explodedlibrary.info

fog and snow and flames

stream of consciousness post about this week

Such a magical fog this morning!
Sight of snow on the Brindabellas
Flames next to my old workplace
Going back to the gym for the first time since my cold, not as bad as I was dreading
A reprieve at work, it was going to be a trainwreck - not my trainwreck, but not something I wanted to see - never been more grateful for an internet outage
Researching leadership, wishing I could absorb what I was finding
Blogging at work - does that count for #blogjune?
Watching BSG season 2
Finished Jasper Fforde’s First among sequels
Processing insights into how I write and don’t write

a lost post about Content and being a radical

[I've had a relapse with recovering from this cold, so tonight I'm using the lazy option for my #blogjune post. When I switched blogging platforms in 2003, there was a bit of a problem and I lost a number of posts. I had a very ugly text export of the old blog, and so eventually I manually reformatted and republished several posts in the new platform. I didn't get around to rescuing all of the lost posts. The following post was first published on 9 June 2003. It begins with a discussion of the blog's then new tagline - which is now only exists in the Wayback Machine. It's interesting about the radical thing - maybe it's about being 8 years older, but I would no longer call myself a radical law librarian. These days I'm more interested in ideas than identifying with a particular label. But I haven't entirely changed, attempts to circumvent copyright's idea / expression of idea distinction continue to make me extremely annoyed.]

I was thinking of adding something like "a radical law librarian's perspective" at the end of the description, but decided against it, because I didn't like the idea of my description being 3 lines long.

I was also toying with the idea of capitalizing the word Content or putting the word in quotation marks because I find it deeply ironic the way that all of the important things on the web have been reduced to being just one form of content or another. Sometimes I get the impression that some techie people think that one sort of content is interchangeable with any other sort of content. Of course, in a way this is true, but this attitude defeats the whole idea of content in the first place. The whole point is that words, images, sounds etc have context, and are not interchangeable! Also it leads to travesties like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which side-steps the crucial idea/expression of idea distinction by declaring everything to be digital media.

Anyway, I didn't do this because a capital letter would have stood out like a sore thumb and some people think the ironic use of quotation marks to be pretentious - or something which Dr Evil likes  to do :) Not that I really care if somebody thinks I'm pretentious - that's her/his problem - but I am aware that quotation marks lose their effectiveness if they're used too frequently.

diluting the heart

I am not somebody who believes that real life (RL) friendships always trump online friendships. I have seen some amazing things happen from online connections - the formation of Libraries Interact comes to mind, the empathy I found amongst people active in LiveJournal, the camaraderie I feel with a lot of bloggers. I have seen amazing creative and logistical achievements in various World of Warcraft guilds (*waves to the Librarian guild on Aerie Peak*).

On the other hand, I know that online friendships are not the same as RL friendships. Online only friends will never be able to help you move or mind your cat. If something really bad happens, like a car accident or a health problem, your online only friends won’t be able to pick you up from the hospital.

There is also a fragility about online only friendships. They can end unexpectedly, and when they end, it is often permanent, with no hope of reconciliation. The problem is that an online only relationship is a filtered relationship. We only connect with a certain part of the other person. There could be other problems in that person’s life which we have no knowledge of, until it’s too late. And if there’s a problem in that one space where we interact, then we lack that whole person view which provides the extra motivation and the means for fixing things.

There is a tendency to think it’s easier to just drop an online only friend than a RL friend. The cynical view is that this is because the chances of stumbling across that person again are so minute, that seems easier to replace rather than repair that relationship. This is becoming less true than it used to be. Over the last decade I’ve noticed a convergence between RL and online friends.

Last year I wrote about Twitter and Facebook in terms of their impact on “old fashioned” blogging. Now I’ll write something about the impact which they are having on communication more generally.

I confess that by most people’s definitions, I’m a terrible Facebook friend. I hardly ever login - and when I do login in, I’m so behind with everybody’s news that I hardly leave comments. I never upload photos, because frankly I don’t trust Facebook. I’d rather share my photos on a platform I have more control over.

I prefer to view myself as a minimalist Facebook user. I use Facebook as a dynamic and extended address book to preserve the means for contacting people (and catching up on their news) when I feel like making that contact. One problem is that I don’t feel like making that contact as often as Facebook wants me to - unless something from outside Facebook inspires me to do so.
Another problem is that other people have very different views and may interpret my relative lack of interest in their Facebook/Twitter as a lack of interest in them.

It’s a weird situation. Now we have the technology to stay connected with so many more people, so much more efficiently. In terms of potential interactions per minute of effort, Facebook and Twitter blow older technologies - email, phone calls, letters - out of the water.

