Tuesday, 13 January 2009

Arcadia lecturer on Radio 4

Michelle spotted that James Boyle features in an episode of 'In Business' on Radio 4. It's on iPlayer for two more days at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00gdyk8

What else to call an e-book?

Interesting post here about e-book terminology: By any other name. However, there's no suggestions of alternatives to use: any thoughts?

Monday, 12 January 2009

Amazing stats, v 3.0

49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats.

I particularly like these:


133,000,000 - number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

346,000,000 - number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)

900,000 - average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period

1,750,000 - number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)

77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

55% - percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)

81 - number of languages represented in the blogosphere

59% - percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years.

New Arcadia Fellows

Lizz Edwards-Waller and Keren Mills are the Arcadia Fellows for this Term. I'm hoping that you'll see both of them posting here before too long.

Wednesday, 7 January 2009

Libraries in a world of permanent connectivity

Lorcan Dempsey has an interesting article in First Monday.  Abstract reads (in part):

"Libraries have been working to develop network-ready services. Mobile communication intensifies this activity and adds new challenges as they look at what it means to be mobile-ready. This has organizational implications as a shift of emphasis towards workflow integration around the learner or researcher creates new relationships with other service organizations on campus. It also has implications for how space is used, for library skills, and for how collections are developed. We can see the impact of mobile communication on services in two ways. First, services may be made mobile-ready, as with special mobile interfaces for library services, alerting services, and so on. Second, mobilization continues the restructuring of services, organizations and attention that networking has brought about. Think here of how to socialize and personalize services; how to adapt to collection and service use which spans personal, institutional, and cloud environments; how to position and promote the library ‘brand’ as services become atomized and less ‘visible’ on the network; and more complex questions about what best to do locally and what to source with collaborative arrangements or third parties."

Tuesday, 6 January 2009

The NINES project

Keynote speaker at the CRASSH symposium on digital humanities drew my attention to NINES.  Looks like an extraordinary project.

Monday, 5 January 2009

The impact of the Google books judgment

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the effect that Google Book Search is having on researchers.