reeling and writhing

e-read or e-don't read

I've been wandering around Guy Kawasaki's emerging book blogs section on Alltop.com, and I found this fairly comprehensive discussion going on around e-readers.
Sometimes an opinionated blogger (writer?) can get a lot more out of people than you realise.

David Prater's latest project, which received funding in late '07, will be posted here as time goes by. (From the Netherlands, where he now resides and from whence I believe he still edits Cordite Poetry Mag). Humorous.

Regarding the objections of some to Helen Garner's use of real people and places....look no further than this link, via Maud Newton's blog.

Ain't they pretty. Link via ReadySteadyBlog. (These are attractive too.)

Finally - I forgot to go to Clunes. And I'm a bit miffed, as it looked pretty good, and others have reported likewise. So I hope the BookGrocer posts another instalment (link via the Reasons You Will Hate Me person, she of Tuesday BookClub fame.)

But if I had gone, I probably would have missed a most convivial pub drinks (winding into dinner for some) with El (of The View from Elsewhere), Laura, David T. of Barista fame and Sophie Cunningham, whose first Meanjin comes out in June.
So I count myself lucky this time around, and look forward to Clunes '09.

 

MMUVE IT

A press release from the Australia Council has landed in my mailbox regarding their latest venture into virtual arts, MMUVE it!
Application information can be found here.

From the media release:

The Australia Council for the Arts today announced its latest virtual world initiative – MMUVE it! – offering up to $30,000 for a collaborative arts project in any massive multi-user virtual environment (MMUVE).

Following its groundbreaking Second Life artist residency, MMUVE IT! will see the Australia Council cast its virtual world net wider, offering a team of up to three artists the opportunity to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork engaging the human body in a MMUVE of their choice.

With more than 73 million participants in  MMUVEs such as EverQuest, Second Life and World of Warcraft, and the recent introduction of motion-sensitive controllers such as the Nintendo Wiimote, there is great scope to develop innovative artworks in a highly networked environment that incorporates body movement and its relationship to real and virtual environments.

Australia Council inter-arts office director Andrew Donovan comments that:

‘Creative professionals worldwide are using these platforms to create cutting edge artworks; MMUVE IT! offers Australian artists a timely and valuable opportunity to explore and build the sophistication of art and physical movement in virtual worlds.’

I can haz a book with train ticket?

Tom Cho reports on his blog that he has a book of stories coming out with Giramondo next year.

If:book reports that the first of Penguin's interactive fiction publishing projects is complete. Charles Cumming has produced a mashup of sorts of John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps, entitled The Twenty-One Steps.

David Prater, poet and Cordite founder and editor, is now ensconced in the Netherlands and has the buzz on a terrific prize awarded if you buy a book in National Book Week. One free day's travel on the train!! 200,000 Netherlanders can't be wrong. David also has an article in the Weekend Australian on self-published poetry where we are told that Walt Whitman wrote his own reviews to his first, pretty much self-published and very famous book, Leaves of Grass - a song of himself, indeed.

Missed the inaugural Booktown event at Clunes last year - but I am going to try to get to this one.
Link via Louise Swinn, who also broke the very good news that Delia Falconer is editor of the Black Inc short story collection for 2008.

I really enjoyed Margaret Throsby's interview with Germaine Greer on ABC Classic FM the other week - but I think it will be off their website soon and we'll have to wait for a repeat. In the meantime, there's always the podcast of her evening at Readings to enjoy.

Finally, fighting words from Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe in the Age on Monday, over UK publishers' neo-colonial attitude to "Commonwealth" rights for US titles. Contentious, what? He's posted a shorter version of the article on his blog, where comments are currently closed, unfortunately.

on a half-readable web, directories still rule

I will leave it to Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb to tell you that the aggregator site Alltop  is something you could get non-tech people to use very easily, described by its founder as an 'online magazine rack'.

But there's more. Apart from the GLARING OMISSION OF BOOK BLOGS (and here I note that BritLitBlogs displays very similarly to AllTop, snapshots and all), I found plenty of top sites here I'd never heard of. So if there are subject areas where you would like some choice  blogs selected for you, you could do worse than treat Alltop as a kind of blog subject gateway, as librarians might say.
It is the kind of thing libraries could use in an 'Introduction to blogs' page for the public. Quite impressive in its design, nice and simple. But one cannot help thinking - after all this time, here we are back at directories.

* I stand corrected. Guy Kawasaki has taken my suggestion for the inclusion of book blogs on board, so there will be a bookblogs section on Alltop in due course. Groovy.

on your ABC, and UTS

I wonder if this kind of thing approaches what the ABC has in mind for its new Compendium project, which I read about here in the Austlit newsletter of June-July '07. (That's right, I'm backdated.)

Rosa B is a bilingual online arts and design journal published in multimedia format - so there are filmed interviews along with articles and essays. It is very beautiful to look at, and a good place to practise your French if you are so inclined. (Over at if:book there is a profile of something else like this, called Issue - and yes, I read about Rosa B there first.) Issue has built more interactivity with the audience into its site by enabling comments, though I think the layout is a bit busy. There is not as much interactivity in the Rosa B site, which is perhaps where it diverges from a new Australian project in the works.

The Australian Literature Compendium, for which the ABC and UTS have received a $150,000 grant, will include an e-journal, podcasts and documentary features on one site, along with teaching resources.

zombies and cheeks rule

This is one of the more sordid things book bloggers have gotten up to in recent times.

And then there's this- it started here, and then got ginormous very quickly.

In other news for bloggers, there's a new plugin for photos available on Wordpress that enables you to find Creative Commons-licensed photographs and publish 'em way quickly. Link via Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb.

borrowers alive, and occasionally buying as well

$85,000 from lending rights to one Australian author is not too shabby, is it?
Susan Wyndham is enjoying speculating who that author might have been in 2007. (The Age rather drily informed us on the weekend that said author remains anonymous).

And while Max Barry certainly isn't English, he might be pleased to hear about this.
A spokesperson for MLA, the UK government's advisory body for libraries, claims that due to the cheaper prices of books,
"people who couldn't afford books before and borrowed them are now buying them on the high street."

I occasionally worry about what will happen when all the old Australian Book Reviews crumble to dust, as there is no comprehensive digital preservation policy operating for it at present. I'm not quite sure I should be so concerned after reading bits of the Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004) which has been published online.

