Posting 5
Comcast’s internet service has been craptastic for me the past week, and since Thursday I’ve had Internet in ten-second spurts. These readings were completed while hitting “refresh” over and over in the hopes of hitting a period of connection (and I couldn’t connect long enough for “Cloud Computing in Plain English”), and my posts were first completed in Word, then copied and pasted into the Tech Trends group. Among other things on my to-do list this week, I had hoped to continue my Facebook message conversations, send out some e-mails, double check my bank account and credit card balances, upload a video to YouTube, add to my Amazon wishlist, create a Dominick’s shopping list, and update my public and internship blogs, but these were near-impossible tasks without a reliable connection or at least Word or Notepad and cut and paste. However, my rather unproductive week has given me an appreciation of how cloud computing dominates my daily life.
Turning in my portfolio recently has made me hyper-aware of just how much work I’ve done that slipped past me unsaved because of the ubiquity of the cloud. Class posts to Ning and Blackboard have been forever lost, as well as an HTML project put on a long-forgotten web hosts. Personal stuff, too – Facebook messages, e-mails, posts to car troubleshooting message boards, or my progress on online games. Or, sometimes I’ll look at my inboxes and clean up sent and received e-mails, then want to kick myself three months later when I realize I deleted something important.
(I did get an apologetic e-mail from Citi about a hack into their name and address database [http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/business/stories/2011/04/05/consumer-email-addresses-hacked.html], but I can’t tell you the contents of that e-mail because I deleted it. Two downsides to cloud computing.)
Anyway, it seems like many cloud-utilizing websites are pretty good at saving works in progress. Dominick’s Just for U program (http://www.dominicks.com/IFL/Grocery/Offers-Landing-IMG) and Jewel’s shopping list (http://www.jewelosco.com/shopping-list/viewmylist) still save your shopping list even if you close your browser; I can’t remember if Target’s Weekly List saves your list (http://mytargetweekly.target.com/). Yahoo and Blogger regularly save drafts every few minutes. Since we’re all relying so heavily on the cloud, it makes sense to have drafts saved, since connections can fail, or you can just be suddenly interrupted and need to work on your blog post / e-mail / shopping list / game sidequest later or at a different computer. Oddly, Facebook hasn’t caught on to automatic draft saving for their messages.
Aside from draft saving, I hope cloud-utilizing sites begin to offer options to save our cloud-originating work to our desktop. The aforementioned stores allow you to send your shopping list to e-mail, which is good, but I also have lots of things sitting out there that I would like to hold onto – Xanga and Blogger posts, those Facebook messages, my farm in Farmville when I was addicted to that. So far, the only method of saving these things is copy, paste, and Word. Or print screen and Paint. It would be nice if we could hit an export button and have a document created and sent to us. Otherwise, we’re stuck with the backwards methods that don’t do a good job of preserving layout. Not necessarily for printing purposes, but it would be nice to hold on to our work and our experiences in the ever-changing world of the Internet where we’ll use websites for a few months and abandon them, like this group site.
If sites soon offer exportation, though, Stephen Fry probably shouldn’t print out his Twitter feed. It would take 10.5 million pieces of paper (http://www.cartridgesave.co.uk/printeffect/twitter/stats/stephenfry).

Posting 4



While the web agents discussed by Berners-Lee seem like a future possibility, I would like to see more about its economic feasibility before I believe it will truly happen. Remember all those things from the 1950’s that we’re supposed to have today? (Video 1 ) We have the technology areas, but the implementation costs for the average consumer far outweigh the benefits (which are more novel than truly life-altering). Is it worth thousands of dollars to press a button and watch your fridge slowly come out of the wall and open before your delighted eyes? Or is it easier to take a half-second and open the damned thing yourself? It’s just plain silly to pay for the housing, indoor lighting, and energy costs of an indoor garden when you can spend a fraction of the cost and use your backyard.
Not to mention the physical bulk of the mechanisms needed for such silly things as joint microwave-refrigerators. There are androids capable of humanlike movement in the face and upper body (video 2), as well as the ability to react to language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EveR-1), but the bodies themselves are probably composed of mostly heavy movement mechanisms and cosmetics, while the computers running their software and the energy sources are separate entities, tucked away out of sight (http://www.robots-dreams.com/2006/11/realistic_andro.html). Even mobile robots with built-in power and programming are still noisy and fairly slow (video 3). With Big Dog, they have artificially replicated some of our capabilities, such as a sense of balance – but they’ve made a major tradeoff in other organic ways: speed and sustained power. We have yet to come up with something that replicates enough human / organic capabilities to be functional on its own.
With each organic capability engineers and programmers try to replicate, they must put in exponentially more work and development. Whether those developments are markup languages or the use of one material or forma t over another, the standards and common practices are changing, and as soon as you log hundreds of thousands of hours into one development, you have to throw it out for a better technology and start over again. It’s not an efficient way of going about things, but it’s the only choice we’ve had so far. Programmers have been working for years on search engines that understand natural language, and we’re closer than we were ten years ago, but not close enough, and it may turn out that their work will be useless in another ten years. Tags and keywords are another development that may be obsolete in a matter of years.
A program still can’t go out into the web to autonomously collect, evaluate, and organize information without a human being behind the wheel to some degree, like a programmer updating the natural language capabilities. However, it seems like the Semantic Web is almost tying to move in that direction. Like the believers in the Semantic Web / Web 3.0 aren’t saying “instead of cassettes, let’s use CDs,” but instead they’re saying “let’s get rid of the CDs, cassettes, MP3s, and the concept of format altogether.” I don’t think that’s humanly possible.

