scandalouslibrary

Bloglines!!!!

2007-10-24T21:38:00.000-07:00

I must confess, at fist glance I thought this week's task a little pointless. My initial experience with news-feedy kinda stuff a decadeish ago lead me to believe that RSS feeds were merely a targeted form of voluntary spam, clogging inboxes with laser-accurate parcels of flotsam. I was wrong. Bloglines allows access to some great stuff- salon, dilbert, news, slate... the list is massive, and the ability to call all this info into one central hub is great! For personal use, the hours will dissolve away, and for work, well, if we could train our punters to use this stuff who knows what information they will find, use, and benefit from.

my accy is http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=scottytime

Flikr-licious

2007-09-26T22:45:00.000-07:00

Flikr seems like a useful site- this photo of Tommy Jefferson's old crash pad (do you think he and Sally used to share the dome room at the top?)was found in the time it took me to enter the word 'Monticello'.
Like others of its ilk, such as Photobucket, Flikr offers online storage, ways to share images etc, and is fairly user friendly. It joins an evergrowing list of web sites and tools that are becoming more and more heavily used in the workplace and at home. And while its uses are apparent (the badgemaker application offers hours of fun and the potential for chaser-esque security badge stunts)I have a niggling question as to whether or not it, and other web tools like it, really are that essential. In this weeks Learning 2.0 we were asked to write about technology and one particular line jumped out at me- 'Imagine now having to cope without these technologies'. This is something I can imagine quite easily! While there is no doubt that Email is convenient, there are doubts about its impact on face to face communication. While social networking sites can be handy for promotion and meeting new people, they can also be massive time-wasters over-run with spam and marketing. And as for the paperless office... well, lets not go there.

Now, I'm no Luddite so I wouldn't want (or like) these new technologies to disappear- I just question whether the benefits they bring are not substantially countered by their shortcomings. anyone who has squandered hours fluffing around on myspace, or prorastinated by browsing ebay for things you will never buy knows how the web can cripple productivity at the same time its time saving advancements boost output.

There's no going back, but I imagine a pre-web world which was maybe a bit more social, and a bit less chained to checking emails and spending hours in front of computers at work and at home. I'd probably be bored to death for the first week before heading out into the fresh pre-net air and writing someone a letter in a cafe.

Which would then be lost by Australia Post.

Our power grows.

2007-09-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

In the past year we have loaned over 1,000,000 items. Tens of thousands of people passed through our doors. smiling people cart bags of books to and fro, their heads filled with book-laden dreams and book-inspired revelations. To the unaware observer all is calm and good. But the unaware observer is mistaken. The streets of our municipality may look peaceful, but under the veneer of relaxed cheer a war is raging. Marshalled against each other are two groups- the mediocre mind-numb-er that is television and the typographical triumphs that are Books.

You may have noticed that Packer-controlled channel Nine has been slipping in the ratings, losing advertising revenue and haemorrhaging viewers faster than reruns of M.A.S.H. Forget media-hack analysis claiming shifting viewing trends, weak programming and Packersterial incompetence being at the root of this decay- Books are back and T.V is under threat!

Its been a while since Books were on top, but they knew their time would come. The novelty of T.V, with its focus on passivity and easy gratification suckered everyone in, offering so much content for so little effort- a book without the need for thought, imagination, or laborious page-turning. But that content has proven to be lacking in imaginative nutrition. T.V is to a book what a deep-fried chocolate-coated hunk of bacon washed down with Coke is to a vege pasta with a glass of red- unsatisfying, and if consumed regularly, unhealthy. Sections of the populace are realising that writing is the root of ideas that much T.V comes from- and why consume the processed rubbish manufactured by the networks when you can savour the fresh, unadultered original? Reality T.V and abysmally bad programming only reinforce the shortcomings of the flickering box and as televisual standards plummet books are waiting in the wings to stride back onto centre stage.

Make no mistake- there will be a typo-naissance. Across Port Phillip Books are already winning the hearts and minds of the people of Melbourne.