My Technology is Abandoning Me

As most everyone who uses it must have heard by now, Google has announced that it is shutting down Reader. Sigh. Dude, that's my window to the internet! I will have to find another window through which to view the internet, and that's a hassle.

I remember there was some talk of Reader closing quite a while ago, but nothing came of it for so long that I had mostly forgotten about it.

I've also just been informed by my Hotmail account that Microsoft will soon be 'upgrading' this account to Outlook. This comes after several previous invitations to upgrade to Outlook, all of which I have declined on accounta I think the Outlook interface is ugly. And the only customization you can do is change from one glaring, dramatic color to another. I'm going to miss the little graphics you could put on your Hotmail account.

It's been a rough couple of days for my web habits. I suppose next I'll hear that Amazon is going to stop shipping to Massachusetts.

This Could Be Brilliant

The American Prospect directed me to a clever new site called ToS;DR, for Terms of Service; Didn't Read.

It refers to the many, many (many) pages of dense legal language that define our relationships with online services like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Steam, etc. The site states,

 “I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that.

Good idea! Because, yeah, I admit I click to indicate my understanding of and agreement to terms that I haven't actually read. I mean, how can you read that stuff? Does anyone read all their terms of service in full?

We should, yeah, but...so long...eyelids getting heavy...ooh, look, something shiny somewhere else on the web! Yeah, yeah, I have read and agree, sure.

ToS;DR rates terms of service for various companies/services from A to E, with A being the best, and puts nifty little icons next to specific aspects of the terms, like a thumbs-up symbol for a "Promise to inform about data requests" or a red X for "No Right to leave the service."

 A lot of the ratings are still in progress, with "no class yet," but you can view the positives and negatives that are listed.

ToS;DR invites user input in developing its ratings, so if you have read and understood your terms of service, you might want to send them a note listing good and bad points for them to add to their lists.

Handy Tips

I have to admit I've pretty much forgotten all about Wolfram Alpha since its exciting debut some years back, but this How-To Geek post, as recommended by iLibrarian, gives some good tips on using it for 10 different useful tasks, such as generating hard-to-crack passwords, checking if you're legally drunk, finding words beginning with one letter and ending with another, and more!

You never know when any one of these things could come in handy.

Internet Freedom Ahoy

I had company over the weekend, so I've been super lazy about updating. Sorry, legions.

However, I note the SOPA Strike/SOPA Blackout (that's two different sites with helpful code) planned for tomorrow, with sites large and small (the SOPA Strike link has a list of confirmed participants) planning blackouts in protest of SOPA and PIPA.

At the moment it's looking encouragingly as if these bills have been set aside for now--but that doesn't mean we should get all complacent, since they could come slinking in again once our backs our turned.

Because bills are essentially the same as rats.

Anyway, I'm doubtful that this particular site will make a big impact, but far be it from me not to take an opportunity to black it out. Solidarity!

If you have a blog and are interested in participating, GeneaBloggers has a nice list of instructions on how to blackout blogs using the Blogger and Wordpress platforms.

And if you can't decide whether or not this is actually something you oppose, Danah Boyd has a nice explanation of why a lot of people are unhappy with SOPA/PIPA on Apophenia.

Also, Not SOPA!

In more legislative news we should probably care about, Jessamyn at librarian.net has a roundup of links about the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.

As she says, "it’s vague, it’s anti-free-speech, and it won’t solve the problem it’s designed to combat." Problematic at best.

Latest Exciting Challenge

I'm thoroughly engrossed in the richly rewarding pastime of translating our library website's current Cold Fusion pages into PHP. (We have our own website, because we don't want to cede control of our pages to a centralized institutional Web Office, to which we'd have to submit requests to get anything done. As a result, any of the librarians can make important updates, and also could completely wreck the site at any moment, on a whim! That's power.)

It's a project that was begun some time ago by a departed web librarian whose shoes have not been filled (I tried, but my feet are bigger than hers!), so the code is basically all written, it's just a matter of plugging the right information in in the right places. Thankfully, since otherwise we would be pretty much be left looking at the current version of the site forever.

So there's a lot of copying and pasting and refreshing to make sure it looks right. And if I can't figure out how to replicate some effect, I go find a completed page that does the same thing, and copy the code from there.