In chapter 37, a general introduction to issues of preservation in humanities computing, Abby Smith writes:

Preservation by benign neglect has proven an amazingly robust strategy over time, at least for print-on-paper. One can passively manage a large portion of library collections fairly cheaply. One can put a well-catalogued book on a shelf in good storage conditions and expect to be able to retrieve it in 100 years in fine shape for use if no one has called it from the shelf. But neglect in the digital realm is never benign. Neglect of digital data is a death sentence. A digital object needs to be optimized for preservation at the time of its creation (and often again at the time of its deposit into a repository), and then it must be conscientiously managed over time if it is to stand a chance of being used in the future.

(Link via Grand Text Auto, where the publication of a new Companion to Digital Literary Studies is also announced.)

where content is king

From Jessamyn West, this link to a post by Rochelle, a librarian in the States who is asking some very sensible questions about the download system on the Kindle, and how its digital content management affects lending between family members, or in libraries.
Bud Parr reports that a Brooklyn bookshop employee has won the Brooklyn Public Library's startup competition grant of $15,000 to start her own bookstore.
On visiting Jessica's blog to read about this happy news, I find she's added a section to her links list of bookseller blogs.
(In usual Blogger style, the links list is not visible on separate post pages, only on the home page.)
So if there are bookshops out there wondering how they do it in Brooklyn, I recommend you start on this page, on the right, and work your way down.

Dymocks kiosk for books, not muffins

From The Australian, a few days ago - Dymocks is to offer e-books, boosting its catalogue to more than 4.5 million titles. (Its largest store, in George Street, Sydney, can hold about 350,000 hard copy books.)
The e-book project has been in development for two and a half years, with Dymocks management keeping a close eye on what has happened in the music industry and recognising that Internet sales are slowly eating away at shopfront distributors' figures. At present it is claimed that 'many...titles would be sold at a discount to their hardcover cousins.'

Update: There is more news on this over at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online, at their Speakeasy blog - it looks as though Dymocks are claiming a world first on this one.

binomial blogging starts here

The Linnaeus Society has decided to publish Carl Linnaeus' letters online as 'a sort of posthumous blog'. The site, at  www.linnaeus.c18.net, is more of a scholarly archive, but points for marketing, guys.
This link providing information comes from the National Library of Australia's online exhibition
celebrating the 300th anniversary of the influential natural scientist's birth. (Yes, it's short and sweet, but there is more in hard copy at the Library. If you are a Canberran, get over there.)

ALL UR INTERNETZ WILL BELONG TO US

But who would have thought that social network would have had so much blood in it? 15 billion?? Is Facebook just a big.... blood orange, waiting for an exceptionally large set of choppers?

Analysts said Microsoft paid a steep price on a bet that the three-year-old company would be able to transform itself into a hub for all sorts of Web activity.

"The only way this works is if Facebook becomes sort of the users' operating system on the Internet -- everyone logs into Facebook every day to get in contact with their friends and use a multitude of future applications that will be developed for it," said Morningstar analyst Toan Tran.

Facebook, a social network that lets friends share information, allows outside developers to create games and other applications for its site.

The popularity and depth of knowledge Facebook has about its users makes it valuable to companies like Microsoft and Google which want to sell advertising targeted to individual preferences. (Reuters)

today Melbourne, tomorrow magazines conquer the nation

Well, I guess it's all horses for courses in the book marketing game - Justine Larbalestier tells it like it is but nonetheless makes it sound pretty enjoyable whilst touring with husband Scott Westerfeld, while over at ReadWriteWeb, making the net side look like damn hard work is J.P. Kenyon, with this guest post on Internet novel marketing.

There's a good roundup of Australian independent magazines in today's M Magazine in The Age, including the new 'mook' from Vignette Press (there's a sneak preview to download at that link). Editor Michelle Griffin gives print a lusty plug in her column this week, all power to her!

As someone who loves magazines in all their myriad forms, it's quite thrilling to see the form enjoying such a vigorous revival right here in my hometown. And we're not talking about amateur productions here, even if so many of their talented creators do it for love rather than fat profits. Magazines such as Is/Not, Sneaker Freaker and Wooden Toy are coveted and collected all over the world. And it makes sense. We've got a thriving cafe culture. A great creative scene. Melbourne needs mags to complete the picture. Internet kill print? Hah! There's still something about magazines that your BlackBerry will never give you.

(Hear, hear. I bought a 4ft by 212 cm bookcase last weekend. It's not only full, but I can put all my journals and magazines in mag files in a smaller bookcase now. And God, they look pretty too.)
Let me just say how much I enjoy this Sunday paper lift-out (in fact it's the only bit of the Sunday Age I read), and full marks to Griffin for steadily turning it into a showcase for all that's interesting about Melbourne, including the recently introduced Eco Life section, the only feature of its type across the MSM in Melbourne to my knowledge. It's turning into something I could happily keep reading for almost as long as I've read Epicure and the EG.

Finally, Eddie Campbell's posts on composition in the last week have been quite riveting stuff, and I give you the link to a couple there, where you'll find the lowdown on the creation of a page from Alan Moore's graphic novel, From Hell.

it's about reading and writing

Lisa Dempster at Locus Press picked up some good reading at the TINA (This Is Not Art) festival in Newcastle, and has a roundup of the National Young Writers' Festival up as well.

Want to talk to an agent? log into this forum at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online from  October 8-11 to talk to Agent Sydney.

From LISNews.org, this link to a Long Island librarians' panel on the graphic novel may be of interest to some.

Read all about the speedy adoption of ketai, novels published on mobile phones in Japan, here in the Telegraph. Talk about convergence:

Out of the top 10 bestselling fiction works in the first half of 2007, five started as keitai novels and boast average sales of 400,000.

Crude in style and basic in characterisation, they tend to be written by first-time writers - usually in their teens or twenties - for a young audience equally wedded to their phones.

Several have been turned into real books. Love Sky, a story about a boy with cancer who breaks up with his girlfriend to spare her feelings, has sold more than 1.3 million copies and is to be made into a film.

Many of the novels are influenced by comic books which are very popular in Japanese. Consequently, they are heavy in dialogue and really short paragraphs which fit neatly on a small screen. Large empty spaces between sentences are used to imply that the characters are thinking.

Link via the Speakeasy blog at AWM Online.

in other news, the laziest blogger on the planet posts even more links

Alex Ross calls this 'a magnificent and generous use of digital technology'. And it is. And I'm going to tell my brother to get broadband so he can spend more time there.

