with the idea of inattention--that, between backchannels, liveblogging, twittering, etc., the people in the audience weren't really there fully.


• Also as a speaker, I felt--and feel--that liveblogging and twittering tend to force speeches into a bullet-point mode: If a speaker wishes to build to a point using narrative means ("tell a story"), these bits-and-pieces techniques will work against effectiveness.


• As a writer who frequently comments on what others have said, I encountered the dark side of liveblogging and conference reporting in general: Namely, what happens if you disagree with anything that's reported. (If you're high-fiving and saying "Wow, so-and-so made a great point," all is well.) To wit, and particularly if the speaker is in one of the charmed circles, you get hit with some combination of "They never said that," "You're taking it out of context" and "That wasn't what they meant at all." ("Hit with" is the appropriate phrase.) After a couple of incidents, I came to a decision: I'd treat all conference reports, but specifically liveblogs and twitter streams, as fictional--I might note them, but would never, ever comment on them or believe they necessarily had anything to do with what was actually said (or meant).

But that's a far cry from saying that liveblogging is either inappropriate or borderline unethical. I might say "I wish you'd listen for five minutes before you start tapping away--and by the way, feel free to leave if I'm not getting through to you," but I would never say people were wrong to liveblog (or engage in backchannel chatter, which may or may not have anything to do with the actual speech).

The gulf?

The more I followed this particular controversy, the more I realized that "conference" in my context meant something very different than "conference" in the science context, at least as these scientists were using it.

Maybe--maybe--conferences-as-in-science, or at least some of them, can reasonably assume that, although anyone who registers can listen to a speech and, presumably, take notes on it and circulate those notes to friends & colleagues, that doesn't make the contents of the speech public--that it's reasonable to tell not only professional journalists but everyone that they shouldn't reveal what was going on while it's going on. (Maybe all such conferences should be held in Las Vegas, given the town's advertising motto.)

But conferences-as-in-librarianship, at least all the ones I've ever attended, have had no such assumptions. On the other hand, very few speeches at those conferences involve stunning new discoveries backed by methodologically-sound research and even fewer involve any danger of being "scooped" or losing huge research grants because early information gets out too soon. As for the latter, so far I've encountered...well, none. People speak because they want to inform, to share ideas and winning strategies, to advocate, or because they're On the Circuit and were invited to give Speech X to a new audience. (There are other motives, I'm sure, but sharing and informing are certainly the dominant ones.) People want what they say to reach a wider audience. Some speakers must love liveblogging, particularly those whose speeches lend themselves to the process.

Can we communicate across this gulf? Is it a real gulf, or is it edge cases? People like John D. and Christina P. convince me that the answer to the first question is yes, at least for some of us. The second one? Who knows?

Inconclusion

I don't have a conclusion. There are culture clashes of sorts even within librarianship, to be sure, but most of the time I also see a shared culture, at least among the types of librarians most likely to be involved in the American Library Association. On the other hand, I just wrote (and then deleted) a whole set of internal "culture clashes," many of them from (some) librarians within one specialty who (always wrongly) either treat other types of libraries/librarians as inferior or assume that all libraries are like their own specialty. And I'm fairly certain that there are many culture clashes within science, even if you leave out the social sciences.

I'll keep trying to communicate.

Oh, and before you ask, I do at least vaguely understand entropy and the second law of thermodynamics--but thinking about or remembering that law is no more relevant to my everyday life or writing than any Shakespeare play is relevant to the everyday life of a nuclear physicist. On the other hand, when someone proposes a system that operates with 100% efficiency, a vague awareness of the second law does trigger my BS-meter...

A footnote and digression: If you want to get one of us wifty humanities types to pick up on the second law, for Gaia's sake stay away from the Wikipedia entry! This site, though, ain't bad: "If the first law of thermodynamics says you can't win, then the second law of thermodynamics says you can't even break even." Followed by much more detail, to be sure. Read the comments on this post...]]> http://scienceblogs.com/waltatrandom/2009/06/culture_clashes_and_conference.php http://scienceblogs.com/waltatrandom/2009/06/culture_clashes_and_conference.php Speaking Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:36:35 -0500