There's no plagiarism in web development!

I have to remind myself that even though it takes a stupidly long time to get the simplest thing done, I shouldn't worry about it. Take the time, figure it out, and gradually it starts to take a less long time, and I'll remember how x problem was solved and can go right to the solution next time instead of spending an hour on it, and eventually I may even sort of know what I'm doing.

It's kind of fun, and keeps the ol' brain on its figurative toes.Which is good, since it wouldn't do to have that slippery deceptive organ getting all complacent and having time to make up false memories or anything.

On this topic, I recommend the much-recommended Code Year (I saw it all over Twitter, so I can't salute any one person), from Codecademy: sign up and get free lessons emailed to you every week in 2012!

So far they're doing JavaScript, which is not immediately relevant to my thoroughly engrossing task, but from what little I've observed, coding languages tend to work in similar ways, even if they use different terms or symbols to do things, so it's good background.

Farhad Manjoo on Slate makes a strong argument for why people should learn to code, and also recommends Code Year, so it's not just me and some people I can't name on Twitter. You should totally check it out.

Remember: If your brain isn't busy learning, it's probably busy plotting against you. Because brains cannot be trusted.

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Usefulness Applies

The Krafty Librarian points out that the winners of NLM's app contest have been announced. They help with gene lists, anatomy study, data visualization, searching the NLM collection, and searching biomedical literature.

I'll have to check them out! As soon as I get a smartphone.

World Domination Cannot Be Far Behind

I'm taking a web development class, and it promises to be good, clean fun.

I'm already plotting how to use my forthcoming knowledge to make millions (of page views).

I suspect pictures of kittens will be involved. Or naked people. That seems to be what the internet likes.

Does someone have a naked kitten site already?

I hope not, because hairless cats are creepy looking. They can't help it, I know, and I don't hold it against them, but it's true.

I bet chimpanzees think the same about us.

Interesting Patient-Info Tool

David Rothman has constructed a custom Google search for physicians to locate educational materials that can be easily sent to a printer and given to a patient.

It gave me a lot of results from MedlinePlus in my testing, as well as some other lay-level information that seems about right.

A cool thing he's done is put separate tabs for material relevant to pediatrics, to seniors, for Spanish-language and large print materials, and for low-literacy patients, although the whole thing kind of stopped working for me before I could notice if those grouped results effectively.

Possibly too many people were all piling on at once. Because it's just that cool.

So go check it out, and we'll see if it stays broken!

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Mulishly Clinging to Old Tech

I had missed the news that RSS is dying, but was soothed from the potential panic it would have caused by this handy roundup at Stephen's Lighthouse, which has links to three posts explaining that rumors of its demise may be somewhat exaggerated.

The takeaway seems to be that it probably isn't dying, it's just not an exciting hot technology and not that many people use it or care about it. Boooor-ing.

Those who do use it, however, seem to find it valuable, so it will probably keep existing.

Whew! As one who does use it, I can tell you right now that I would wither and die without it. OK, so I mean my blog-reading would wither and die without it.

I'm reading 200+ blogs, all of which I enjoy and learn from in various ways, but almost none of which I would be keeping up with if I had to visit each site individually to check for new content.

I just don't have that kind of time!

Why, just this very day a post appeared on a long-silent blog that I moderately enjoyed. I would have given up checking for updates and left that blog for dead long ago, but thanks to RSS, I instantly knew the author was back. There was this little "thanks to anyone who's still reading me!" note, and I thought, "don't thank me, thank...the knife!"

Wait, that's The Simpsons. And it was about a knife. I mean "thank...the RSS!"

You know, it's just easy.

I suppose if you don't care about following 200 blogs, it won't be as important to you, and that's fair. I'm not about to tell anyone they need to be reading 200 blogs.

But at this point in my life, I am, so I don't care if RSS is cool or not, I'm stickin' to it.

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One Is Not Everyone

I like this post by Tami on What Tami Said, entitled Rant: Hate Twitter? Fine. Stop being so sanctimonious!

This is a nice reminder not to descend too far into "kids these days"-ism, which is sometimes a temptation in relation to all kinds of newfangled gadgets and technologies (here, obviously, specifically in reference to Twitter).

