explodedlibrary.info

i <3 atomized texts

Time to put into practice what I was writing about a couple of posts ago.

Michael Gorman has just annoyed me again (via Librarian in Black), but I’m not going to write about him. Instead I want to write about why I think that atomized information is mostly a good thing.

As a blogger, I am used to having my writing atomized. Blogs are designed to be atomized. Some posts are more popular than others. Some sections of posts are more popular and are atomized when quoted in isolation from the rest of the post.

If I cared to study the matter more systematically I could probably see some ideas and themes developing since I started this blog almost 3 years ago. But it’s not really that important. Otherwise, I would demand that all my new readers begin with my very first post and read every one in chronological order before they were ready for the stuff I’m writing now. The very thought is ludicrous.

Of course there is a huge difference between unfinished and unfixed blogs and books that were written as a single unit. It would be an understatement to say that authors go to a great deal of trouble in arranging the content of their books. Atomization – ripping a few relevant paragraphs or sentences or words from these finished edifices – undoes all of that work. It wouldn’t surprise me if some authors aren’t comfortable with this. To that I say, the intentions of the author are irrelevant. I don’t want to go any more post-modern than this, but a text gains its meaning from how it is interpreted and read, not from the intentions of its author.

screenshots

I just added some screenshots to my last iPod post. Better late than never. It wasn't that painful, so I expect to do more of this in the future.

IM status

I've just added a new feature on this blog which will allow you to see my IM status in my left sidebar. It's AIM only - I'm a Mac user, and like to use that most elegant IM software, iChat AV. I do have other accounts - ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! (collecting email addresses and screen-names is one of my vices), but if you're trying to IM me, iChat is the one that I'm most likely to have on in the background.

pondering the rant

My DSL service has finally switched on at my new place! I've been wanting to go on a big rant against my ISP which had been bungling the transfer of my DSL service to my new apartment. It's been particularly annoying because I had a few ideas for posts in this month, and being stuck on dialup - on a fairly busy shared phone line - has made this difficult. I'm postponing my goals for July (testing trackbacks, moderated comments and ads) through to the end of August, because I just haven't been able to do enough blogging in July. I guess that off-line blogging (as discussed in my post here) is possible, but it's not the way that I like to blog. It creates a disconnect between reading and writing. Maybe this could lead to more considered posts, but it also diminishes the spontaneity which is one of the possibilities of blogging. Even worse is that it separates the research from the writing - I now realise that I research as I write, or more accurately, that the processes for these two things are so deeply intertwined now that it's difficult when I try to do these things separately.

But back to the ranting, I was tempted to castigate this company. From time to time, I've had a mind to vent my spleen at a few other companies, banks, retailers etc., but generally I've decided not to. For one thing, there are legal issues. I am concerned about the impact of defamation on freedom of speech, particularly now that I'm living in Australia again. I don't agree with our defamation laws and think that truth alone should always be a defence and that breaches of privacy should be dealt with separately, but that's what the law is right now in NSW - and the law should generally be respected and obeyed even when it is being an Ass.* [I'm resisting the urge to digress into jurisprudence and discuss the limits, if there should be any, of our obedience to unjust and immoral laws]

But matters of law aside, I just don't want to be wasting my energy on these negative issues any more than I need to. If bloggers gradually accumulate positive credibility, I think that every negative post about a company or person has a chance of backfiring, and damaging the blogger as much as her/his target. Maybe it's possible to get away with a few attacks, but after a while, people might start to think, "He's just another ranter/hater/troll" - and the credibility plummets. (Unless of course, one's credibility is based on negativity, in which case the opposite would apply.) This all sounds terribly amoral - of course there are moral arguments that are relevant, but that's opening another can of worms.

Of course I'll still be negative sometimes, especially towards ideas and generalities which I disagree with. I just hope that on this blog at least, I'll make myself pause and take a deep breath before ranting at specific targets.

taking a nuanced view of the Federal Court of Australia's anti-linking decision

[20/12/06 update: The decision in this case has recently been upheld by the Full Federal Court of Australia. For information about how this case was treated on appeal, see this commentary by Kim Weatherall]

In no shape or form do I approve or agree with the "anti-linking decision" recently handed down by the Federal Court of Australia in the Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Cooper [2005] FCA 972 (14 July 2005). Having read the decision for myself, I do think that there is some hyperbole in some of the criticisms of this case. People were all too happy to take a nuanced reading of the Grokster decision. My argument is that the Cooper case deserves a similar nuanced reading. The respondent Cooper lost one key point, but the applicants – Universal Music Australia and the other members of Australia’s Content Cartel – didn’t get everything which they wanted either.

