paidcontent has the scoop on that thing falling apart. If it looks like a brick, weighs the same as a brick…maybe it’s a brick. The PS3 soon to follow.

I’m not a fanboy, I’m a big fan of Microsoft. But when something is doomed to fail despite the marketing hubris and mindless press releases and media coverage, you can’t just but feel the glee as it all comes around and minds meet reality.

Bloglines, Rojo, Google Reader, Client side, online, in your browser, whatever.

They all suck.

Basically you end up with something resembling an inbox with HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of unread news items. You have feeds you don’t read, but you don’t want to delete them because maybe someday you will read them (yeah right) or maybe it’s a friend and you’ll feel guilty.

Yeah guilt, that’s how I want to spend my free time. Technology so advanced it enables emotional hijacking. I introduced Bloglines to my coworker and she loves it. She uses it all the time. It’s fun at first, and maybe it is fun forever if you live on mars (40 extra minutes each day).

The other thing is you don’t get to see the cool websites. You know you don’t get to see their brand, it’s all diluted through that tasteless baby blue hue that is Bloglines. Sometimes I think I can smell the baby poop and baby powder when fighting with those horrible frames. It’s like a crib, a prison for babies, only more scrollbars.

It’s just too much. RSS Readers suck. I’m using Google Bookmarks and the gmarks Firefox extension to look at sites. Not a Google start page that takes ages to load whenever you start your browser, not that horribly ugly ‘My Yahoo’ (excerpts city).

Someone had to say it. Bookmarks are here to stay.

It’s not an emote. It’s not a command, it’s nothing other than that other person changing their away message.

Okay first of all, I know I’m a bit of a moron. I’m posting this so that the next person will find it right away. I almost made a complete fool of myself by posting this as a question in Something Awful with the promise of a free account upgrade. Anyways, if you ever see this light gray, text in Google Talk:

It’s the other guy/girl changing their away message.

The cost of digital content is more than just its dollar price. The cost for digital content such as an iTunes tv show includes the time you spent looking at it and the amount of space it takes up on your hard drive. Time is hard to quantify, unless you’re paid by the hour and you are viewing the digital content during work hours. Bandwidth is another cost. DRM and licensing restrictions are another.

Disk space, however, presents a unique problem. Disk space is the amount of space on your hard drive the content uses. There is a limited amount of space. As your collection of digital content grows, you continue to use up more and more space. Disk space is not like physical space. Disk space requires maintenance, it can fail, it can become obsolete. Generally it is best to back up digital content, because of disk space’s unique vulnerabilities. A backup is a second copy. That means in order to protect valuable digital content, you need to multiply the space it takes up by two. One gigabyte become two gigabytes. You’ll require double the space. Maybe not all the digital content you have justifies this additional cost, but if you paid money for it, it makes sense that you do back up.

Digital content also has many unique attributes that make it different from other goods you buy. For instance, you can make multiple copies of it. You can’t easily make multiple copies of a car you bought, or a can of worms. Another unique property of digital content is DRM, Digital Rights Management, a way that copy right owners protect their right to control the copying and distribution of their intellectual property. When you buy digital content, you don’t actually own the content, you have purchased a license to consume it. There are also other unique properties of digital content, far too many to list them all, but another interesting one is that you can’t really know what benefit an information item will provide you until you have consumed it (this makes it hard to measure the price you’re willing to pay for it). Also there’s no way to return the benefit you’ve received from it - you can’t return your knowledge in exchange for your money back.

The last item I want to talk about is the right of sale and its consequences in the context of DRM. You can’t sell your iTunes videos; when you purchased the content you agreed to this (even if you didn’t read the agreement). You don’t have the right of sale, but your content still has value: you can view it some other time. Or maybe the value it had for you expired once you’ve viewed and the price you paid for it was worth the one viewing. In this case disk space is not a cost, you can delete the content, you’ve gotten your worth from it. But more than likely you’ll care about the money you spent, and you don’t just want to delete your files. Maybe someday, Apple will let you sell your purchases (don’t hold your breath). If you don’t want to lose your content because of its value, you can’t sell it, you’ll have to store it. I’m not a futurist, but I predict that your digital storage needs will continue to grow, and you’ll find your needs will make continuous, and perhaps perennial, withdrawals from your wallet.

What is my point? That $1.99 price for the latest episode of “Lost” or “The Office” does not represent the real cost to you. Think about it. Think about how storing your CD collection in the 1990’s (if you had one) became a real issue for you - but you could sell them. Buying that $1.99 episode will burden you with a lifelong obligation to store it, at least until you get fed up with it and just finally delete it. More than likely, by the time this happens, you will have spent more than just, a dollar and ninety nine cents.

I did not renew my membership with ALA this year. Last year I signed up as a student while at SIRLS. I graduated from SIRLS in December with an ALA accredited M.A. in Information Resources and Library Science (and how that is different from an MLS I can’t tell you, I sign emails with ‘MLS’).

Here are the reasons why I did not renew:

1. It’s very expensive and what benefit do I get from it? It’s really nothing more than an expensive magazine subscription.
2. That whole ‘blog people‘ debacle.
3. The demise of the Public Library. The Tucson Pima Public Library Director Nancy Ledeboer has been a guest speaker at two of my classes and she has said in both that the focus of the public library system will be on becoming a community resource. She says that the reality is that people do not come to the Public Library anymore to get information, they use Google. So basically they’re going to turn them into a YMCA. Lot’s of meeting rooms, board games, maybe they’ll get an air hockey table, who knows what direction that’s going in. You know what I see here is not adaptation, I see this as surrender. A “Library” is about a collection of information. Look how it is used in other contexts: ‘JavaScript library’, ‘personal library’, etc. I don’t think you think of a personal library as where you meet your friends, it’s where you keep your books. I don’t see why they need to even keep individuals with an MLS on staff given the direction public libraries are going. I didn’t learn about setting up a community center, I learned about information ethics, reference services, digital librarianship, metadata, and the like. If people are not going to the library for information, then the library should either downsize or it should find a way to provide information services in a way people want, it shouldn’t turn into a circus and redefine librarianship into a non-profession. And what is the ALA doing about this?

Okay, rant is done. If anyone has an idea of why the ALA really matters, I’d certainly like to know. Right now it appears to be nothing more than a bastion of traditionalists unable and unwilling to heed the tides of change. Information matters as much as ever, and you’re not going to convince me that will change. Maybe the edifice, the physical structure that is the library will go away, but information professionals will be needed more than ever.

I have ever encountered. It is written terribly, there are tons of spelling mistakes in the example code.

The official list of corrections names only seven errors, but I have found that many in just one example. Every chapter is populated with them. Some of them are just really sloppy like extra quotes in strings and who knows what. If you type the code in examples as is, often it wont compile. I have spent hours debugging code in the book. The CD comes with example code (first of all, it doesn’t even install to where the book says it will install), but that code is the finished code, and yes it works, but you don’t get the step by step from it.

It’s just very poorly done, and the writer should really never write another programming book again. Had I been smart and read it got on Amazon.com, maybe I would have bought a Wrox book instead.