At BoingBoing back in July (yes, I've been saving this one up), Cory Doctorow is wild for the wikified library at the Internet Archive:

I think this project (which right now seems to point to almost half a million books) is very cool -- it's going to be a major addition to the world's open cultural infrastructure. I have a hunch that it's going to be the primary way many if not most people access books, and I see it becoming an always-open window on the desk of every librarian.

(Please note that the BoingBoing link is to the demo version only, which will give you the full story on how this project has been built from the ground up. You can also follow this link instead to the current Open Library, which really deserves a post all on its own.)

Wandering further down the page at TechMeme, this report from TechCrunch40
led me to "U"vatars. They look a bit dull to me - I thought avatars were supposed to be imaginative, not just dressup dolls. (Also thought I'd seen a few of these around before). Check them out in beta at befunky.com.

And as you can see I have been spending far too much time reading feeds and collecting links instead of reading and writing my own stuff. Such is life. I do have plans for some longer pieces, but I have to reconcile myself to writing them in pieces first - and then putting the pieces together. I also have plans to read over 100 articles I've saved on del.icio.us - so if any of those are any good, you can't count on me giving up on linkdrops anytime soon. There used to be a "sorry" category here somewhere...

One original piece of reporting I do have to make, however, which is published here as I left it too late to send a letter to the Editor, is that Peter Craven claims in the September Australian Book Review ("No Jude Law, No Money") that Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is out of print.

Not so - during this month I did two checks on Global Books In Print, the industry database available through most public libraries in Victoria, and found that only the 2006 Australian Scholarly Publishing edition of this trilogy (published here as one volume)* is unavailable at present, as of yesterday to be exact. The 1998 Penguin edition, however, is alive, kicking and ready to be ordered.

* And the reasonable explanation for ASP's slowness is to be revealed in editor Clive Probyn's letter to ABR, which Rosemary Sorensen has read and reports on in today's Australian, and which I won't see till it hits my mailbox sometime next week. The scholarly edition is in three volumes, and Vol. 3 will be ready next month, when all three will be released. (Doesn't explain why the entry in Bowker's shows 2006 as a publication date, but I'm sure there's a reason for that too.)

salt from the earth

There is a wonderful post over at Chris Boyd's blog celebrating the life and deploring the untimely loss of Tanja Liedtke.

Salt Magazine is now relaunched online as a free journal! Wow. The first issue is truly beautiful - poems from a galaxy of stars.

From Anne, Woolf scholar, at Fernham, a spin-off that looks quite good, all things considered. (Being wise, of course, she has.)

Beware of jealousy, the greeneyed monster - when you look at this cleversocks. He has an online game that's been played by over a million people. Talk of convergence. Now Nation States is being cited in cross-media journals.

hey, enough already

HAHAHA!!
That didn't take very long. Or hurt much. Did it.

we have all been here before

Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb reviews a new rss reader which integrates comments into the reader interface. Apparently it will be possible to comment on feeds within fav.or.it when it reaches full strength. I have come across a comments aggregator before (CoComment), but this is the first application I've seen like this.

And in Wired magazine, Facebook is given a workover.(Link via Boynton, from this post at Sarsaparilla).  The Wired author sounds a bit peeved that he didn't think of it first, and I don't really understand why he wants to build a competitor from existing tools, as Facebook's biggest strength, as far as I can tell sitting on the outside and NOT looking in, is known content. People are finding the people they already know there, in a restricted space, and the crowd has voted with its fingertips. (This has led me to make the observation at Sars that it may well be a 'recognition platform'.)

Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb has also suggested that the opening up of this essentially closed system to developers earlier this year gave it a huge advantage over its fairly staid competitor, MySpace. ReadWriteWeb did some feature articles on Facebook's shiny and powerful toys a few weeks back, and you can find links to most of them here.

The technical lowdown on how and why the system is closed can be found here ( see para 3, "Why Facebook Isn't Open"), as well as McManus's introductory remarks on the platform's rise (and rise).

As the Wired article points out, at present nothing on Facebook can be found by Google, but this could be changed at some point. I have no burning need to be part of a closed network right now other than the mailing lists I'm already on, or to play with more applications than I have names for, as I've been aware there are lots out there for quite some time now, and there's only one of me here at the keyboard (my [much slimmer] clone is cleaning the toilet today.)
But if I had gone to Facebook for quietly social times behind Internet doors and they then decided to open the platform up, I think I'd be freakin' annoyed.
And you? hypocrite bloggeur, mon semblable, mon frère?

the great unconscious of the intertubes

The discussion list -empyre- at the Australian Network for Art and Technology is running several forums on Second Life this month, entitled The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
There will be at least one inworld event, as well as posts and discussions onlist.
-empyre- is an influential media arts practice discussion space. (Link via Arts Hub.)

Recently, Jane Ciabattari offered a refresher on book coverage and arts news reporting, including the rise of newspaper litblogs, at Critical Mass. She supplied a link in her post to this article on hyperlocal coverage in American Journalism Review, by Jennifer Dorroh. Maybe the 'mandarins' at the Melbourne Writers' Festival could have a look at these before they sit down to chew the fat at the Malthouse in early September. I have the feeling that by the time they get onto the stage, the line between hardcopy arts criticism and online arts journalism, dressed up by newspapers as a species of blogging, will have almost disappeared. I hope they enjoy trying to redraw it.

Over at Chasing Ray, Colleen Mondor has been running a One Stop World Tour with a focus on Australian YA authors, including Penni Russon, author of Undine. It's engagingly titled, "Best Reads with Vegemite", and up to a dozen books have been featured on the blogs of participants.

the paper where tech journos do not read blogs unless they use Macs

Maud has noted that those who decry blogging may live to eat their words.

I take note of this with especial regard to Graeme Philipson's funny little piece in the Tech pages of The Age on Tuesday:

"Data from Nielsen/Net Ratings shows that Australian internet users access many fewer pages (sic) than do most of those in North America and Europe, despite spending about as much time online... We play more sport, we have better weather and we are not as reliant as people in some countries on indoor leisure activities."

In the very next paragraph, he does a complete backflip:

"Our data shows that we read as much or more than many other countries, and our Internet usage rates (as opposed to cost and speed) are right up there."