It's only natural to assume that if something isn't useful or interesting to me personally, it isn't interesting or useful at all, but it's also kind of silly.

Like it, don't like it, whatever works for you, but don't act as if not liking it is a sign of your superior intellectual and/or moral qualities.

I mean, unless it's automatic puppy-kicking software or something.

Although proclaiming your dislike as a sign of your superior intellectual and/or moral qualities is entertaining. Fair assessment is good, but does it give us the opportunity to make sweeping pronouncements about how thus-and-such is the worst glob of awful coding ever sneezed onto a computer screen?

Where would we be without the ability to set ourselves apart from the unwashed masses who like stupid stuff we don't care about?

Who, in some other instance, are probably the freshly-bathed masses who like cool stuff we do care about. It's all very confusing.

But anyway, I generally try my best not to overestimate the extent to which my own preferences provide evidence for how much something either rocks or sucks, and to recognize that even things that don't serve any good purpose in my life or work may be of value to someone else. I think I can safely say that this is a clear sign of my superior intellectual and/or moral qualities.

I'm obviously way cooler than those unwashed sanctimonious masses.

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Mini-Links

I see on Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day that Google now offers a URL-shortening service: goo.gl.

I do use those services every once in a while, generally when I want to add a link to one of our Subject pages at work and it turns out to be something long and clunky. The URLs themselves show up on the page, rather than just appearing as the classic underlined blue text, and I think that's basically good--a way of making transparent, giving due credit, to the resource linked.

Here: click to get there, but if you care, it's fabhealthinfo.org!

So I see the value of displaying the URL, but if it's too a specific page it can be really long, and can loop around and look ugly on the page. In these cases, I've sometimes put in a shortened URL instead, just for aesthetics. I'm a little doubtful about the persistence of shortened URLs since if the service that creates the link fails, the link will presumably no longer work, but it's certainly also true that if an originating website is rearranged, or a document removed from a server, that link will also no longer work, so I don't think it's an unacceptable risk.

Sometimes links break, and that's part of the nature of information on the web.

I don't use shortened URLs often enough that I really have a favorite, or that I will get an opportunity to try Google's version anytime soon.

I think I started with tinyurl.com, which is the first of these services that I heard of (and which has the advantage of letting you customize the short URL, so you can make it something you'll recognize--I especially like this given that I'm usually posting a link as a resource on a web page, and want to characterize it in some way), and may have also used bit.ly, which seemed to be popular on Twitter.

I was, however, immediately curious about the .gl domain, which turns out to be Greenland. It's interesting to see how various sites and services make use of domains whose countries they have (as far as one can tell) no real connection to, but that suggest something about the service. Like last.fm, which plays on the connection of FM to radio, or the exciting potential of the .tv domain.

Greenland, the Federated States of Micronesia and Tuvalu might as well get something out of their domains.

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Something is Up in the State of NCBI!

The renowned Krafty Librarian directs my attention to a new project from everyone's favorite center for biotechnology information, NCBI.

It's apparently going to be a consumer health information website called PubMedHealth. Krafty speaks for many of us:

I know what you are thinking, “What does this mean for MedlinePlus?”

Yup, that's exactly what I was thinking. Isn't MedlinePlus (a longtime favorite and a site I plug at every opportunity) a consumer health information website?

What will PubMedHealth offer that MedlinePlus does not? Will it provide a distinct service that the existing site could not reasonably do, or will it merely duplicate features we love in MedlinePlus and dilute the brand, so to speak?

We can only wait eagerly, and maybe speculate wildly and skulk around the internet in search of rumors.

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Useful* Website Features

There's a 'last-updated' field on the data entry side of our e-book listings on the library website (that is, the part where I put in title and author info and the URL, not the part the eager would-be reader sees when looking for that perfect textbook about woody plant stems).

It fills in automatically with the current date, so I never really think about it, and the date that e-book information was most recently updated is not something that comes up all that often. But the other day I was thinking that sure, it could be handy if you just wanted to see, without checking the various Excel sheets and so forth, whether a title was part of this year's purchased package, or last year's.

Obviously, then, if a record was last updated sometime last year, we couldn't have just bought that title this year. Perfect!

Then I noticed that the field automatically resets to the current date as soon as you open the record in the edit view, even if you don't change anything. (And remember, you can't see this information in the non-editing view.)