But are these good interactions, the sort that really nurture a friendship? That might depend on the type of friendship. A friendship that’s mainly based in RL would not suffer from Facebook neglect.

Now that the technological constraints have been removed, is there another limit on the number of friendships we can maintain?
I wonder if the human psyche is limited in the number of specific people which it can care about at any one time?
I could imagine that different people could have different limits, but surely even the most extroverted have an upper limit - at which point new friends just blur into the crowd of overwhelmity or they remain distinct (at the expense of somebody else, who gets blurred).

Maybe in this way, I’m a bit of a luddite and one day I’ll change my mind and pay my dues to Facebook. But for now, I say that it is just one of many tools for maintaining a friendship, and must not be mistaken for the friendship itself.

crunching the gearbox

A few weeks back I drove a manual (stick shift) car for the first time in four and a half years. It wasn't too bad, I eventually remembered how to use the clutch and worked out the feel of the gears, but it was awkward at first. The worst moment has when I needed to downshift from 5th gear to 3rd, and I think for the horrible moment I think I was in 2nd, and there was that horrible sound of gear crunching as I tried to fix things up. But most of the time I'm not such a terrible driver.

If only I could manage my life as well as I can manage a car.

I’ve been sick with a cold for the last few days. It’s not the worst cold I’ve had, although according to somebody who seemed to have this one about a week earlier than me - I’m now about to enter the phlegm stage. Sorry, that’s probably way too much information...

Moving right along then. One thing about getting sick is that it forces you to change gears. At least it does for me. In the last few weeks I've been feeling rejuvenated - in my writing, exercise and diet, and just trying to live a better a life. Then I get sick and I have to change my focus onto recovery. I'm worried that that I'm going to have trouble switching gears again from sick mode back to healthy mode.

All this has happened before. In fact it's happened so often that I'm eventually seeing the pattern. I feel that I've finally turned the corner, that I'm cruising along quite well, until something happens which forces me to switch gears. It could be an illness or a relationship issue or work hassles or moving hassles or some family problem or whatever. Maybe I handle the hazard well or I don't. The problem is that when that hazard has passed, I forget to speed up again.

So this post is a conscious signal to myself: Get ready to change gears and make some progress before the next slow down happens. Because there will always be something which comes along and forces us to slow down.

the most important question

Is it worth making a post to say that I'm not posting anything for #blogjune today because I've been sick?

Probably not.

a few lessons learned from when I was a manager

This post was drafted nearly two years ago - a couple of months after I started my first management job. I decided not to post it then. I think I felt too inexperienced to be imparting my so-called wisdom to anyone, and it’s not as if I had an easy time of it in my first few months of managing. Now, my perspective is a little different. This blog serves many purposes, but one purpose is to supplement my memory. Writing and publishing these notes here makes the experience and the knowledge more real - for me, at least.

Since finishing that first stint at management, I’ve had two serious opportunities to become a manager permanently. This is more to do with being in the right place at the right time than any inherent ability. Although tempted, each time I went for the non-management option which seemed to promise the more interesting work or the better environment. I'm not avoiding being a manager, but it's not the goal of my career either.

I feel that I have enough experience of management that I don’t need to be afraid of it, I can avoid some of the pitfalls and I won’t be excessively dazzled by what it has to offer.

I would not say I have a natural talent at management, but that’s ok, because the worst managers are those who think they are great at it. As a fairly introverted person, I sometimes felt I was at an disadvantage when compared with my more extroverted colleagues. On the other hand, I felt that sometimes being introverted was a real asset.

I like diversity of all sorts. Any theory of management which proclaims that good managers must have a particular personality type is wrong-headed, depriving workplaces of a diversity of temperament and leaving it more susceptible to group think-induced mistakes.

Anyway, this is what I drafted -

1. Find a mentor and/or confidant - outside of your area

This is a difficult one - both to stick to, and because of the inevitable negative consequences when this isn’t followed.
As a manager, you are held to a higher standard than your staff. There will always been annoyances and annoying people in the workplace. It can helpful to vent about these irritations, but do so in the right way. Never complain about one direct report in front of another direct report. The days of sending email rants are over (if there's no other outlet for you, draft something outside your email programme, to lessen the temptation of sending it).
Better yet, confide in somebody outside of the situation - ideally an experienced manager in another organization who can give you some non-interested and non-specific advice.