He goes on to natter unconvincingly about Australians being 'laconic' rather than chatterers or shouters, and clearly has never ever heard of the Australian Blog Index or Australianblogs.com.au, nor has he read anything on Crikey about political blogs or kept up with Frank Arrington the prominent Australian Microsoft blogger, or Darren Rowse, the pro-blogger who earns six figure sums from working in his pyjamas, or Cameron Reilly of the Podcast Network (all of whom have been reported on at his paper).

Philipson would be unlikely to know that Father Bob Maguire blogs most successfully, here. As he admits at the end of his article, he doesn't read them. Why, then, does he feel the need to make generalisations about the state of the small but perfectly formed Ozblogosphere?

This more sanguine post by Mark Bahnisch at LarvyProd gives a happier spin to it all. If the Ozblogosphere doesn't exist, as Philipson seems to be insinuating, then the Government Gazette's editors were just hallucinating the other week. Happy birthday to all of us, each and every one.

Australia Council gets a second life

Not quite sure how this will blog up - we are Internet free this week, and this news has come to hand from Victoria McClelland-Fletcher from the Australia Council, so I'm posting it in only slightly edited form in at the City Library.

Pioneering Second Life artist to inspire Australian artists

On 12 July, the Australia Council for the Arts, in partnership with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), will host its first ever artist forum in Second Life.
The in-world event, to be moderated by ABC’s Sunday Arts reporter/producer Fenella Kernebone, is for the Australia Council’s inaugural Second Life artist residency.

In an open forum at 7pm (EST) on ABC Island, Paris-based artist and architect Brad Kligerman - one of the first artists in Second Life to complete an in-world residency - will present his work, discuss ideas and answer participants’ questions.

Brad, an architect and teacher, completed his 11-week residency with US-based Ars Virtua , a new media centre and gallery in Second Life, where he questioned the idea of materiality in the rendered environment and the nature of image.

Australia Council chief executive officer Kathy Keele said the partnership with the ABC was a great fit with the Australia Council’s Second Life initiative. ‘The ABC was the first Australian media organisation to establish a presence in Second Life and we are excited about working with them on this project. We hope that Australian artists gain valuable insight from Brad Kligerman’s successful art interventions in Second Life and that they will be inspired to create innovative works in-world that will place them at the forefront of this groundbreaking practice.’

The Australia Council has also set up an artist’s forum in Second Life for artists looking for other artists with whom to collaborate. The moderated artists forum can be found at ABC Island and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) Island, Esperance.

Places for the 12 July Second Life event are limited. To register email slrsvp@ozco.gov.au with your Second Life Avatar name. The event will be streamed live at http://slcn.tv . A vodcast* of the event will also be available on the ABC Sunday Arts website.

* video podcast

live author is on ur screen, eating up ur bandwidth

The blog of the Internet marketing director for Holtzbrincks', Jeff Gomez, carries the ominous title 'Print Is Dead'. In this post he gets pretty excited about the future of book flogging using videos of only the most attractive authors. According to Jeff, if you're not a good looking writer in the future, it won't matter how good your book is, you'll be as high and dry as silent movie stars during the rise of talkies.

Christy Dena has noted some of the first examples of this over at Cross Media Entertainment, and puts a more positive spin on the development than Mr. Gomez, suggesting that video podcasts can communicate more information in a shorter amount of time than audio podcasts (as you'll see if you go take a look, Simon and Schuster's output at BookVideoTV is video podcasting).

Christy is an advisor to the Australian Literature on creative opportunities for writers in new media (among other things), as well as a tertiary lecturer in games and alternative worlds and a consultant in universe development. Her perspective on all developments in publishing, wherever it occurs, is always worth a look, and I really enjoy her blog and another website on text arts forms she contributes to, WriterResponseTheory.

While I agree with her that video podcast is not such a bad idea if your only option is to listen to the promotion of a book, I think that the speedy provision of detailed information is where print reviews have a huge advantage over all these whistles and bells. Not only does the writer get to hide - useful if you're not as photogenic as Allison Dubois, or you don't like getting caught in the wind like Marianne Wiggins, here. (God, she handles this well, I'd have been throwing a whopping tantie to get a better day for my shoot if that was me).

But print reviews and interviews are really easy to read FAST. And I can't see a great deal of benefit anyway in promotional material where the writer sits with you to tell you what a great book this is. No way am I going to read it just because the ad is on the telly, or a computer screen or mobile. The Book TV videos are not giving us much information, and whatever they do offer is prettified up to make us feel there's a product involved somewhere, and the author loves it so much they're happy to stand out in the wind on a beach and tell you all about it with their mouths full of hair.

I really doubt that this will work for readers who have always made considered buying decisions based on print reports. But perhaps we have always been in the minority.

Over at Dan Green's Reading Experience a few weeks ago, Colleen of Chasing Ray discussed the nature and purpose of the reviews she writes for the American Library Association's book review publication, Booklist. There's a place for short, sweet and devoid of literary criticism, even in reviewing. (I'm not sure if I need shots of seagulls and piers as well, though.)

The recent campaign of US bookreviewers to keep book reviews in newspapers has brought the whole function of reviewing under closer scrutiny in the US across several book blogs, and deserves a post on its own. For now I'll say there are reviews, and reviews - and there are also floggings, now available weekly on a phone near you.

once upon a pair of wheels

Mark Sarvas thought this was a bit weird, but I think it's hilarious. (Though what kind of writer sends a driver out for stool softeners, knowing that one day they may be interviewed by a newspaper about same?)

The IMPAC shortlist has been announced, and 14 Canadians feel cut out.

Books on the phone - here. New media formats just get funkier all the time, don't they? Fancy the Bible on your mobile each morning? download it as an 'mBook'.

E Ink's profits have been increasing by 200 to 300 percent per annum for the past three years. A change in how digital publishing is achieved is in the air according to this report from Reuters.

And Stephen Mitchelmore has found someone who thinks Clive James is a 'stereotype of the provincial arriviste' and is happy to debunk his hatred of 'old Jean Paul'.

the semantics of search - is it Web 3.0 yet?

