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…
wcrawford | June 10, 2009Most, but not all, of the archives for the original version of this blog now appear here.
I omitted old movie reviews, cruise line commentaries, and a handful of "temporal posts"--ones that really have no meaning at this point. In all, I omitted less than 10% of the posts.
There are a lot of posts in the archive that don't fit very well in ScienceBlogs--but none of them have channels, and they're there for archival purposes.
Another "scibling" made a great suggestion--that instead of importing my whole archive, I repost selected posts, flagging them as "from the archives."
I didn't do that…
wcrawford | June 10, 2009I was going to write a series of posts describing each essay in the current Cites & Insights, and still plan to do so.
But this hit me by surprise--a LISNews item pointing to a makeuseof.com post pointing to Blind Search.
Blind Search?
People who care deeply about open web search engines spend a lot of time figuring out which engine is better for which purposes. For most users, though--at least the minority who appear to be aware that Google's not the only game in town--the look and feel of a site may be as important as the apparent results.
Blind Search takes that away, at least for…
wcrawford | June 9, 2009I've just published Cites & Insights 9:8 (July 2009).
The 30-page issue, PDF as usual but with HTML versions of most essays, includes:
Bibs & Blather
Notes on sponsorship for C&I, the status of four possible future projects--and the move of Walt at Random to ScienceBlogs.
Making it Work Perspective: Thinking about Blogging 2: Why We Blog
Continuing the discussion of blogging philosophy and practice that began in Cites & Insights 9:5 with a focus on reasons for blogging.
Interesting & Peculiar Products
Seven individual items and technologies, plus eight editors' choices and…
wcrawford | June 8, 2009A bit of background for those new to Walt at Random
The Library Leadership Network (LLN) is "a platform designed to help library leaders (and those who will become leaders) communicate, coordinate, find resources and share information." It's a service of Lyrasis, a large library network formed from the merger of two regional library networks, PALINET and SOLINET.
While LLN primarily targets library leaders, most of what's there can be useful for leaders of all sorts--and "leader" for LLN isn't just a synonym for "manager." Anyone can read LLN content (it's free), and several hundred people…
wcrawford | June 8, 2009I'm Walt Crawford. This is another blog in ScienceBlogs' new Information Science channel. As with the pioneers, John Dupuis and Christina Pikas, it's not a new blog.
And as with those two--both of whose blogs I've followed for years--I was pleasantly surprised when ScienceBlogs contacted me, in the person of Erin Johnson. I was maybe a little more surprised, since I'm neither a science librarian nor, technically, a librarian at all. (I don't have an ML[I]S and am exceedingly unlikely to get one at this point, barring an honorary degree.) I've been hanging around library and information…