Most importantly, Tamberlin J rejected the applicant’s contention that merely linking to copyrighted material on the web infringes copyright.

The Federal Court held against Cooper for a different reason, that his website was designed to facilitate and enable its users to infringe copyright. The site, mp3s4free.net, fell afoul of the rule prohibiting authorization of copyright infringement which exists in Australian copyright law. The fact that mp3s4free.net had many deep direct links to infringing copies of sound files on third party sites hurt their case. Who knows that would have happened if mp3s4free.net’s links had been to htm or similar regular web pages, and not directly to the sound files.

The Content Cartel wanted to make it illegal for anybody to provide links to infringing material. That argument failed. Instead the Court has held against the practice of linking to files in such a way that facilitates and encourages other people to infringe. One of the cited High Court authorities states that authorization “connotes a mental element.” (see para. 79 of the decision)

I don’t like this decision, I think it has some disturbing implications and hope it is appealed and overturned by the High Court of Australia. But hysteria and hyperbole aren’t helpful responses to it.

Excerpts from Tamberlin J's opinion:

57 The applicants allege that Cooper has directly infringed the applicants’ copyright in the music sound recordings by communicating these recordings to the public. …

the power and/or vulnerability of named and anonymous bloggers

Gormangate and Croningate: Prominent individuals in the library academia and professional associations write columns criticizing bloggers and are themselves flooded with criticism. A few responses were supportive, some were nuanced responses, others expressed strong disagreement on the issues (how I view my own responses). There was also a large number of mostly anonymous personal attacks.

Los Alamos Bloggers: An anonymous employee-run blog airs employees’ frustration about the management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In what would have been an organization’s nightmare, much dirty laundry was aired which was noticed in Washington DC and may have precipitated the departure of its unpopular director.

The Dog Shit Girl: A young Korean woman flouts manners and norms by refusing to clean up after her dog on a train. She is photographed, the photo is uploaded onto the internet, where she is identified and humiliated. She thought that she had been an anonymous face in the crowd, but once her identity had been discovered she was vulnerable to what was arguably disproportionate punishment at the hands of a cyber posse. There's one thing about this incident which I'd really like to know - were most of the people involved in bringing gae-ttong-nyue to justice, were they using their own names, pseudonyms or were they anonymous?

An anonymous author (“Ivan Tribble is the pseudonym of a humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest.”) writes an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, stating that having a named blog is often viewed as a negative by university search panels. “The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.”

but please, no minimum billable hours for law firm librarians

This article - Heather Smith, Don't count out law librarians, American Lawyer (July 14, 2005) - provides some good examples of librarians meeting the challenges (and opportunities) presented by our current times. Here's one brief quote:

Schnader Harrison partner Donaldson says she's heard no negative feedback from clients when presenting them with bills for librarians' work. "They've been pleased with what [librarians have] been able to ferret out," she says. And since LexisNexis and Westlaw searches are billed as separate line items, cost-conscious clients have begun demanding that lawyers improve their efficiency by using librarians who are more skilled searchers.

Thanks to Library Stuff for the link.

off-line, worries

Is it possible to blog off-line? Well I'll find out this weekend when I move and I'm temporarily without internet access. (btw, right now I don't blog from work and I don't blog about work, except in very general terms. This isn't an ideal situation, but it seems like the right approach at this moment in time)

There are a few things I've been mulling over that I will hopefully be able to draft during some off-line moments. I can store them on a CD or USB drive and upload them in one of Sydney's countless internet cafes.

Now that I've got the mundane stuff out of my system, let me get to the other point of this post. I'm quite worried about a cousin and other relatives that I have in London. In such a big city, what would be the odds? But until I hear that she's ok, it's hard not to worry. I can't even begin to say anything about what an evil, despicable crime this is.

Update: Today I learned that my cousin is OK. That's a relief, but I've also learned more about what happened - so I feel horrified.

the National Library of Australia's PANDORA archive

For reasons that should become apparent, I plan that this will be my first and only post about the National Library of Australia's PANDORA archive.