Richard McManus of Read/WriteWeb has been talking to the founders of a semantic web search engine that has a focus on natural language processing methods and analyses sentences in order to perform searches. Hakia will come out of beta towards the end of 2007. The CEO of Hakia, Riza Berkan, was invited to make comparisons between his product, between Ask.com which is an indexing search engine, and Google, which McManus claims is already using semantic technologies. McManus writes that

Riza's view is that Google works with popularity algorithms and so it can "never have enough statistical material to handle the Long Tail". He says a search engine has to understand the language, in order to properly serve the Long Tail. Moreover, Hakia's view is that the vastness of data that Google has doesn't solve the semantic problem - Riza and Melek think there needs to be that semantic connection present. Their bigger claim though is that the big search companies are still thinking within an indexing framework (personalization etc). Hakia thinks that indexing has plateaued and that semantic technologies will take over for the next generation of search.

Cross-posted to Library Sputnik.

Postscript:

>There's another post on ReadWriteWeb from yesterday which discusses Google's contribution to semantic searching on the Web in more detail, by Phil Midwinter, here.

I mention it simply because in the comments, Google Sets is mentioned, a Google Labs initiative which is online for testing and improvement. Go visit - it invites you to put in a set of related keywords, then watch it wrestle to find additional words that belong to the 'set'.

I put in literary review, authors, journalists and small magazines - and got back sweet nothing for my pains. I ran off to blog elsewhere, came back and ten minutes later Google Sets was still thinking about it.

what's in, what's not

Congratulations are due to Will Elliott whose first published novel, The Pilo Family Circus, has won the Golden Aurealis award at the annual Australian awards for genre and young adult fiction, held this year in Brisbane. The Circus also tied for the Aurealis award for best horror title with Prismatic, written by three writers who pass collectively by the name of Edwina Grey.

The ABC and Telstra have joined the stampede to Second Life. Constance of LINT and Ruminations will be able to tell us if this is good news or not. New media services in both organisations will not be simply advertising, but will be building online facilities in this increasingly popular virtual community.

Germaine Greer talks up Ten Canoes for The Guardian, and does a great job of it in my opinion.

Susan Wyndham is blogging up a storm at the SMH, with 88 comments on this post on best sellers. This blog is a good source of Australian lit news, and Wyndham seems to have a better grip on developing a relationship with her readers than some other Australian newspaper bloggers (Tim Dunlop excepted, of course.) She has made a real effort to engage by starting an online book group, and has a good grasp of how to pitch to a book group readership. You will find plenty of interesting snippets and more than a bit of analysis here.

So, online collaboration on work documents getting you down and you'd rather write a book? NaNoWriMo looks a bit too much like hard work? Try the Penguin online writing project, A Million Penguins (which is a bit crowded to my way of thinking, but that's just me. Link from Australian Writers Online).

Finally, this was so delicious I just had to save it - from the Time archive, link via Flop-Eared Mule. Things to do in 1959 when you've finished your Rhodes scholarship but not your novel.

e-write, e-read, e-publish

I was intrigued by Monica Dux's article, 'Bound To Please', in The Age last week on electronic books and readers. (Aaargh, the link has drowned under subsequent Writers' Festival coverage. You'll just have to take my words in good faith today.)

There was no suggestion anywhere in her rather upbeat piece that Dux had actually test-driven e-readers or had a good look at the software - I'm in the position of being able to make some comments on that simply because I'm studying electronic publishing as we speak, and have been looking at a few of these things in the last few weeks.

I' d really like to see a Sony Reader: unlike the Hiebook which is now almost defunct, it doesn't come with an MP3 player of sorts, however it appears you can 'download' blogs and RSS feeds onto it to read (ahh, but how do they update without an umbilical connection to the desktop? Stored feeds? what kind of feeds be those?) And photographs can be stored and viewed as well.

Pope steps down for youngjamesy

Here's a great quip from an extended and intelligent comment on this post at NéoMarxisme:

'A school system does a much better job inculcating a love/hate for moby dick (sic) than any number of blogs can do for the arctic monkeys.'

I know I'm getting sick of recycling other people's discussions into posts - but this was still interesting even two months after I first read it. Can the Schadenfreude Dailies really "ruin" culture?

beeb catalogue is bigger than google earth now

More from Ben Hammersley and his friends: the experimental prototype of the BBC Programme Catalogue has been released. Courtesy of some slick work with Ruby on Rails by Hammersley, Matt Biddulph and others. Having worked briefly last year at ABC Archives on databases similar to those released into the Internet wild by these fellows, I am suitably impressed. Biddulph quotes one of his testers, saying:

This is as addictive as Google-Earth for anyone interested in UK television and radio.

australianblogs.com.au is here

Welcome in Australian blogging to a very useful new site, australianblogs.com . Cloud tags, nearly 300 blogs and rising and some interesting names among 'em. It would be great to see more, especially useful if they are tagged with their capital city to boot.

SInce its opening just over two weeks ago, Jon Yau and team have put me in touch with several sites hitherto unknown...

academic blogging time is now, says McConville

Found on Templedata, Georg Hibberd's excellent tech blog for the University of Sydney, and crossposted to The Weblog Repository ( that's another blog of Genevieve's with a crappy name).

This article from Online Opinion, an Australian site, is by James McConville, a Senior Lecturer in law at La Trobe University.

It is probably still the case that, at least in Australia, blogging is considered a distraction from true scholarship rather than an exciting addition to scholarship. This was the case also in the United States, but the attitude is rapidly changing...

In Australia, most academics are happy to pump out their one or two journal articles a year and the occasional book. Academics cannot be criticised for this, as it is what is expected of them - just as workers in the Cadbury factory are expected to pump out the Freddos and family-size blocks.But surely it is time to open up this traditional approach to examination. Surely things can be done better.

Australian novel not quite dead yet - feeling rather better

Two things, no. 1 being:
In the Saturday  Australian, that tired old chestnut about the dear departed novel rears its ugly head again. Some of this article is useful, some of it is just bloody annoying really. After all, at least four new independent presses have put up some great new stuff for 2006 (I'm after going to the shed right now to look in the family Age archive for the list, given I won't be able to link to the online list at all.) Plus Jane Palfreyman of Random House assures us again that they have ten exciting Oz titles upcoming, including five new writers' first novels (four more than last year). It does appear we are executing our tall poppies a little early in the piece, people. Let 'em print the f...ing books first, eh?

(Note to overseas readers: The rather bitter tone of the above paragraph is designed to reflect the fact that Australians are prone to cultural navel gazing and cynical attacks on their high achievers. The second behaviour being enshrined in the national demotic as 'cutting down tall poppies'.)

