Cites & Insights
wcrawford | July 5, 2009Cites & Insights 9:9 (August 2009) is now available--just in time for the 2009 ALA Annual Conference. That's not a coincidence, to be sure; although the issue may not be directly relevant to the conference, if I didn't publish it now, it wouldn't be out until at least July 19.
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…
wcrawford | June 28, 2009In the past few days, one of the best libloggers called it quits: She explicitly said there won't be any more posts on that blog.
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…
wcrawford | June 12, 2009I'm not snarky by nature. Really I'm not.
Or, well, I'm recognizing that pure snark rarely improves a situation, and trying to reduce the amount of it within the e-zine. I got rid of one running section that was always negative by nature, just because it was always negative by nature.
But sometimes, just for a little while, I like to have a little fun with what I see as excesses. That section is My Back Pages, and like many other "last page" features it's not intended to be taken too seriously. That section is also a "PDF bonus"--I don't make it available as a separate HTML section.
The July…
wcrawford | June 12, 2009The penultimate section of the July 2009 Cites & Insights is Trends & Quick Takes--another "occasional" feature, this one for little thoughts that are more substantive than the foolishness in My Back Pages but not substantive enough for their own essays.
Realistically, most pieces of this section would work nicely as blog posts--and there is some crossover.
When this section appears, it's usually longer than this time around and usually includes a section of "Quicker Takes," each a single paragraph. This one has a trio of items, each triggered by something I saw elsewhere:
A note on…
wcrawford | June 12, 2009Do words have meanings--meanings that change slowly over time--or did that noted logician Charles L. Dodgson get it right when he had one of his more scholarly characters, H. Dumpty, assert that:
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less
To some extent, this essay--the second major essay in the July 2009 Cites & Insights--is about the proposed settlement of the Association of American Publishes and Authors Guild lawsuits against Google over Google Book Search.
To some extent, it's a followup to the issue-length Perspective: The Google Books Search…
wcrawford | June 12, 2009The third section of the July 2009 Cites & Insights is an installment of an occasional series, Interesting & Peculiar Products.
When C&I began (in December 2000, as the ejournal continuation of a monthly print-newsletter section that ran from 1995 through 2000), much of its focus was personal computing and related technologies. This is one of the remnants of that focus, although the range of products is even broader. The specific holdover comes at the end of each installment, "Editors' Choices and Group Reviews," where I summarize top review choices in some personal computing and…
wcrawford | June 12, 2009Long-time readers of Cites & Insights will know all this.
Bibs & Blather is my alternate name for the ejournal itself--and may have made more sense when the ejournal (ezine?) was heavily composed of "Cites," that is, citations for various articles and discussions of those articles.
Bibs & Blather is also the running head for random notes related to the ejournal itself (and my other sites and projects)--sort of a letter from the editor.
This time around, in Cites & Insights 9:8, the brief note includes three elements: One relating to sponsorship of the ejournal (I've had…
wcrawford | June 11, 2009The first major essay in Cites & Insights 9:8 carries forward a set of discussions that began in the April 2009 issue, Cites & Insights 9:5.
Both essays are largely "masses of metablogging"--that is, blogging about blogging--with a healthy amount of commentary and synthesis. The earlier essay (which, if you hate PDF and don't mind crude HTML, is separately available here), discussed blogging as a median medium: a sweet spot in a casual media hierarchy of length, thought and formality.
After that discussion (which I think many of you will find interesting on its own merits), there's…