@SILibraries Director Gwinn welcomes American Technion Society @ nano Bible ceremony

http://newsdesk.si.edu/mobile/releases?id=8604

Got Chromecast for better TV options and to help google and NSA track me better

Interesting bit of technology; very easy to set up and got it working on a WinTel machine, iOS, Android and a Chromebook. Didn't realize that I wouldn't be able to "cast" from only limited apps on tie iOS device. 

Technology purging for 2013

Palm Pilot charger, portable phone cord -- keeping the Iomega zip drive bag, full of cords and adapters that I'll purge in 2014!

Technology refresh, updating the home network

It had been a while since the home network was refreshed ... uh, a real long time, in fact, never, since the initial install. Things were getting pretty sluggish, so got a new cable modem and new wifi router. Here are the old ones (Motorola Cable Modem and Dell wifi router - see the little antennae!). The modem was just old (and my broadband provider sent a free one). The Dell router finally just up and died.

Remember the times of your life, Kodak and Penn Camera

Many of you are probably following the slow, tortuous decline of Kodak into likely bancrupcy and, if lucky, a restructuring that will leave the once iconic company a mere shadow of what it was (see Polaroid which now exists merely as a name with no relation to Edwin Land's original company). Ironically, the company that brought photography to the masses with products from the Brownie to KodoChrome, has as its most valuable asset, patents for digital photography.

Kodak, captured - as the reminded us - the times of our lives. Remember the ad campaign from the 1970s with Paul Anka? Here's a version from 1977:



Michael Hilzik, in the LA Times (4 Dec 2011)  made a salient comparison to other transitional businesses:

Kodak, however, markets a process technology; and as the chemistry of film has yielded to digital electronics, consumer demand for Kodak's traditional products has evaporated. A similar transition afflicts newspapers, book publishers, movie studios, broadcasters and record labels today, but the issues for those industries are different yet.

[insert here "libraries"]

As Don Draper reminds us, "technology is the glittering lure" ... Kodak, once the master of embedding their technology in our lives, seems to have now failed.

On a related note, this week also saw the bancruptcy of Penn Camera, a local Washington, DC institution going back to the 1950s. Ironically, I found out about this the day after it was announced when I was going in to buy a new camera.

I remember going to their old store at Metro Center, full of all kinds of photo gear and smelling of developer and the other chemicals since replaced by digital.

I'm particularly going to miss Penn as I was one of the, apparently, few, who regularly printed out digital photos. With Penn gone, Ritz Camera shrunk to a few inconvenient stores, printing options are now the CVS drugstores or online. I'll miss that ability to queue pictures the night before and pick them up at lunch.

Joining the brave new world of e-readers

Kindle
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

I'd said before that I'd be far down the list of e-readers purchasers (mostly because I couldn't see adding another device to my daily carry alongs - Droid & Netbook).

I had both the Kindle and Aldiko readers on the Droid, that that was good enough for some books to carry around for reference ... but then ...

Well, but then I was offered a free Kindle (2nd gen it turns out) with my credit card. What the heck, I took it.

It arrived yesterday and only played around with it a bit (testing some publications I had converted to epub/mobi for work purposes) before my wife took off with it to read her book club book (Sinclair Lewis's Main Street).

OCLC Digital Forum East

Getting ready for my talk later this a.m.

And here's the talk:

An Inordinate Fondness for Data: The Biodiversity Heritage Library

View more documents from Martin Kalfatovic.

Google's new bikes

Why does this make me think of the the great 60's TV show, The Prisoner?

Who needs cloud computing?

Me! Or something other than a monthly fix of a case of 500 gig hard drives from my dealer, Iomega.

Oh yeah, the 4 tb NAS came with the same delivery!

Possible ou Probable ... le livre!

Very interesting video from a French publisher, actually from 2007. I find the idea of going into the bookstore and swiping the e-book from a physical manifestation interesting, but wonder if that is a French librairie prejudice!

From the description:

Editis French publishing group, has produced this short film about a future possible or probable ... the book. This is not to show the vision of the group on the future market of publishing, but rather to initiate a discussion on the different business models and possible future features of playback devices that are currently on the market . The uses that we imagine are numerous and are well within reach.

Kindle DX: WPost and NYTimes snatch a fail from a potential victory!

So, Amazon comes out with the Kindle DX, a larger format, and maybe, just the thing to read a newspaper ... hmmm ... maybe. Actually no, maybe for some, but well, looks like NYT and WPO were able to pull a #fail out of a potential victory.

So, The New York Times (and it's sad little gutted step-child, the Boston Globe) and Washington Post jump on the bandwagon. This is it, some real action from their gray eminences, Newspaper 2.0. What an interesting idea, offer a Kindle DX to online subscribers to the papers. Start transitioning the deadtree/newsprint portion of your audience who are not tech savvy enough to use another mobile device to the digital future while at the same time, locking them into a subscription to your journalistic expertise. Lock in an audience and a key demographic. Brilliant stroke!