So you can't actually see when it was last updated, even though the field is called "last updated," because the value instantly changes to (assuming I am looking at it today) July 30, 2010. And I know I didn't add every single book to the website today, but if I wanted to look at them all, that's what they'd say.

So when you get right down to it, all that field actually does is tell me what day it is. I'm not saying this couldn't be useful in certain situations where I didn't have any other means of finding that out. If, for example, I were not on a computer with both an internal calendar and an internet connection, and had lost both my paper calendar and my cell phone, and there was no one around to ask.

So remember, when designing websites, that a fun thing to include is information that would only be useful to a person who had no means of accessing a website.

I'm sure there's some webmaster back end way to just get a list of data in all the fields for all the titles, and thus to see when a record actually was last updated (or at least, last opened, since as I said the date changes even if you don't do anything to the record), but I really don't care enough to bother the web librarian about it.

I just think it's kind of funny to capture data that no one can see because it changes when you try to look at it. There's a philosophical point in there, I bet.


*Or, as it may happen, not very useful.

The Future is Now

This is my high tech character sheet for our high tech online gaming group.

Our plan is to conference call over Skype and play Basic D&D with reference to online documents, so we have different levels of technological development in play.

I think the back-of-envelope character is a nice touch, though. In theory I could transfer that information to a digital document, but...enh.

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Attack of the Hideous Logo

OK, I often like Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day, but this SearchCredible she mentions is creeping me out.

I shan't copy the image, lest I violate any copyright, but go look at it, or else let this description suffice: there's a sort of cartoon superhero figure in a cape, posed as if flying toward the viewer, brandishing a magnifying glass (for detailed searches, I presume).

So far, so good, but the creepy thing is that it has this huge, elongated mouth that surrounds the search bar where you'll type your terms, leaving the white space of the search field to suggest featureless teeth. The mouth is way bigger than anything else on the figure, and I don't like it.

Also, the figure has googly round eyes in which the iris is completely ringed with white, as if in terror or agony (possibly from having its mouth stretched the width of its body).

I find the overall effect spooky and disagreeable.  Sorry, SearchCredible. You may have a perfectly good search engine there, but I'm barely moved to try it.

Although to be honest, I'm not even sure how awesome it is: apparently the idea is that you type your query (into this superhero's mouth), and then choose one of a number of credible resources in which to search for it.

And there are plenty of good sites listed, like JSTOR, the Library of Congress, PubMed, Dictionary.com, etc., but if you know you want to search for something on the Library of Congress site, couldn't you just go there directly? Or use Google's 'Advanced Search' features to run a Google search on the LC site?

I suppose this site does offer a good list of suggestions for 'credible' places to search, and you can enter one query and then search it in multiple places without having to retype, so I guess that could be useful to people.

Also, I do like that it recognizes that some sites are better information resources than others, and makes an attempt to differentiate between credible sources and less credible sources--although some of us stern librarian types might question the inclusion of YouTube, Wikipedia and search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo as authoritative sources. I would consider these more ways to find information that may or may not be credible, than actual credible sources in their own right.

"I found it using Google!" is not, in itself, something that will guarantee that your information is any good.

So I don't personally foresee ever using SearchCredible for anything, but I could imagine it being useful to someone. If he or she isn't scared off by the giant mouth and staring eyes of the logo, that is.

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Listen Up! Or Whatever

In case anyone was really anxious to know, I will report that yes, I was Twittering a bit as well as blogging during the conference, and it was a fun extra way to know what was going on.

I find Twitter to be more of an amusing trifle than a key information stream on most days. I update if I think about it, read updates for people I follow, and am sometimes alerted to truly wonderful things like this music video of librarians and library school students at the University of Washington doing a search-related song set to the tune of Lady GaGa's "Poker Face." (Watch it. It is magnificent. I want to be making a music video at my library right now.) But it's not something I worry about catching up with if I forget to sign in for a week, so it's not one of my primary means of getting information.

I find it a bit more interesting, though, as a means of keeping track of a specific event. By reading posts with a certain theme, you get an interesting angle on what's happening and what people think about it.