Secondly:
The digital demagogue McKenzie Wark , prominent in Australia in the 90s and now teaching in the US, is publishing a networked book soon. Preview over here at if:book, the book blog at the Institute for the Future of the Book. The title is GAM3R 7H30RY Version 10.1, and it looks like fun. May even come out as a syndicated serial via RSS. I rather like the topic graph for the nine forums which will occupy half of the site on which the book will be published - a designer's version of a tag cloud (View this photo ). And the idea of publishing an intertextual piece in Wordpress 'with a custom-built card shuffling interface' sounds compelling too, and is hardly likely to push any tacks into the novel's coffin anytime soon. I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to bring out my dead just yet.

do I dare to blog a peach?

Hells bells, will I blog this? I think so. David T, look away - it's from my conference research.

This however, was discovered serendipitously. To think I started reading this girl's blog and thought it was INTERESTING. I'm talking about Clicky Tooth #3 becomes Old Rotten Tooth. The young have no respect - okay, I love them for that, all right? but this piece is putrid. Question is, will it come up if I google 'Beckett parody'? or was I just really unlucky? I wonder what will come up if I google 'Beckett parody' ???

AND now for something completely different - Edna Walling is famous here both for her ability to make things grow and to write about it, and here is the online exhibition at the ABC to prove it. Some attractive photographs of Edna's too.

To finish up this very sloppy dump, a global link - The only blogger in Azerbaijan has moved to Kiev. So do visit her, the archives have some great photographs of Azerbaijan as well as some acute observations of the capital, Baku, and the people.

** And everyone's probably seen this already - the Nonist had a depressed blog some time back.

                                             

cultural journalism round-up is rocking

I found this link to a round-up of quality arts journalism some time ago - in his introduction on the main page, Jason Gross devoted most of his introduction to several similar lists to decrying the role of blogs, remarking that they are endangering the discovery and retrieval of quality journalism.

I've yet to explore any of these lists in great detail, but they're enticing and the Music list got a grudging mention from Alex Ross, who languishes in my sidebar under a general category. But it's crowded over there...Never mind, there are many links to music blogs at his engrossing space, The Rest Is Noise.

* Sorry this has been rewritten - apologies, erasing bits simply wasn't enough!A botched and un-botched post.

tell me a story

Busy times down here.

Firstly, I've had a brief incursion into freelancing, covering the Digital Storytelling Conference here at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) last weekend for a film-makers' website. Fits in well in this space, so there is a list of links in the sidebar of the most prominent leaders in the movement, while a few more will reside in the body of this post.

Digital storytelling has a practice base of less than 150 known organisations in the world at present, however as it works to spread technical expertise within communities rather than aggregating it within a group of professionals, it will continue to grow.

In some respects it is low-tech multimedia, in other respects desktop scrapbooking with a voice-over. Groups represented at the conference were not all digital storytellers as it is practised in the US, at the BBC and here at ACMI - some were documentary film makers, some museum curators, one was an  interactive storytelling software developer, others were indigenous film makers and community website authors, or academics involved in youth projects.

But all their work is worth a look if you are interested in the potential of computers to democratise the media. From that magical place Canada, a shot of what it might look like on the box.

And my other life as a family manager and frustrated student? Writing in fits and starts fits in beautifully with all that - down to the index cards hidden away in the handbag where son with autism can't find them and repack them in a better place, along to the opportunities for negotiation with others over computer time. I think my youngest son gets a lot more homework done when I'm on the computer ostensibly 'earning', but mainly learning.

The downsides? the money, my stodgy style (not really like my blog at all, to my recruiter's well-disguised surprise), my innate desire to research rather than report, and the deadlines - flexible in this case, but very like school I must say. I'm very grateful to the networker who got me this gig as he's opened doors in doing so. Will I pass through them? I wonder.

In the meantime, I've got a paper to write and a supervisor to meet with - so Structured Blogging, look out.

bigger than jesus (in media terms)

Dave Munger notes that Seed Magazine has been 'Boingboinged'. He is probably right to conjecture that this publicity could be worth more than a New York Times article.

australian blog wins HNN award

A find - amongst the nominations for best Australian blogs, one that has already attracted overseas attention. PK blogs 'pseudonomously' at BibliOdyssey, and has already won a Cliopatria award this year.

I particularly like the collection of graphic links towards the bottom of the main page, one of which presents images from the collection of the National Museum of Japanese History together with a useful review of their collection of history essays. Just one of the reasons I'll be posting less and reading more this year.

And BTW ( note to self here), who knew that Cognitive Daily is now over at ScienceBlogs? I didn't. Something else I need to read more often - written by the Mungers, psychology professor-and-writer team extraordinaire.

slight pickings

On this site I've just managed to collapse four categories into one - Media and Technology is where you will find all the blogging meditations from now on. If my work at a new site bears fruit, future posts on that topic will be over there ( TBA), but we will see how that goes...In the meantime, I'm sick of offering links instead of something I've taken time to think over, (and that's one of the reasons the tidy - up is taking place), but this is all I have this week.

Over at Corporate Engagement, Trevor Cook notes that spending on Internet advertising has risen 34% in the last quarter, giving increased returns of 5 % and pulling dollars away from other advertising areas such as TV and newspapers. (From Reuters.)

In other news from Reuters, the Library of Congress has sought assistance from Google for its World Digital Library  documentary project:

The Library of Congress will contribute its own body of works to a blended collection with other countries. More than half of the printed volumes in the Library of Congress are in languages other than English.

"It will deal with the culture of those people rather than with our contacts as Americans with those cultures," [librarian James] Billington said.

Web search company Google has agreed to work with the Library of Congress on developing standards for indexing the digital collections and by providing computer equipment.

It's anticipated the existing American digital library at LOC, the American Memory Project, will act as a model for the collection of unique objects from the world's collections such as manuscripts, pictures, photographs, recordings, maps and books.

Divertissement du jour: Over at Rhetorica, a list from Andrew Cline (updated in September this year) of Professors Who Blog.

And coming close behind that, the Guardian's list of Top Twenty Geek Novels (link from Barista).

bloggers and journalists of the world, unite

I've been digging around at Jay Rosen's PressThink and found some reports on the Greensboro News Record online news site currently under development that show that Margot Kingston's attempts to circumscribe her online journalism efforts with a charter and guidelines are not that unusual after all. (As well as this provocatively titled post, Bloggers V. Journalists is Over. As we used to sing in post Vatican II church, God has Spoken To His People, Alleluia.)

