Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 67 of 147)

Dec 8: ibiblio at NCREN Community Day

NCREN logoWe’ll be torn on Friday December 8!

ibiblio.org is to be a big part of the North Carolina Research and Education Network Community Day from 8:30 – 3:30 at MCNC in the Research Triangle Park. There will be some great sessions there including K-12 Networking and Ad Hoc Video Conferencing.

But it’s happening at the same time as the UNC Social Networking Symposium. Yikes!

Both events require registration, so sign up before showing up.

North Carolina Science Blogging Conference – Jan 20

The Triangle Science Blogging Conference has become the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. One look at the registration list (so far) tells why; the Conference, already at 35 registrants, is drawing folks from all over the country. We’ve got months to go, but we’ve gotten great people initially. You can join in. Please do.

NC Science Blogging Conference

What: North Carolina Science Blogging Conference
When: January 20, 2007 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: UNC-Chapel Hill (building and room to be announced)
Preconference: So You Want to be a Blogger skills session on Thursday, January 18th from 2-4 p.m. at the UNC Health Science Library

Note: ibiblio.org is proud to be one of the sponsors for the North Carolina Bloggers Conference and I’m delighted to be one of the organizers helping out Anton Zuiker, Bora Zivkovic, and Brian Russell.

Communities in IBM developerWorks

Michael O'ConnellThanks to IBM developerWorks Editor-in-Chief Michael O’Connell for the nice words about our J-School seminar on Virtual Communities. Michael was in the very first version of the seminar. We’ve come a long ways as has the idea of online communities and social capital and social networking. I’m using some of the basic ideas for creating conversation for my recent talks — at Berry College, on Open Source for the Office of Technology and Development and for an internal talk with News and Observer reporters. I learned all I know from the folks in the seminars and in the communities (and from the the good researchers who wrote the texts we use in class).

Carolina Innovations: Open Source Licensing: The Basics, The Benefits, The Buzz

As part of the Office of Technology Development‘s Carolina Innovations Seminars, I’ll be speaking on “Open Source Licensing: The Basics, The Benefits, The Buzz” on November 9 from 5:15 to 6:15 in 014 Sitterson Hall.

In the spirit of Openness, please dear readers and potential attendees, use the comments here to let me know any specific questions or areas that you’d like to see covered. I don’t want to talk endlessly on the differences between GPL 2 and 3, for example, unless someone cares, but then if someone does I want to be sure to be prepared and to do a good job.

Some helpful source material (pun intended) can be found at these links:
Free Software Foundation
Open Source Initiative
GNU Project
GNU Philosophy including the 4 Software Freedoms
Software Freedom Law Center
Wikipedia on Free Software
Wikipedia on Open Source Software

For non-software, see Creative Commons, iCommons (international Creative Commons movement) , and the Science Commons Project.

This is another experiment in opening the conversation like the one I just did down at Berry College where using the wiki really worked well. This time a blog post instead.

So post below.

Silverstein, Gillmor, Weinberger – all coming to UNC

Upcoming speakers of interest.

Craig Silverstein
CRAIG SILVERSTEIN
Google‘s Tech Director will be speaking on Thursday, October 26 from 4 – 5:30 at the Medical Biomolecular Research Building here at UNC-CH. Details here.

Dan Gillmor
DAN GILLMOR
Dan Gillmor is director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project affiliated with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
He is the author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (2004; O’Reilly Media). Dan likes to say that he “spent almost 25 years in the newspaper business, and am proud of it.”
He’ll be visiting the UNC J-School and giving a public talk at 4 pm Monday November 13 in the Pleasants Family Room, Wilson Library, UNC-CH.

David Weinberger
DAVID WEINBERGER
The School of Information and Library Science’s 2006 Henderson Lecture will feature Dr. David Weinberger who will present, “Everything is Miscellaneous” at 2 p.m., Thursday, December 7, 2006 in the Murphey Hall Auditorium (room 116) on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A reception will follow.
You probably know David Weinberger as the author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and of the blog, Journal of Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO). He’ll be here for the UNC Symposium on Social Networking as well.

Google people Today and Thursday

Today at 6:30 pm in 105 Gardner Hall, Google folks will be talking about Engineering opportunities (“job opportunities, their culture and their work environment” I suppose these are three different subjects?). Also they alert us all to visit the google.com/students site and submit applications before November 1, 2006. Unfortunately that link doesn’t work; this one does so go here if you are interested.

On Thursday, October 26 4 – 5:30 pm, Google Tech Director Craig Silverstein will be speaking as a guest of the Health Sciences Library. See this link for details.

Bloggers in the Q (NandO)

If you can find the online Q section of the News and Observer, you’ll find a pile of writing and reflection on blogging and blogging ethics by local bloggers.

Amongst those featured are Anton “Mr Sugar” Zuiker who has organized more blog meet-ups and teach-ins than anyone I know of. The short of Anton’s message “Do unto others.” There is more of course.

OrangePolitics.org‘s Ruby Sinreich wants reporters to credit bloggers when they take bits from the blogs. This is not a new complaint. OP is a rich source for local reporters who for some reason don’t think that OPers care if their community gets the credit. Note from Ruby: We do care.

Martin Kuhn, who developed his bloggers ethics guidelines in part in my seminar, has his good work summarized as part of the piece. It would have been nice, Martin might say ethical, if NandO had also linked to the blog on which Martin created his ethics outline. I will here.

A little sidebar gives brief voice to other local bloggers, most of whom I didn’t know, Sue Sturgis, Nancy Baker, Chris Anderson (of Lulu and Raleighing, not of Long Tail) and Gary Kueber. NandO does link to each of their blogs showing good form.

