Article on GooglePrint

This month’s issue of FIRST MONDAY, a peer-reviewed journal on the Net, is devoted to selected papers from “Inspiring Discover: Unlocking Collections — WebWise 2006,” the seventh annual conference on libraries and museums in the digital world held in February.

One that may be of particular interest is “Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their kin) in the World of Google,” the conference’s keynote address given by Paul N. Courant. First Monday, volume 11, number 8 (August 2006)] URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_8/courant/index.html

Abstract
“The prospect of ubiquitous digitization will not change the fundamental relationships among scholarship, academic libraries, and publication. Collaboration across time and space, which is a principal mechanism of scholarship, ought to be enhanced. Reforms in copyright law will be required if the promise of digitization is to be realized; absent such reform, there is a serious risk that much academically valuable material will become invisible and unused. Ubiquitous digitization will change radically the economics that have supported university–based collections of published material. Scholars and scholarly institutions (including libraries and university presses) must assert vigorously claims of fair use and openness.”

Please note: the author has placed the paper in the public domain, so feel free to share it with your colleagues.

Online tutorials from UNC

From our pal Serena (Fenton, not Williams): UNC has video training online that is free – you just register with your Onyen. There are several web tech courses, including Dreamweaver, etc. The style of the one that I am watching currently isn’t too interesting – sort of flat and mechanical. But the content is great!

The announcement from UNC : Computer-Based Training expands course offerings

Information Technology Services is pleased to announce that additional technical courses are available to subscribers of the Computer-Based Training (CBT) service. Effective immediately, more than 2,800 courses are available—a significant increase over the approximately 500 courses previously offered.

New technical courses offered to subscribers cover topics such as Java, Oracle, MS SQL Server, programming and Web development, Linux and project management.

The service is offered through a CBT company called ElementK. After users sign in to the UNC single sign-on server with their Onyen and password, they are directed to ElementK’s site and can choose from the thousands of courses available to them.

To learn more about CBT or to subscribe to the free service, visit http://cbt.unc.edu/

Busy-ness of sports sites

This post is from Poynter Institute’s E-Media Bits, a daily email and online newsletter. It raises interesting questions for us, as writers for digital media, as to how much is too much:

begin excerpt:

Poynteronline
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Posted by Steve Klein
The Busy-ness of Sports Sites and MySI

ESPN.com Sports portal sites: Way too busy, says Steve Klein.

Although I have been a sports journalist (and now teach sports writing and reporting, among other subjects) for the better part of my career, and had something to do with the shaping of USA Today‘s online sports presence, I don’t spend much time with online sports portal sites like Sports Illustrated, Sportsline or even the Big Dog, ESPN.

I mean, have you looked at those sites lately? Busy, busy, busy: deep in content, rich in multimedia, and time consuming.

End of excerpt.

Sports and news as genres or categories both are known for notoriously busy and cluttered sites. For simplicity’s sake, I visit the league sites for quick scores and results — NFL.com or MLB.com — skipping middlemen altogether. Klein says he prefers Yahoo!Sports for headlines, then goes into the niche sites and RSS feeds that suit his interests.

What’s really interesting are the attempts by media companies like Inform.com and Digg.com to allow you to customize your reading. Sports Illustrated recently launhed a free, customizable, downloadable desktop application called MySI to allow us to orient our information according to our team loyalties. According to Klein, SI also developed a recommendation engine that aggregates content and links to stories about teams that we choose.

User-control. “We” media. The big, old media companies slowly are ceding control. They have to.

Jill Carroll multimedia: a good example

Relevant to our class, a nice multimedia online feature: Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story. Along with an account of  Monitor freelancer Jill Carroll’s 82 days of captivity while on assignment in Iraq, the package also includes streaming video of an interview with Carroll. See also the Jill Carroll update blog.The Monitor took reader questions for Carroll. Amy Gahran of the Poynter Institute suggested this as an example of how multimedia can become conversational media. Interesting notion.

West Coast blogger in trouble: legal questions

Even though class hasn’t yet started, I have to post about a kid out on the West Coast in a heap of trouble over something the First Amendment should protect him from. If the First can’t do the trick, California’s shield law, which is fairly strong, should bail him out. Of course, he first would have to be deemed a reporter.

As the San Francisco Chronicle notes, this kid isn’t a saint, but what he did and what he wants to continue doing is publish, write, express and communicate. His legal woes beg the oft-repeated question, “Who is a journalist?” What kinds of communication and expression are protected speech, and what does the Internet have to do with making the distinction? These are great questions for our course.

The jailed blogger’s name is Josh Wolf. His blog: The Revolution Will Be Televised. A wiki has been set up to “free Josh Wolf,” and it gives some good background on the case.

And here’s an excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle, from an editorial in its Thursday, August 3 edition:

. . . the First Amendment was not crafted just to protect the mainstream media. One of its clear aims was to allow journalists to do their jobs without government regulation or interference.

It’s hard to think of a more basic measure of a free country than the ability of people to demonstrate against government policies — and the freedom of journalists to edit and disseminate their accounts of such events.

Wolf was recording a demonstration by a group of anarchists on July 8, 2005. The demonstration turned unruly, with some of the protesters vandalizing buildings and scuffling with police. Wolf posted some of the videos on his Web site.

Federal prosecutors are demanding that Wolf turn over the outtakes — claiming to be specifically interested in the attempted burning of a police car. . . .

But the really ominous element of the government’s argument is the notion that a journalist can be compelled to turn over raw material — be it notes or video outtakes — at the government’s whim. If that standard can apply to Josh Wolf, it can be used against CNN, NBC, Fox News or any independent journalist who is conducting an investigation or trying to record a chaotic event. Journalists are not agents of the government.

Greetings & Salutations

Hello JoMC 711! I must confess, WordPress is entirely new to me. I’ve always used Blogger.com. I am excited about using this new software and about learning from each other how to use it.

To our blogging voyage … all hands on deck!