Take a look at the Terms and Conditions attached to the News Record's comments boxes sometime if you think Margot asks a lot of her Webdiary participants, as I did at first when I rolled by her site the other day. Note too that News Record is still not quite ready to manage comments, instead inviting would-be contributors to join an online forum for the time being. Rosen would like to describe this as an 'Internet paper with a print version'. And this may be how it needs to be done.

In which case, the recent online skirmishes between bloggers and journalists in Australia are beginning to look like the storm in the proverbial, non? Instead of focussing on the negative aspects of blogging, perhaps it is time for newspapers to get with the tools and look at making them work. It appears Margot has been working on this since 2000, with inadequate support from her original host, the Sydney Morning Herald - I have to congratulate her for her efforts given the truly woeful technology platform she operated on there, and wish the Diary well in its present Typepad incarnation.

Meanwhile my research on blogging and journalism continues  - I'm looking forward to obtaining a copy of Barons to Bloggers:Confronting Media Power (ed. Jonathan Mills, Miegunyah Press) tomorrow after I attend the protest rally against the Industrial Relations Bill  in Fed Square. According to Age reviewer Fiona Capp,

Rundle argues that the net can be used to mask the workings of centralised power and suggests that this is why Knobel [ex-program director of the World Economic Forum] extols the virtues of atomised bloggers.

And after I've read that, I think it might be time to start a 'blogging' blog and return this site to its original interest area - literature. (Aaah, yesterday!)

and rebecca thought she had ADD

Rebecca Blood provides a link to a fascinating report ín the New York Times on a study of office workers' patterns of interruption which puts much of the blame on computer hardware design. It seems that the more windows you have open on one monitor, the more stressed your short-term memory becomes. (And I thought that was middle age...)

According to researchers Gloria Mark and Mary Czerwinski, the monitor may in fact act as a bottleneck, causing us stress as we strive to remember what else we have open, and what we have to do next:

Some experts argue that the basic design of the computer needs to change: so long as computers deliver information primarily through a monitor, they have an inherent bottleneck - forcing us to squeeze the ocean of our lives through a thin straw. David Rose, the Cambridge designer, suspects that computers need to break away from the screen, delivering information through glanceable sources in the world around us, the way wall clocks tell us the time in an instant. For computers to become truly less interruptive, they might have to cease looking like computers. Until then, those Post-it notes on our monitors are probably here to stay.

Professionals who follow work management guru David Allen's advice about managing technology -induced stress are known as 'life hackers', and technology writer Danny O' Brien discusses his interest in them:

At the core of Allen's system is the very concept of memory that Mark and Czerwinski hit upon: unless the task you're doing is visible right in front of you, you will half-forget about it when you get distracted, and it will nag at you from your subconscious. Thus, as soon as you are interrupted, Allen says, you need either to quickly deal with the interruption or - if it's going to take longer than two minutes - to faithfully add the new task to your constantly updated to-do list. Once the interruption is over, you immediately check your to-do list and go back to whatever is at the top.

"David Allen essentially offers a program that you can run like software in your head and follow automatically," O'Brien explains. "If this happens, then do this. You behave like a robot, which of course really appeals to geeks."

O'Brien summed up his research in a speech called "Life Hacks," which he delivered in February 2004 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Five hundred conference-goers tried to cram into his session, desperate for tips on managing info chaos. When O'Brien repeated the talk the next year, it was mobbed again. By the summer of 2005, the "life hacks" meme had turned into a full-fledged grass-roots movement. Dozens of "life hacking" Web sites now exist, where followers of the movement trade suggestions on how to reduce chaos. The ideas are often quite clever: O'Brien wrote for himself a program that, whenever he's surfing the Web, pops up a message every 10 minutes demanding to know whether he's procrastinating. It turns out that a certain amount of life-hacking is simply cultivating a monklike ability to say no.

Strategies for managing short term memory loss induced by the computer's inflexibility here range from military aircraft-like dashboards and large plasma TV size monitors to Merlin Mann's low-tech PDA, manufactured from 3"X5" index cards, which he has christened the "Hipster PDA".

( Enjoy the leading life hacker's website, won't you. I've just finished reading Scott Andrews' excellent post there, on how I would have been living now if I'd kept singing at weddings. And here's one seriously obsessed fan of index cards' take on (gulp) customising them with a computer. I confess, I came THIS close to buying index cards plus box last week for writing ideas.)

A lot of this reminds me of some reading I came across very early in library school regarding a study done of doctors in a prominent US hospital, who were asked if they would use a computer laid out in the shape of a large desk, with documents displayed as virtual piles of paper...Of course I'll quote it in full when I remember where I've put the article!!

in the spirit of the staircase

From the ALIA lists, this link to a nice article on why George Bush says 'nucular' instead of... you know. Thanks to the poet who never fails to cheer up the library list with some intelligent and witty flimflammery.

I like this, from the word list at the end - 'Blog - a syllable whose time has come'. Hehe.

There's a New Kid In Town. And she looks so shiny ( my Polyester Girl). Also her website designer has a link to a tremendously important quiz on "Which File Extension Are You?" which is way riveting. (Haven't done it yet, though. I reckon I might be a .dll somehow - add one letter in Australian and that makes you a bit of an idiot.)

This ole syllable, I dunno- just when you're about to chuck it in, it starts looking fun all over again.

Not all of this post is frivolous, however... from Freepint, an online journal for information managers and librarians (which has a suspiciously obvious Lexis Nexis/Butterworths logo at the head of the website), comes this book review by Martin White of Steve Arnold's book on Google, which is only available as a download of 24MB so far and will be updated before its final release:

This excellent book really goes behind the scenes and it is a tribute
to Steve Arnold, that he has managed to write a book of such detail
and insight without the cooperation of Google itself. Indeed, I would
not be surprised if Google employees were among the early readers of
the book!...
This is not a journalistic approach to Google but the outcome of the
author's lifetime involvement with search applications. The result is
a level of technical detail and analysis which I cannot see ever being
bettered. Equally valuable is that Steve Arnold looks at some of the
issues that might yet derail the Google train. After all, I can
remember the days when no one could conceive of there being a
competitor to AltaVista.

