And now, a bunch of pretty decent links:
This week’s favorite line from Techsploitation Chick: "The[rehashed dot.com companies such as] Zupits suck up funding, while true visionaries innovate for free." Not a bad thing to keep in mind in this age of big companies who want us to use their metadata in ways they determine with minimal imput from us. Controlled vocabularies are nice, but the price for their use is sometimes quite high. And huge, ostensibly metadata-friendly ILS systems with their myriad add-on services are rarely as customizable as those who sell them to us would have us believe. Anyway, read the whole thing here.
A major event in the "Woo-Hoo!" department is the Academy’s Grey Literature Report being written up in ResourceShelf. We even made Resource of the Week! (Yea!) Granted, we’re not the only repositories of Grey lit to be found with a bit of effort, but I still think we have one of the bst. But, what do I know? I merely catalog the stuff that goes into the report every couple of months.
Here’s a kind of creepy revelation from The Nation magazine: "The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an
alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and
nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded
service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online." (The full article is here.)
Another related story on the same issue is here, from the NY Times. Should something like this go through (unlikely but always possible) how does one get the service of an ISP overseas? Assuming, of course, that this law would apply only to access points within the continental USA? Something to think about.
Here’s something else to think about. Granted, it’s a tiny bit dated, but I think "just plain insiring" is a good description.
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