How many people are commenting on that lecture? Oh, this person noticed that turn of phrase as well! I'm glad someone is updating on that topic, because I missed the first half of the presentation. 

So yes, when it's about something I'm interested in, I agree with a fairly broad array of others in finding Twitter a nifty tech tool with some nice application to conferences and meetings.

This reminds, me, to switch topics somewhat, that I was reading recently something to the effect that it must be unnerving for speakers to look out over a crowd and see a bunch of heads bent over laptops and phones, typing away.

And I guess it might be, if the speaker is really accustomed to seeing a bunch of people looking up in rapt attention, but really?--I don't see how someone typing away at a laptop is any more disturbing than someone scribbling away on a pad of paper.

And it's much less disturbing than someone chiseling away at a stone tablet, because you know that makes so much noise, and the rock dust makes other people in the audience sneeze, which is just distracting.

There's this sense that people are being less attentive if they're taking notes while listening, and sure, that's true since if you're doing anything other than gazing raptly your attention is probably divided, but it sometimes seems as if people find it especially inattentive to be working on a laptop, as opposed to writing on a napkin or something.

This may be because we don't trust people not to be playing solitaire or shopping on eBay on their computers, instead of actually taking notes. But really, we can't assume people industriously writing in notebooks aren't actually just drawing pictures of dragons eating cars, or playing "hangman" with themselves.

And even if someone is gazing at a speaker with an utterly fixed and to-all-appearances-rapt stare, they could actually be daydreaming about dragons eating cars, or decorating their bathrooms in their heads.

My general opinion is, there's no way to completely ensure that people will be paying attention to you, so you just figure it's up to them to either do it or not. In most situations in which I either speak or hear someone else speak, you have to assume everyone there is a grown up and can work it out for themselves, and if they're not inclined to be attentive, even tying their hands and propping their eyelids up with toothpicks will only go so far. (Although to be fair, that specific tactic would probably go pretty far, just based on novelty and horror.)

Whereas if they are inclined to pay attention, they'll often manage to do so, and the fact that they're typing busily away or sending text messages on their phones doesn't necessarily mean they think the speaker is boring or aren't listening. Possibly they're just trying to share the excitement, and/or capture the ideas for later.

Or possibly they're trying desperately to fight off albino trolls in a fantasy game and aren't listening at all. But that's their lookout, right?

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Fun With Your Internet

Combining some of the more frequent non-health topics on this here blog, Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day has given me an online game about social networking and other web tech: Smokescreen.

It offers 13 self-contained but sequential parts with different missions, over the course of which you try to work out the solution to a mystery centered around an online social networking site called White Smoke, using web technologies like instant messaging, photo sharing, etc.

It looks lively and thought-provoking, plus with awesome UK slang!

I only played the first chapter so far, but it was pretty entertaining. I may go back for more. I'm not really in its target demographic since all the characters are teenagers (it's supposed to teach kids useful stuff about privacy and other features of the web world), but don't let that stop you. Kids these days have fascinating lives, you know.

Not like back in my humdrum adolescence, when we didn't even have social networks or adorable tiny computers or cell phones.

Or CDs. Or TV. Or telephones. Or running water. We sometimes had electricity, though!

I grew up in the 1920s.

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New Perspectives

Here's an entertaining web gadget from Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day: it's FlipText!

It literally just flips your text upside down, like so:

¡ɹǝʌǝ ƃuıɥʇ ʇsǝq ǝɥʇ s,ʇı ¡uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ ʎɯ sı sıɥʇ

To be perfectly honest, I can't really think of anything this is especially useful for, other than playing havoc with readability, but it's amusing, right?

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Yes! Grown Up!

I saw on Health Populi a link to this little quiz to assess your "digital age."

The idea, worked out by Wells Fargo, is that proficiency with digital technologies can be broken into categories roughly equivalent to levels of maturity, from "Digital Teens," to "Digital Novices," to "Digital Adults." This is, needless to say, not necessarily related to chronological age.

You could be 12 and be a Digital Adult, or 50 and still a Digital Teen. It's all about how skillfully you make use of those nifty web gadgets we so love.

I managed to get the stamp of a approval as a Digital Adult with 30 points, thanks no doubt to my masterful web fu. Or whatever. I credit Twitter.

Anyway, if you like quizzes, give it a shot.

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