random musings from a serialist
Change for Kentucky gets national attention.
Jeremy Horton, the man who is keeping the Dean spirit alive in Kentucky, guest blogged at Blog for America this week. After scrolling through the first part of the comments folks left, I am reminded of why I never bothered to read the comments at BfA; far too many people using it as a bulletin board to post their random whatever about semi-related subjects.
Iowa State University researchers have developed a new type of computer mouse/pointer.
Iowa State University researchers have developed a new type of computer mouse/pointer. It’s supposed to be more ergonomic. I think it looks a bit odd, and I can’t see how it will be easier to use. I’ve tried a few trackball type mice, and usually they frustrate me. I can’t move the mouse pointer as quickly with them, and by the time I’m finished with whatever I’m doing (or have given up), my thumb feels cramped. This new mouse they’ve developed is controlled by the thumb as well. I hope it’s more effective as a pointer tool than the current ergonomic alternatives.
Will RSS feeds overload the ‘net?
Wired News has a short article about RSS feed readers and the potential they have for increasing web traffic. I knew about this article because it was listed in the RSS feed that I get from Wired. Go figure. Anyway, the author and others are concerned that because aggregators are becoming more and more popular among those who like to read regularly published electronic content, eventually a large chunk of web traffic will consists of desktop aggregators regularly downloading that data throughout the day.
The trouble is, aggregators are greedy. They constantly check websites that use RSS, always searching for new content. Whereas a human reader may scan headlines on The New York Times website once a day, aggregators check the site hourly or even more frequently.
If all RSS fans used a central server to gather their feeds (such as Bloglines or Shrook), then there wouldn’t be as much traffic, because these services check feeds once per hour at most, regardless of the number of subscribers. So, if you have 100 people subscribed to your feed, rather than getting 100 hits every hour (or some other frequency), you would only get one. The article notes two difficulties with this scenario. First, a lot of RSS fans prefer their desktop aggregators to a web-based aggregator such as Bloglines. Second, the Shrook aggregator is not free, and probably that will be the model that its competitors will take.
I don’t completely agree with the premise that having a central server distributing content to feed subscribers will reduce the flow of traffic on the ‘net anymore than it currently is. Whether my aggregator checks my feeds once an hour or whether Bloglines does it for me, I still use up bandwidth when I log in and read the content on the Bloglines site. For some feeds, if I want to read the whole entry or article, I still have to click to the site. Frankly, I think the problem has more to do with aggregators that “are not complying with specifications that reduce how often large files are requested.”
Readers are supposed to check if the RSS file has been updated since the last visit. If there has been no update, the website returns a very small “no” message to the reader.
But Murphy says the programs often don’t remember when they last checked, or use the local computer’s clock instead of the website’s clock, causing the reader to download entries over and over.
Perhaps the best thing for us to do is to educate ourselves about which RSS aggregator we use and how it may affect the bandwidth of the feeds we download through it.
I’m taking a class next fall on PHP.
The computer science department is offering a new course next fall called Web Programming with PHP. I’m signing up for it (if I can get the necessary over-rides) because I’ve wanted to learn PHP, but I don’t have enough discipline or programming experience to do it on my own from books. I have these ideas of things I want to do to enhance the user interface with our electronic resources, and I think that PHP will be a good first step towards gaining the knowledge I need to do implement those ideas.
A new book published by No Starch Press.
I received an email today from O’Reilly & Assoc. about this book. I’m on their mailing list for book announcements because I want to keep up with what’s new for computer geeks, since I’m the library liaison to the Computer Science department. This title caught my eye. I’m a bit of a computer geek, but I’m not very good at tinkering with programs or the OS, so my laptop has most of the out of the box configuration for the Corel distribution. Unfortunately, that distribution is no longer supported, and as a result, my kernel is very old (in terms of the age of Linux), and I can’t install most new programs developed for Linux. I’ve been toying with downloading some other distribution, but I haven’t found one yet that is non-geek friendly. If this book was written by the author for his mother, then I think it might be useful for me to at least get my feet wet. Maybe someday when my computer geekiness becomes so great that I dream in UNIX code I’ll look back at this entry and chuckle….
Andrei Codrescu on spam poetry.