2. Find some quiet time, and make the most of it

One of the biggest changes about being a manager is that your work time is no longer your own. Expect to be interrupted at any moment - it could be anything, from crisis management to leave requests and other administrative tasks to receiving stupid questions which your staff shouldn’t need to be asking you. It can be exciting - your work days can take some very unexpected turns.
When so much time is spent helping your team members do their jobs, it can get difficult to do your own job and the things your manager is wanting from you. One way is to find some quiet time - such as starting early or finishing late or (if you’re lucky - and sparingly) working from home - and do this work then.
Your manager is more likely to gauge your performance by how you deal with the tasks he has given you, rather than how you are helping your staff, so keep perspective.

3. Be prepared to make mistakes

As a new manager, you will make mistakes and people will expect this of you. All you can do is pick yourself up, debrief (one of my managers used to talk about “lessons learned”) and move on. Throw yourself into a challenging reference query or technical question to short circuit any unhelpful rumination. Dwelling on past mistakes helps nobody.

4. Find something to enjoy about the role

When you become a manager, you generally get paid more, but there has to be some other work-related reward you can focus on. Nothing damages a workplace's morale than a miserable manager, who doesn’t really want to be there. Particularly when you’re having a bad day, it’s good to think about something you like about being a manager. As a manager you get to participate in those strategic and higher level conversations about the future of your workplace. These can be extremely interesting - and rewarding. Even more rewarding, but it’s often not apparent until after some time has passed, is seeing how you have been able to help particular staff grow into their roles, sort out problems and develop professionally.

Almost two years on, I would add this one: The only way to be keep the respect of your staff is to be true to who you are. Don’t let the organization compromise the traits and values which define you. If you think you’re changing for the worse, it’s time to get out.

the difference of 8 years and a Pacific Ocean

This post is inspired by Peta Hopkin’s Day 4 summary in Libraries Interact. Tonight I’m not really in the mood for writing anything, so I thought I’d make something instead.

I’ve made 2 Tagul tag clouds looking at two specific time periods for this blog. The first cloud is covers April - September 2003, when I was living in Minnesota in the USA. The second tag cloud goes from the end of June 2010 until yesterday. Most of that is June 2011. There’s probably a similar amount of words feeding into these clouds - my posts were generally shorter in the early days.

I don't know if it's helpful to study tag clouds in detail, but they certainly help show larger differences. Am I more focused now? Information is huge on the more recent cloud. I can see that in 2003, I wrote more about US politics and general technology/web issues than I do now.

 

 

 

grassland panopticon

My partner and I have been in our new place for 6 weeks, but we only got our blinds yesterday. It is a totally new place, and blinds/curtains weren’t on the list of inclusions. We weren’t too happy with any of the options in Canberra, so we ended up getting blinds from a company based in Yass. Window coverings are one of those things which we take for granted. I’ve missed them - particularly because of how they help with both privacy and energy efficiency.

Some of our neighbours have put up sheets on their windows, but we never considered that. We really like our view - literally across the street is a nature reserve which stretches all the way to the New South Wales border. Growing up in Tasmania, I’ve always been interested in borders. When I lived in Minnesota, I used to enjoyed crossing the St. Croix River and visiting Wisconsin. It’s interesting that I’m now living in the Australian Capital Territory, a small enclave within NSW, where the border is always close by.

It’s dusk as I write this and I’m keeping an eye on the darkening grasslands across the street, which gradually becomes a low wooded rise. On some days, it’s possible to see dozens of kangaroos on the grasslands. I can’t see any today, they must be somewhere else in the reserve, or I just can’t see them.

I do a lot of bushwalking in the Mulligans Flat nature reserve. It’s not as flat as its name suggests. There’s a nice variety of terrain - from grassland to woodland (sparsely wooded areas) to forest. It’s amazing how many kangaroos I see during these walks. When they stand still, they blend into the landscape extremely well. If they think you can’t see them, you can get very close to them before they lose their nerve and jump away. When I do notice them, I often don’t make eye contact with them and pretend they’re not there. Sometimes when I do that, I can walk by, extremely close, and they don’t jump away.

But the weird thing about walking in Mulligans Flat - or in a lot of places in the Australian bush, for that matter - is that at any moment, there could be dozens of sets of eyes looking at you, observing you carefully, gauging how much of a threat you pose. It can be a bit disconcerting to be aware of the scale of this observation, so I usually decide to think about something else.

It’s now totally dark outside. I shut my blinds. After all, I don’t want any curious kangaroos from the nature reserve across the road to observe to the blogger is his natural habitat.

revisiting AFR.com

I wrote three posts about AFR.com back in 2007. All along I have thought that the Australian Financial Review's strategy with its website has been flawed. I’m reflecting now on why the topic was so compelling for me - I think it was personal irritation at something which was making my life more difficult combined with the fascination of seeing a company absolutely determined to do a stupid thing. At the time I worked in a business school library and we worked with business case studies. I remain convinced that one day somebody will write a case study about AFR.com - as an example of how not to monetize content.

