Small Signals

A New Direction : SFPL Internship (Week 1 recap)

2012-01-31T22:14:00.000-08:00

If you were perhaps wondering what possessed me to take up my writing again, let me clear the mystery: it's required for a class. To be specific: an internship. To fulfill my course requirement for an online log to document my experience.

My internship is a "virtual" one, with the San Francisco Public Library, and my duties will be to investigate digital best practices as well as to catalog one part of a specific collection from the Archives. It sounds very interesting, and I'm looking forward to it!

Right now, I'm sorting out the preliminaries and getting my infrastructure in order (for instance, this blog), while waiting for word from my site supervisor. I also need to speak with her to see if there are any aspects of my internship that she would not want written about on my blog (if she wants me to use her name or a pseudonym, etc) -- but by the end of Week 2 (Feb 5th, Super Bowl Sunday) I should have enough information to begin logging my experiences properly.

To my class-mates and professor: welcome aboard! and thanks for taking time to read my log. As always, I'll try to make it meaningful. Please feel free to leave comments for me if something you read here sparks them!

Another high-quality blog

2012-01-26T01:42:00.000-08:00

Don't let the trendy-sounding name of this blog turn you away -- Study Hacks is the best I have found and the only blog that I follow habitually and re-read carefully. The author is Cal Newport, and he is on a quest to lead an extraordinary life in an academic environment. He is thoughtful, sincere and humorous, and I always learn something from him. Hopefully one day I can return the favor. Thank you Cal, good luck with your dream.

Hello Again!

2012-01-26T00:13:00.000-08:00

It is now 2012, nearly 6 years after I created this little blog (which has been dormant since then), and a lot has happened -- but some things remain the same: for instance, I'm still grappling with internet privacy issues, still attending grad school in library science, and still seeking ways to communicate meaningfully online with others without wasting too much of the reader's time (or my own).

Some housecleaning:
Of the two links I provided in 2007, Nicholas Morin is still actively blogging (and now provides helpful English summaries of his posts. Thank you Mr Morin!) -- but MoBuzz has gone bankrupt and disappeared. Some sort of German hipster search engine has replaced it at that web address, but I'm not convinced they're really the same thing. So I think I will pull that link until I can locate the actual MoBuzz vlog episodes. In the meantime, you can find some of them on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/mobuzz?blend=2&ob=0

"The internet is forever", they say, but huge chunks of it seem to have a startlingly brief lifespan.

Quick Aside ...

2007-12-13T15:01:00.000-08:00

Fifteen minutes a day, or one hour a week -- either way, it's barely enough time to read and digest a company's privacy policy before signing up for a 2.0 website account, let alone adjusting the defaults and investigating the tutorials.

No wonder the OCLC survey found that even though Internet users' top concern was "Privacy", less than half actually read privacy policies or adjusted the defaults on their accounts when they signed up to use 2.0 technologies -- they were probably too time-pressed to consider those things.

Hmmm.

It took me 15 minutes to compose this entry and post it.

Either I am a very slow typist/thinker (which is probably true), or else the time-requirement for this project is a bit optimistic!

Thing 2 (Part 2.5) : I Found Another Blog! -- and some thoughts on youth and privacy

2007-12-11T22:09:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned before, I recently finished writing a paper related to youth, 2.0 technologies and privacy. I'm fascinated by this constellation of topics -- of the way that the younger generations willingly give so much of their privacy away online. Is it because they are more "thick-skinned" than the older generation (as so many have speculated: Emily Nussbaum and Jason Fry to name two) -- or is it simply because young people haven't yet been through the kind of life experiences (a messy divorce, an overzealous admirer, etc) that would make them realize the value of their privacy yet? I tend to think it might be the latter. If that's so, then I'm very fortunate to have learned the value of my privacy before there were so many opportunities to compromise it globally.

I wonder what it will be like several years from now. Will those of us who've resisted transparency "thicken our skins" and join this generation in their public confessions, or will it be the opposite -- will everyone, young and old, suddenly revalue their privacy (what's left of it) and close up, sandwiching this three-year glut of information between years of secrecy -- like the way drought rings encircle a flood ring deep inside the trunk of a growing tree?