I really liked Mackenzie’s competition with her mom from the last exercise, so I decided to sort of go in the opposite direction.
http://www.lumbles.com/lis753/exercise09.html

Hi everyone!

Twitter review: http://lumbles.com/lis753/twitter.html
The greatest sandwich in America: http://www.lumbles.com/lis753/exercise08.html
My diminutive kitchen helper: http://lumbles.com/lis753/exercise07.html

Posting #2

While not a library, King Arthur Flour is a company that uses 2.0 technology extremely effectively. I started out as a Facebook fan because I am ferociously loyal and wanted to spread the word about their awesome flour (http://www.facebook.com/#!/kingarthurflour), even if it meant the occasional update I didn’t think I’d care about (I think this was in the early days of Facebook fan pages, when for the first time, there was an actual person updating the page instead of a list of fans). They mentioned having a Twitter page, and since I was new to Twitter (and thought it was information overload central, but instructors kept insisting it was important without really explaining how or why), I decided what the heck and followed their Twitter page (http://twitter.com/kingarthurflour). I noticed that they posted photos of their products in action and links to their blog (http://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/), and I started reading the comments, printing out recipes, and memorizing their baking tips. Since they started mentioning their daily cafe specials (http://www.kingarthurflour.com/ourstore/), I’m planning a road trip to their Vermont store, where I will inevitably drain my bank account on scone pans and Fiore di Sicilia (http://www.kingarthurflour.com/browse/secret-ingredients/).

I have to admit I wasn’t sold on Library 2.0 for a long time, but KAF’s ability to catch my attention, to bounce seamlessly from one tool to the next, and their lack of obvious self-promotion has shown me that yes, it can work, and no, you won’t be throwing yourself at patrons and alienating them. Multiple bakers write the blog entries, but one of the bloggers also seems to control all of the social media, and she actively responds to blog comments, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter mentions, simultaneously sharing event photos on Facebook and responding to user photos (most of their photos have been uploaded by fans, and most page activity is conversations between fans). I guess I first viewed Library 2.0 as a one-sided marketing campaign. I was wrong. It’s really about organizing an online community where librarians and patrons are equals, where you share your common interests and even passions without the boundaries of age, race, gender, dialect, appearance, employment status, disabilities, or anything that impedes face to face interaction. Marketing is merely a by-product.

Maybe I’ve been awake too long at this point and I’m veering from the topic of web jobs, but it’s certainly a nice ideal, and one that requires a very human person or team of persons dedicated to managing the tools that guide that community. It could be a Facebook page that displays tagged photos of the youth Super Smash Brothers tournament, an Omeka-powered website where users can comment on audio clips of your oral history project (http://omeka.org/, another goody from LIS 881), or a comment-enabled blog where you show photos of the latest sci-fi novels on your shelves and link to the author’s Wikipedia page. It’s the connection with other living, breathing humans that are going to make these technologies effective. And isn’t it one of our goals to bring people together so that we might share and learn from each other? Maybe it’s just my own experience, but it seems the Internet has evolved to a place where we are more comfortable than ever to show who we are, instead of fearfully guarding our identities behind screen names as we did in the days of AOL Instant Messenger. We share videos on YouTube of our kids doing silly kid things and our acoustic Radiohead covers, we use our Facebook accounts to comment on Slate columns, and we shamelessly tweet our excitement over the newest DiCaprio movie, then link it all together. This is absolutely our prime opportunity to make meaningful connections with our patrons outside of the library walls.

Here’s some of mine!
http://lumbles.com/lis753/exercise05.html
http://lumbles.com/lis753/exercise04.html