The main article by Eric Ferreri seems to have been inspired by the blogging of KC Johnson about the Duke Lacrosse team’s problems (KC defends them mostly) but the article grew far beyond that and is better for having done so. Eric does a good job of discussing the problems of accountability and the challenges to new blogger/journalists. Great quotes from Martin Kuhn and good research help out.

But try to find the stories on the News and Observer web site, where one might expect to see them prominently displayed. You can’t find them at all! You can barely find the Q section even if, like me, you were looking for it. NandO’s content-ignorant layout jambs the Q under Local and State in on the main page with no description or content revealed and under News as well as State and Local on the pull-down. Q however is more of an Opinion/Features/Forum section. Not exactly News and not entirely Local and State (although there are local interests and sources). Inconsistant as well as hidden from the folks who might want to read and react or just read and appreciate the discussions.

What would a blog entry be without a rant?

Poems at the end of The End

it is sad to say, almost so sad that i can barely type this, that a novel– a novel that you should not read if you are at all sensitive, a novel that ends a heartbreaking series of 13 novels, a series of unfortunate events–ends with two poems or nearly ends there as there are no true endings in the world as the narrator points out to the point of pain. you will know these poems because the are about heartbreak and because they are spoken at a desperate point in the lives of two characters–their unfortunate ends, although there are also beginnings, but not for them. these two poems are not credited directly, but i can tell you that the authors are called “associates” of those in VFD which if you have had the unpleasant experiencing the novels you will know far too much about but also not enough.

one poem is by the famous poet Francis William Bourdillon. his poem is not sung by bobby vee, a singer that once fired bobby zimmerman a poser according to vee who often claimed to be booy vee himself but later became known as bobby d taking on the name of a poet who met an unfortunate end. the poem is not the script for a 1948 movie starring Edward G. Robinson. it is a sad thing of its own from the late 1800s. it is short as
life would have it. and it is sad but true.

The other poem is sadder and truer still. it pains me to even mention it. in fact the speaker, a bit of continuous and sad evil claiming to be misunderstood, only mutters and sputters the last verse–this series being for children or at least the child-like. there are reasons not to say the first two verses that have to to with the sensitivity of our children toward language. the title of the poem is not mentioned, but you who know poetry know that the poet took his title from Robert Louis Stevenson’s own Requiem. this title and this poem are, young hipster postmodernists, what literary irony is all about–not the silly songs of certain talented but transient waifs who would title their unironic collections, ironic. i could write more but i am overcome with sadness.

let other poets and literati point you more directly to the poems in question or refer to pages 317 and 318 of The End or call your library reference desk.

back from Berry and on to NandO

My experimental use of a wiki to build a conversation into the talk I just did down at beautiful and deerfilled Berry College was a great success (for me at least). Just like SlashDot interviews, I asked the folks who were coming to the talk to post their questions. There was no voting, as in Slashdot, as we were dealing with a smaller group of people and we would be physically proximate. All questions were more or less equal.
I was able to arrange the questions by topics and then run through them in a more or less coherent way (for me at least). One result is that my answers led to further discussion among us all and it was fun too. Many folks lingered and the conversations seemed to be continuing as we left.
Brian tried to take a couple of us to Havana’s in Rome where some sort of bikini team was promoting some kind of cigars. You needed to buy so many cigars to get to go upstair and meet them. We passed and took our conversation down the street.

Next week, we’ll see how well this approach works for Craig Silverstein of Google when he tries talking to about 700+ people on Thursay October 26.

Then for Halloween, I’ll be doing a keynote at the News and Observer‘s internal training/meetings. I’ve asked them to set up a wiki there so’s we can work on (at least) Two Way Journalism. With journalists, we might need to go to the SlashDot style of interview/talk under which the folks attending post questions then vote on them then I answer the top 10 or so.

Other ideas?

At Berry College

Down in Georgia (like the Devil) at Berry College near Rome. The Georgia NorthWest Mountains are in full color and the spacious, 26,000 acre, campus is rife with deer which are more common than squirrels.
Edenic is defined here. Wireless is fine in the buildings but not in my cottage, a log cabin, up the mountain from here.
My talk is pretty organized but I’m asked to cover quite a bit in order to cover the submitted questions. I rather like the challenge.

ibiblian speakers – Tues, Wed, Thurs, etc

A lot of folks from ibiblio are speaking around this week:

Tuesday October 17, noon – Fred Stutzman will be speaking in the ISIS TechTueday series at Duke University

Wednesday October 18, 3:30 – Kristina Spurgin will talk about Personal Information Management as part of the SILS Research Colloquium in room 208 Manning Hall.

Thursday October 19, 8:45 am – Fred will be doing the keynote for the UNC Caroina Technology Consultants Conference at the Stone Center.

Thursday October 19, 7 pm – I will be speaking as part of the Evans Lecture Series on “Expression and Repression” at Berry College in Georgia. I’m building the talk from questions posed by students on a wiki.

Thursday October 26 4 pm (but come early over 700 seats will be contested) – Fred and I will be among the panelists at the Health Affairs Library presentation by Google Tech Director Craig Silverstein.

Tibetans “shot like rabbits”

When I was among the Tibetan exiles, I was amazed how hardworking and innovative they were and how positive they were. I mentioned this to my guide and friend. He immediately set me right, telling me that there is so much that was not being seen. Every Tibetan has had a family member or friend killed many times right before them, he told me. Still there we were among smiling and optimistic people.

In the past 24 hours, proof that the Chinese soldiers are still killing Tibetans in cold blood hit the news (and on youTube.) Xeni has a good summary on her Trek Blog.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 The Real Paul Jones

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