I am always pleased to hear Andrei Codrescu‘s commentaries on NPR, and last night’s piece on “spam poetry” was no exception. I have been wondering about those bizarre messages that get filtered to my Held Mail folder. My email provider, SpamCop, uses the SpamAssasin software along with other spam filtering programs to keep my inbox clean.
Popular bloggers or plagiarizers? You decide.
Wired magazine has an article about the infection rate of weblogs. They looked at the sources of information for popular blogs and found that in many cases, less popular blogs were the first sources, and often the more popular blogs did not cite their sources.
“The most-read webloggers aren’t necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs.”
We need to get some librarians out there to teach people how to do proper citations. This story reminded me of a professor I spoke with recently who had his class re-do a one page issue paper assignment because half of them had blatantly plagiarized (i.e. cut and paste entire paragraphs from the web). Most of them had no idea that what they did was wrong.
“What is blogging?” or “Is there such a thing as too many feeds?”
While I was on the reference desk yesterday (sorry, no refgrunt), I was making use of a short lull by catching up on my blog and news reading. As I sat there skimming over my Bloglines feeds, my colleague and fellow blog fan Steve came up and noticed my subscription total — 59 feeds. He was amazed that I could keep up with so many feeds at once, and I must admit, it does take sometime. Although quite a few of those feeds are not very prolific, there are some writers who make up for those and then some. Steve commented that this volume of content is more reactive than proactive — meaning that I spend more time reading other people’s thoughts and reacting to them than I do coming up with my own. He’s probably right, and that concerns me.
I’ve gone through and cleared out some stuff that was either deadwood or feeds that I’ve stopped reading because they are too time consuming for what I get out of them. I’m left with 52 feeds, but 7 of them are not really serious stuff, more of an alerting service. I suppose that I will be adding more relevant feeds in the future, but for now I’ll try to keep it to just these, and maybe they’ll inspire some original thought that I can post here to keep my readers busy.
On the other hand, a good bit of blogging is about posting one’s own thoughts and reactions to other things, whether they are events in the news or random websites. Perhaps the very nature of blogging is reactive, and those that have made it proactive have moved from blogging to…. what would something proactive be called? Journalism? Something else?
Bloglines is a great tool. I’m going to blab on about it for a couple of paragraphs if you don’t mind.
I’m trying to get that word into common usage, but since I’m a virtual nobody in the library blogging scene (much less the wider blogging scene), it probably won’t happen. Anyway, that’s not what this post is about.
When I first got into reading weblogs, I initially had my favorites bookmarked in a special folder just for blogs. Then I learned about RSS (possibly from Greg or Steven) and decided to check out reading blogs through an aggregator, or what I like to call a feeder. I was hooked! The convenience of this method was very intoxicating. I began subscribing to more blogs and new sources than I had in my bookmarking days. Then I began to get overwhelmed.
Mondays were the worst. I would come into work early, turn on my computer, and SharpReader would load and then download the new entries for all of those blogs. It would take me close to an hour (sometimes longer) to catch up on the reading. Also, since I started maintaining a blogroll of my favorite blogs to read, I was having to add to both my feeder and to the blogroll every time I ran across a new one, which I didn’t always remember to do.
I had heard Bloglines mentioned a few times as being a good place for beginners to get familiar with reading RSS feeds, and Steven touted the capability to filter email to the feeder, which is a nice for saved searches in Google News and other sites that do not have RSS but do have email announcements. I wasn’t sure I wanted to give up some of the features that my desktop feeder provided for me, but there were two more aspects of Bloglines that convinced me in the end: blogroll generation from subscribed feeds (no more duplication of work!) and the ability to access my feeds from anywhere (no more ovewhelming Monday mornings!). I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I hardly remember any of the features that my desktop feeder had that Bloglines doesn’t have. Probably the only thing I miss is the automatic archiving of posts, but all I need to do for that is to go to the website of the blog in question.
Yet another librarian blogging about del.icio.us.
I have resisted jumping on the del.icio.us bandwagon until now. For the most part, I haven’t felt the need to make public and categorize my bookmarks. I even doubt that I will ever use it for that purpose. However, I thought it might be nice to give some of my favorite websites a plug by adding them to my del.icio.us. For those that care, here’s the RSS feed.