One source I used heavily for my paper was a recent OCLC social networking report. I was fortunate that it was released within a few weeks of the due date. If it had been released any later, there wouldn't have been enough time to incorporate it. So thank you OCLC for your good timing! Here is the report:

http://www.oclc.org/reports/sharing/default.htm

As I was reading the commentary from various library people in the report, I noticed that I shared many opinions about privacy, Internet and libraries with a French librarian named Nicolas Morin. For example, this:

(from page 6-16 of the report)

"...On the other hand, people should (and will hopefully) better learn how to manage their online identities. One will learn how to keep some things for oneself while being online, how to have several online identities with a wall between some of them so as to prevent some information from being pulled together. I think libraries and librarians have an educational role here ..."

Morin's thoughts in that paragraph were very similar to the thesis and conclusion of my paper, so I was pleased to see that someone else felt this way, and that I could use such ideas for extra support. I feel that the crucial role librarians can play in the 2.0 environment is not in the creation of yet more social networking sites to compete with MySpace and so on, but in the creation of a program to enhance "Privacy Literacy" -- that is, a baseline of understanding of privacy issues, so that those who tell-all online can do so out of informed choice, not out of ignorance or accident. And so that those who tell nothing can do so out of informed choice, not out of paranoia or frustration. And everyone in between can also do so for informed reasons.

It seems that Nicolas Morin has a blog!
So, I wanted to make his blog my second link.

Oh, but it's in French
(naturally).

To be honest, I only know enough of French to ask for certain cheeses in the supermarket; to say "thanks" and "hello" and "please"; and to adequately pronounce the surnames of the 98 World Cup winning soccer/football squad.

So I'll have to filter his blog through Babelfish until I'm fluent.
But perhaps you know enough French to read it without filtering?
I envy you.

Thing 2 (Part 2) : Link Some Blogs and Vlogs

2007-12-06T16:16:00.000-08:00

With something like 5 kazillion blogs and vlogs (including mine now, too, *sigh*) going up in the world every second, it's surprisingly difficult to find a few that you like. And it's not so much out of finickiness as it is out of sheer information overload. Finding a few blogs and vlogs to cuddle up to, well, it actually requires reading them -- and not just a post or two, but about a month's worth, to get a good idea of the person's style and favorite topics. I was given one hour to devote to my task today, and by the time I'd settled in, got my bearings, taken a few search engines for a spin, and read a few entires, I was at the "95% time spent" mark!

... so I did what the pros say you should do when you're under fire:
I fell back on something I knew.

Mobuzz.

This irreverent little tech/info/web news show was a great help to me recently when I was researching a project related to libraries and 2.0 technology. So I guess I'm returning the favor.

I have one vlog link! Yes!
Hopefully I'll find time to read -- and add -- a few of the other 5 kazillion soon.

Wish me luck.

Thing 2 -- Discovering Blogs

2007-11-29T16:15:00.000-08:00

Currently, I'm participating in a program, in which I've been asked to comment on various 2.0 technologies. That's what the "Thing" tags mean. Since I've only just begun the program -- and blogging, too! -- I don't have much to say about either yet, but I'm sure that will change as time goes on ...

When I do have something to share about blogs, I'll either post those comments within this message, or into another message. I think it will depend on how much I have to say, on how easy it is to edit previously posted messages, and on how well the messages will "flow" together (also perhaps on how easy it will be for readers to follow along if the content of my previous postings changes frequently).

Hey, not bad.

I've only been here a few minutes and I found something interesting to think about tonight: if the structure of a blog is best by time, by subject, or by something else!

Why I'm here ...

2007-11-29T15:40:00.000-08:00

Or should I say: why I'm 'здесь' --
because that's how "here" appears in Cyrillic.
It's pronounced: "Zdes'"

I've always liked the sound of the word -- and the meaning, too:
to be in this place and at this time and of this time.

My goal is to make this meaningful for both of us.
That's why it's called "small signal"
Nice to meet you.