Five years on, the AFR.com approach of taking customers for granted and thumbing its nose at intermediaries (content aggregators and librarians) is finally wearing thin.

On Thursday afternoon I was attending a information session for Factiva customers*. There was a very interesting presentation from Chris Pash, Director of Content, Asia-Pacific about new Australian content which would be available on Factiva. At the end of this presentation, I asked Chris if there had been any developments on the Australian Financial Review front.

Amazingly, there has been a development. Michael Gill, who has been the champion of the AFR.com strategy, is no longer with Fairfax. There is nothing definite yet, but it seems that Fairfax may be reconsidering its prohibition of licensing the AFR full-text in aggregators such as Factiva.

I’m excited about this news because blocking the aggregators was a key component of AFR.com’s business plan. Nobody at all would pay to use an over-priced and clunky website if that content were easily available in established products which businesses and institutions were used to paying for. If Fairfax is considering this change, they could be reviewing the entire business model.

Chris Pash gave a very insightful analysis of what could be prompting this change. To paraphrase what he said, most of Factiva’s customers are from North America, and for understandable reasons they aren’t all that familiar with the Australian newspaper market. They don’t know that the AFR is the paper of record in Australian business, and so they don’t miss it at all. If they need a business story about Australia, they’re just as happy to use something other than the AFR such as the Australian or the Sydney Morning Herald or the Age. The result is that the AFR’s standing as a business newspaper is being damaged.

Here’s my take on this: The AFR has been so effective at walling off its content that it is gradually making itself irrelevant in the global market.

I don’t want to over-emphasize this development. It may not develop into anything, or if it does, it may be disappointing - if the AFR is only available in Factiva at prohibitive rates or under unreasonable conditions.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this topic. I may have one or two more posts in me about AFR.com, how in its fervour to remove all intermediaries, it alienated the large Australian companies and firms who were initially its most loyal customers. Libraries have a role in this story too. Some have gone to amazing lengths to ensure that their users would not be disadvantaged by the library’s rejection of AFR.com.

Previous posts:

my rant on the afr.com fiasco

from Crikey: Michael Gill pounded over AFR.com fiasco

afr.com follow up

the day finishes and starts at dawn

Something I like about activities like this blogging challenge, and also the way Libraries Interact works in general, is that there's a kind of anarchic order. There's no person in charge and no code of rules defining how #blogjune is meant to operate.

If somebody wants to complete the challenge by posting single word posts for a month, nobody is going to jump up and down and say that the single-worded blogger is not acting within the spirit of the rules, because there are no rules. People get to interpret and even modify the challenge for them as they see fit. It's good to be consistent about it, but there are no hard and fast rules there either.

There are two things I may be doing differently. I may as well write it here so nobody will surprised.

1. The day finishes and starts at dawn

I know, the day is meant to finish and start at 12:00 midnight, but that is a very arbitrary dividing line and it doesn't work very well for me. People of some faiths believe that sunset is the moment when the old day ends and the new day begins. That makes just as much sense as midnight. The only thing midnight offers is rigidity - 12:00 midnight never changes, while the time of sunrise or sunset does. But who cares about this rigidity when we have so much interaction with people from different time zones? I'm so used to thinking that my midnight is not other people's midnight that I may as well take this one step further.

I have nothing against midnight or dusk, but for me, these points don't represent any meaningful transition. At midnight I may be sleeping, but it's more likely that I won't be. It's just another moment in the night. I could be doing anything at dusk - working, commuting, shopping, doing other chores, admiring the sunset while walking in Mulligan's Flat.

For me, dawn is when the new day starts. One moment I'm sleeping, then I wake up, and it's around this time when the sun rises. As we approach the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere, dawn is later than we'd like it to be, but for me at least, it works and that's what I'm sticking to.

This means that for Day 3, I could publish a post at 1:00 am Saturday morning (EET - everybody else's time) but for me it will be 1:00 am on Friday night. Basically I refuse to allow midnight to be my deadline for each #blogjune post.

The next post I write may take longer than my average post but it absolutely must be my third post.

2. The blogging may not all be here

Although it's convenient - and really the only practical way - to list blogs which are participating, it's the bloggers who really sign up for the challenge. This means that one day, I may write a post in my badly neglected LiveJournal and that will count as a post. Who knows, I could (unlikely as it is) start a new blog halfway through June and do the rest of my blogging from there.

These are my interpretations of the blogging challenge. I'm not seeking to impose them on anyone else, but if other people adopt them for themselves, that's fine with me.