I don't know much about Freepint, however there is a link to a shop, so how independent is this reviewer, I wonder? We've been given two articles from SearchEngine Watch about the deviousness of Google this semester, so it would be interesting to see if Arnold has in fact managed to open the company up a little to the outside world.

wired style and other constraints

I'm sitting in the lovely little room where the Victorian Writers' Centre collection is housed, reading Wired Style:Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. (Edited by Constance Hale and published by Hardwired:San Francisco, 1996.) Coffee and bix for nix, specialised writing and fiction collection thoughtfully displayed, large distressed table to spread out on, not a computer in sight, and what do I choose to read about? Online style.

I'm going over to RMIT later to hunt down a copy I can borrow - this is from the VWC's reference collection, and cannot be borrowed - not an entirely novel experience as I'm heading up to the State Library of Victoria later as well, to copy some chunks out of an account of the Yorick Club that is held there.
My son's interrupted this comparatively wireless interlude with a call about his upcoming encounter with a dental surgeon. This young man is a wicked guitarist who gave a fine account of 'Fade to Black' and 'Sweet Home Alabama' with the mates at the school concert two nights ago - now, bitchety bitch, we must have a tooth removed and put braces on his bite. Cruelty, thy name is orthomaximillius...

So, here I am in a pretty, grimy Art Deco building , facing a wall of Australian literary journals whose publishers are slowly nudging their way online,  and revisiting the Internet in 1996.

The chapter titles are the usual snappy bites, leaving me unprepared for the occasionally sober, sometimes passionate analysis they contain within incisive definitions and anecdotes. The reference style is breezy, but the intention is serious nonetheless:

What's the language of the global village? How can we keep pace with technology without getting bogged down in empty acronyms? How can we write about machines without losing a sense of humanity and poetry? Wired Style is anarchic, fluid and rule-averse, so beware: the digital dictions in this book may someday ache for updates and clarifications.(Consider this Version 1.0.Fortunately, Version 2.0 is already being created for the World Wide Web at www.hardwired.com/.)

The compilation strategy used to create the guide back in 1996 was collaborative. Readers are included and named in the credits. Chicago, AP and Strunk &White are mentioned briefly. Dean Swift's influence is invoked on page nine:

'As a lover of the plain simple straight ahead commonsensical [sic] and above all human style of the master Jonathan Swift,' says John Seabrook...'I am so pleased to see citizens of the Net quietly keeping the fires of great prose alive."

I ended up skating through the first two chapters and leaving the definitions in the past, as I couldn't borrow this treasure from RMIT after all. So I'll probably sample the first edition again sometime, in between visiting version X in its freshest incarnation.

There's an excitement in earlier writing about the online environment that's well worth savouring, though. As i'm midway through transcribing Seabrook by hand at the distressed dining table, I'm suddenly visited by a sense that technology has been my master for too long. I'm writing this and thinking, "ewwwh, if they had a machine I could photocopy this and be on my way...why don't I get a laptop, when am I going to start that Wordpress blog..."

Perhaps it's a leftover from being a music student all those years ago - your work is structured around the availability of tools, you come home from school and throw your younger sibs off the piano and hunker down...Then there's written exams, all of which promotes an insidious garbage in, garbage out frame of mind. I suffer from the ridiculous conceit that if it hasn't been researched or isn't the occasion of a special excursion of some sort, then any piece I produce is somehow frivolous or illegitimate.

Thanks to this tendency to over-research, it's likely I'll disappear into someone else's writing once more without producing the pieces I want to write on blogging for a print source. I could easily spend the time between now and Christmas building a little blog to put it all in. Like a pretty box. Bloody hell.

The writer's centre has a ghost librarian who has been busily devising a series of card indexes - it appears the centre is reluctant to invest in an online catalogue of any sort. But there is a freedom in that minimalism that I may be just ready to embrace. Get the tools - then forget them. Is that how to write an online essay? Maybe.

Constraints on this piece (after Derik Badman, another librarian I know of):

A Mitsubishi pencil (Uni-ball Eye Micro) and red notebook, some scratchings out, arrows and asterisks, minimal paraphrasing whilst typing, not having read the whole book I'm using as a peg for my thoughts, a mobile phone with a wonderful young person on the other end, and (last but not least) tiny, cruddy toilets down the corridor.

Tech-free surroundings come at a price.

Update: another constraint - Hardwired disappeared pretty quickly, after some lukewarm reviews. Even Google has it listed as a Style Guide - but the bird has flown.

preoccupied (and blogging the day away)

I''ve had a seriously tense morning. Jory Desjardins and I had a conversation about human legacy a while back - a family is one hell of a legacy sometimes. One wonders how bad writing a book could possibly be...

I'm winding down from a session with the day centre, planning for my son's next 12 months there, which took all the diplomacy I could possibly muster - and then some. The adult training industry sends me reeling sometimes. So this is a grab bag of the last week's snatches and titbits.

From Elisa Camahort's blog, this link to Hip and Zen about testing out Starbuck's fair trade coffee assertion. I wouldn't give them the custom myself, as we like our coffee here in Melbourne (snark snark), and we also like our shops to be small and personable - but if you usually go there, do ask them for the fair trade blend and let other bloggers know what answer you get. Create some buzz out there...

I'm just about over coffee myself, having realised four lattes a week is also four cups of full cream milk I didn't really need, and it's making me thirsty in my old age. Tea - Russian Caravan, English brekky, camomile after lunch, and for very special occasions, Terry's Mix from a magnificent mail order service in Sassafras here, is all hitting the spot. However I am absurdly, foolishly choofed with myself as I have always considered Atomica on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, to serve some superb stuff - and a food guide has recently suggested theirs is the best coffee on the strip. So snobby snob coffee snob.

In other news, here's a great link from Robert Nagle at Idiotprogrammer to a lovely piece on Brian Eno, and (among other engrossing things), how he came to write the start up music for Windows.

And just in case anyone gives a shit, I've been amassing a page of links for a professor of media studies up in Sydney who is not amused at the somewhat capricious way bloggers distinguish between what they publish on their blogs and what is written in the paper or online. And that's all I want to say about the squirrel, the nut, the barber and the campus right now. She is also still working as a print journo, so in a few weeks time I'm sending her a mass of material to look through and draw her own conclusions.

I'm also going to tell her that I'll use the same material myself if the mood takes me, to write something here or in another publication. I think how we both approach the matter would make for an interesting comparison - also I want to make sure she does her own research! (Whether I get around to it, or fail to be tough enough over her information seeking strategies, is quite another question altogether.) It is rather fascinating, though, that both these blogging hullabaloos blew up at the same time across two different continents - and that I have links to both of them. Not many degrees of separation there.