Except, of course, that it's newspaper industry doing this. So what do the brilliant business folk at NYT and WPO give their customers? Well, the deal isn't available to subscribers in the home markets of the papers - the very audience that's bleeding from the subscription rolls like watery ink through newsprint.

Now, of course the Times and Post are nationwide papers, but their hometown readers are, well, generally an influential group. As I noted in an earlier posting, the Washington Metro is increasingly "Kindle-ized". But, WPO is doing nothing to leverage their Kindle investment to take advantage of that.

Here's Rob Pegoraro writing in The Washington Post (here's the link for those of you in the DC area who might be getting the Kindle DX/Post package - 'cause you won't be able to read it on your Kindle!):

With the DX, Amazon is also exploring cheaper ways to bring this device to readers. Three newspapers -- The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Boston Globe -- will offer the DX at a discount to readers who subscribe to their Kindle editions. ... Those deals get around the relatively high cost of a Kindle, but few readers can benefit from them. The newspaper discounts, for example, only cover readers living outside of each paper's circulation area -- an arbitrary restriction that will probably prove to be self-defeating.

The Amazon press release even highlights the WPO and NYT fail feature in it's lead:

The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post to Launch Trials Offering Kindle DX to Subscribers Who Live in Areas Where Home Delivery is Not Available

How much longer will journalism tie itself to a business model that can't see the digital forest for the dead trees?

"Ambient awareness" ... a fleetiing, Twittering thought

I woke up this morning and checked my Twitter feed ... saw something interesting ... "Ambient awareness" ... hmm I thought. Need to look at that.

Turned out to be a link to a Time Magazine article about Twitter; the relevant quote:

The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines.

Yes! I thought, that's just it. Ambient awareness. I like it. Of course, some might also define it as "shallowness" but ... well ... uh ... I won't. I like the halo, the auro, the buzz, the Kirlian haze, that Twitter lets me have around the people in my world.

But I find Twitter gives me much more. To wit, or would that be "to Twit", conversation communication. In the article there's a discussion of a conference "covered" by Twitter:

Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact.

But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.

At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.

Yes, that hits it. Earlier this month, I flowed with the Twitter-feed (#ebio09)around e-Biosphere. Would I rather have been in London with the participants? Of course! But by following friends - and new found friends - via Twitter, there was a sense of being there.

At work, I've added Yammer to my communication tools. I've watched the Google Wave rollout video. I like it.

So, again, how did I find the Time article? Thanks to this Tweet:

brewinlibrarianRT @yestoknow: reading & thinking about "ambient awareness" http://bit.ly/FITYW

(or actually reTweet). Thanks to @brewinlibrarian (part of my extended network of news finders!) for an inspiring repost!

Your old National Geographic Magazines ...

0611091503.jpg
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

Yes, you really can thrown them away. I know it's probably heartening in some ways to keep them, buy those yellow/gold boxes to store them in. Stack them on your shelves ... store them in your attic ... stash them in your garage ... build small habitats for exotic animals ... hide them away for such time as they'll make landfill for your backyard as the rising waters brought on my global warming threaten your iris patch ... someone is taking care of copies of them. Libraries around the world, and, of course, the National Geographic Society itself.

But I digress!

I had a very interesting meeting today with staff from the Imaging Department of the National Geographic Society (note for Washington visitors: please do go to the NGS Museum, always a fabulous and fascinating exhibition space). The state of the art equipment for conversion of analog images is quite impressive.

I also got a peak at some of the 8-10 million photographs the NGS keeps in their photo library. Black and white prints, glass plate negatives, color glass plates, a fantastic archive documenting our planet and peoples since 1888.

The "Geographic" is one of the hidden treasures of Washington and of our cultural heritage establishment.

Kindle on the Metro: a movement?

Kindle on the Metro
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

"And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement."
- Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"

The other day I saw someone using a Kindle on the Washington Metro during the morning commute.

A couple days later, the second person at work showed up with their Kindle. I know now four people with Kindles. Today, I saw two people on the morning commute with Kindles (the Kindle 2.0). Everyone I know with an iPhone or iTouch has the book reader app on it.

Has the mobile e-book finally turned the corner? Who will win the battle of the mobile book? Sony? (Sony saturated the Washington Metro with an ad campaign a while back - including the famous "Sexier than a Librarian" ad - but I haven't seen any on the trains!

I'm not sold on the e-book for general purpose reading (yet). The idea of having an expensive device loaded with (still) expensive books at the beach (not that I go to the beach very often) or left in a plane seatback pocket, or in a Starbucks (all of done with paperback books before) doesn't make me feel comfortable (and do I want the added stress of having to actually THINK about where it is?

And I'll miss used book stores (like I miss the used record store). The secondary retail market was my favorite shopping experience!

So, no Kindle (or Sony) for me now. My netbook is loaded with work related articles (and a few books downloaded from the big scanning projects, but as I type, I have very battered copies of Nine Stories and "Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters" & "Seymour: An Introduction" tucked in my bag for my daily commute.

Twitter Peeps

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