I received an email from the National Library of Australia (NLA), requesting permission to archive the exploded library in its PANDORA archive of Australian online publications. I agreed, and so now the archived version is available here. I thought that people should know, if only because comments and trackbacks will also be preserved.

Look at these links for some basic information about the PANDORA archive: Editing our future, Sydney Morning Herald (4 May 2005) [requires free registration to view]; Margaret E. Phillips, Selective Archiving of Web Resources: A Study of Acquisition Costs at the National Library of Australia, 9 (3) RLG DigiNews (15 June 2005); FAQs from the NLA about PANDORA.

Yes, there are some in the library and media establishments who might think that blogs are worthless ephemera*, but I’m glad that the National Library of Australia takes a different view.

I’m no historian, but I gather that it’s quite common for writing from outside the establishment to be of interest to people trying to understand what’s been going on at a particular time period.

I doubt that there would be very many bloggers out there who would take offence to have their blog selected as an online publication of “national significance” and being preserved in (presumed) perpetuity. Just this week I was wondering how long this blog would stay around on the web if I happened to get hit by a bus during my perilous crossings of McEvoy St.

I still can’t believe this blog has had that sort of recognition. I wonder if it helps that the people making these selections are librarians and I have one of the more prominent Australian library blogs.

One of the weird things is that I’m going to need to resist the urge to be more self-conscious, now that I know that my words here will be preserved in this manner. I feel kind of inspired to keep this blog going and may end up trying to improve the quality and quantity of my posts, which is a good thing … I guess ;) That's the reason why I don't plan on writing any other posts about this. In fact, the less that I think about it, the better.

I think it’s unfortunate that because of a flaw in Australian copyright law the NLA has to ask permission to archive online publications in this manner. Blogs are different from books in that they are never really finished or fixed (in the copyright sense of the word). A book can only be collected and archived after it has been completed and published. I think it would be better if the NLA were just able to do what they needed to according to legal deposit laws, because that would reduce the extent to which the act of observation (or in this case, archiving) influences the behaviour of the thing being observed. 

In the short-term nothing will change. Before this I was aware of the Google cache and the fact that the practice of googling exists. This is just another level of preservation.

Like many Australians, I don’t have much time for patriotism. I love the land and most of its people, but I am frequently embarrassed by the nation and its leaders. So it’s odd and feels kind of nice, to know that in this area, Australia is leading the way, and that I’m involved in it.

* I’m sure critics of blogs would appreciate the irony of blogs being collected in the PANDORA archive, seeing that in the myth, Pandora’s Box contained “the sorrows and evils of mankind within it.” But PANDORA contains many other Australian online publications, not just blogs.

testing a few changes on this blog

For the month of July, I’ll be trying out a some different things with this blog.

First, trackback is returning to this blog, at least for all new and recent posts. I’m doing this because trackbacks can now moderated by me, so I don’t have to be quite so worried about trackback spam. It was because of a very bad outbreak of trackback spam that I turned off this feature last year.

The downside to this is that this means that comments will also be moderated. Ideally on this blog, I would just moderate trackback and leave comments alone. There is a legitimate concern that slow moderation could impede the flow of conversation in comments, and I have really appreciated some of the conversations which have happened this year. So I’ll try to be quick with approving comments, but there will be impediments caused by time zone differences if nothing else.

I’ll be evaluating these changes in a month. So if it turns out I don’t get any trackbacks and my comments drop down, I’ll probably dump this change.

The other change is that I’ll be trying out some advertising – the feature which I mentioned here with some skepticism. I’ve since looked into it some more, and feel sufficiently reassured to at least give this a test on a temporary basis. Those of you who read this solely by the rss feed won’t be affected at all. For people who do look at the actual blog, you will have an important say in whether ads stay or go. If enough of you hate the idea of blogs with advertising and never click on one of the ad links, the ads will most likely go. I won’t keep them unless they’re worth my while. On the other hand, some of you might choose to click on an ad link once in a while, kind of like a tip jar.

I may also think about changing the look of this blog, now that I have a few more options at my disposal. By the way, the larger fonts on my sidebars aren't my changes, probably a bug associated with the changes to TypePad which have just happened.

At the beginning of August, to coincide with the third anniversary of this blog, I’ll decide what will be staying for the next year.