The Real Paul Jones

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Word of the Day – TransFatWa

Discovered or possibly imagined by David Harrison, a unrediscoverable headline reading “New York TransFatWa.” As in “New York City health authorities voted unanimously on Tuesday to ban the use of artificial cooking oils, known as trans fats, in the city’s eateries [actual wording in NewScientist]; in doing so they have declared a TransFatWa [imagined portion with great new word].

Carrboro Commons goes live

J-school colleague Jock Lauterer alerts us to the new Carrboro online/offline news — the Carrboro Commons. The Commons is a lab production, completely with cracking electronics and bubbling liquids I suppose, of Jock’s Community Journalism classes.

He writes: “A 12-page tab print version will be out later this week. Then next month, the Web-based Carrboro Commons will be released every other week throughout the semester. Once we have the user registration system set up, folks will be able to sign in and comment about individual stories.”

Kathy Sierra on “How to Build a User Community – Part 1”

Kathy Sierra gives good insights on building User Communities over on “Creating Passionate Users.” Definitely New-you-can-use.

One, of the many, take-aways: Encourage users with intermediate skills to be answerers of inquiries; not just expertly skilled users. How to do this? Kathy outlines strategies in her article and her commenters expand on those from Kathy. Much on motorcycle support vs tech support ;->

Cool News from McConville, Tyson and Newton

David McConville is back from Sao Paolo where he attended the Planetary Collegium. He sends a link that describes what’s doing on at the Collegium — it’s in Flash so I can’t link within the pages well… David and his dome will be at the AGU Meetings next week.

As Sally and a lot of other places have noticed, Tim Tyson was just awarded the 2007 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his book, Blood Done Sign My Name. Speaking of names, the Grawemeyer folks manage to credit Tim “Dyson” a couple of times at their website, but the prize of $200,000 will make up for that I’m sure.

Michael Newton was just awarded The NLS Saltire Research Book of the Year for the best book covering aspects of Scottish life: arts, education, history, science, etc. for his Dùthchas Nan Gàidheal: Selected Essays of John MacInnes.

John Price Wilkin on InfoWorld podcast

John Price Wilkin of the University of Michigan Libraries talks about digitizing libraries from the Michigan view point including the beginnings of JSTOR (1994 and beyond), the Making of American grant (with Cornell) as the start of the Digital Library Federation, the Michigan Digitization Project with Google, and the Distributed Proofreaders Project with Project Gutenberg with Jon Udell of InfoWorld in Jon’s podcast.

[Disclosers: ibiblio hosts Project Gutenberg. John P. Wilkin is a member of the Louis Round Wilson Knowledge Trust.]

Cory and Eben in the News

Eben Moglen and friends at the Software Freedom Law Center (see us in India here) gives a much needed smack to Blackboard, the education support system would-be-monopolist.


Cory Doctorow
writes in Forbes Special Future of the Book about “Giving It All Away” explaining “I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.”

Both Eben and Cory have been ibiblio-sponsored speakers here at UNC.

Dean Jean (Folkerts) on WCHL promoting blogging

Our new J-School Dean, Jean Folkerts, is featured on WCHL 1360 in a story that announces a new blogging position in the School (I am on the faculty of the UNC J-School):

Academics at the UNC Journalism School will take a leap into the digital age with the addition of a teaching position centered on blogging and online news.

The school’s dean Jean Folkerts says the job listing signals how the mass media have changed in the past decade.

The creation of the online news position is among the first significant moves Folkerts has made as the journalism school’s new dean.

She says she wants the school’s graduates to be able to cross over platforms of old and new media, but she’s not straying from the school’s core principles.

Folkerts says creative production will be part of the professor’s duties, which could mean maintaining a blog or generating multimedia presentations.


The job description for our ” Outstanding Scholar in News/Online Journalism” is here

BBC: Virtual Pals Increasing

And not the NeoPet or Harvey or Bonzi Buddy type virtual friends, but friends you find online and then perhaps later in physical space.

BBC reports on the University of Southern California Center for the Digital Future‘s 2007 Digital Future report:

Virtual pals ‘soar in importance’

Online community members value their virtual friends

Virtual communities are as important as their real-world counterparts, many members of online communities believe.

A survey found 43% of online networkers from the US felt “as strongly” about their web community as they did about their real-world friends.

It also revealed net-users had made an average of 4.6 virtual pals this year.

The survey, from the US-based Center for the Digital Future, of 2,000 individuals forms part of a six-year study into attitudes to the web.

Each year, the University of Southern California researchers publish data tracking the changing opinions of the same American households to the internet.

On the results of their sixth report, Jeffrey Cole, director of the centre, said: “More than a decade after the portals of the worldwide web opened to the public, we are now witnessing the true emergence of the internet as the powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become.”

[… see article for more]


Read the full Center for the Digital Future 2007 Report here.

Next Week’s Speaks – Wizards, Weinberger and NCREN

The semester is winding down, but the speaking and speakers keep coming on. Next week, we have these events to look forward to:

  • Wednesday December 5 at 6 pmthe recently mentioned “Wizard People, Dear Reader.”
  • Dave Weinberger
    Thursday December 7 at 2 pm
    I get to welcome Dr. Weinberger to SILS and to UNC before his Henderson Lecture here on Thursday December 7 at 2 pm. Fred will to the introduction. I’m standing in for our Dean who has a conflict.

    The best part is that I get to invite everyone to a reception at the end of the talk. Be there to hear that.

  • NCREN logoFriday December 8 at 2:30 pm “ibiblio.org at NCREN” North Carolina Research and Education Network Community Day.
  • 10,000 copies of the Daily Tar Heel stolen

    Breaking News
    Updated 10:07 a.m.
    The Daily Tar Heel was the victim of a widespread larceny early this morning when at least 10,000 of its papers were picked up in mass right after they were delivered to their destinations. Unknown persons lifted the papers, of which each person is allotted one copy, from almost all of the newspaper’s campus bins and several in town. University police are investigating the incident. The DTH also is reprinting 3,000 copies of today’s issue set to be available around the Pit in the early afternoon. We apologize for any inconvenience. You can read all of today’s stories as well as view a full PDF of the issue [at the paper’s website]

    Most popular articles of the day online:

    1. Sigma Chi guilty on hazing charges
    2. Buckeyes roll into town for a showdown
    3. Neither system all that fair anyway
    4. 7,000 of us want your seat
    5. Congress covers tickets, safety

    UPDATE: Sigma Chi, already suspended til 2009 for hazing violations, fesses up to newspaper theft.

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