Book Blog on LibraryThing

Serendipity or "push vs. pull" technology : a little more on Thing #8

A drawback to relying on newsreaders and primarily using the World Wide Web to access newspapers is that it's easier to find only what you're looking, thus avoiding finding out things that don't necessarily agree with your search strategy. You have to use some limits when using newsreaders (what newsreaders you pick, for example) and that limits what information people are exposed to, which frequently means that they further limit their own experience and knowledge to that which makes them feel comfortble and keeps them within their own bubble.

In "The Complete Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" there is a plot point where Claudia is so determined that when she is looking through a newspaper to find out information about Angel, a sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she completely misses an small news story about her parents who are frantic about her diappearance. (Claudia had mailed them a note telling them not to worry, but clearly the note didn't work.) The narrator points out that this is a prime example of letting the goal of your search dictate your search strategy and control what you see, and the nature of your results can be compromised because of one's focus.

Jump Around (Thing # 9, or is it Thing #11?)

I went to Feedster and looked up Banned Books (does anyone detect a theme here?) and got to LibraryThing (which I see is also part of Thing #11). My first problem with LibraryThing is one of my problems with all of these "everyone can post what they like" sites; I'm really not sure that it's a meaningful resource for a professional. Novelist at least has editors who I know are employed and therefore their work is supervised.

On The Other Hand, I also know that bookstores often have a section called "Employees' Favorites" so that regulars of the bookstores can go to that section and use a similar search strategy (The "I know I like the books Jean likes" algorithm) and I also know from experience that sometimes customers know that they like books that a particular librarian likes, so they go up to her for recommendations.

LibraryThing's Book Suggester is more annoying than helpful, because it requires at least one more step for me to figure out what the book that's being suggested is about. I might have liked "The Other Rebecca" for any number of reasons, and because LibraryThing hasn't figured out how to manage tags (while Novelist has) means that I won't find it professionally useful, yet.

Reconsidering Bloglines or Task #8 part 3

A lot of the information on Bloglines looks really fascinating and helpful to me as a librarian, but should I be interpreting my job as including looking through these newsfeeds for different sources of information? And what do I tell the parents who are convinced that their children have been told "not to use the internet" for a school project when I have the perfect site that's sponsored by the JFK Presidential Library?

It's Really Too Much!!! (Thing #8, part 2)

I signed up for a bloglines account. I'm completely overwhelmed by the amount of information that is out there. If part of my job is to help people navigate the Internet and not drown in information overload, my advice might be just not to subscribe to news feeds. When I was in library school my teachers were talking about how the Internet was "pull" technology, as opposed to the television which was "push" technology. When a person looks on the the Internet they have to actively go looking for what they want and even then, what they seek might be elusive. The bloglines account gives me the impression that the creators of bloglines are using the television "channel" metaphor as their model, though they may have just borrowed it from AOL which was using that metaphor back in 1996.

So to sum up, I don't think RSS really makes my life that much more simple.

Rant re: Digg or Thing #6

I just signed up for a Digg account. I had noticed the icons for Digg and Del.i.cious. on nytimes.com and wondered what they meant. This may be a much more helpful way of bookmarking stories I want to explore at a later date. Great. I just have one annoying comment regarding Digg....

Why are its gender selections so "hip?" What's wrong with my wanting to identify myself as a "woman," not as a "grrl," "lady," or "female"? It's not a BIG deal, I know, but it might just be enough to put off women of a certain generation who fought to be called women in the workplace.

One reason I prefer Firefox or Thing #7

On my Firefox browser there's a link to Scribe on the bottom of the screen, so I can automatically start blogging about whatever page I'm looking at. If there's an RSS feed affiliated with a webpage, that RSS link shows up in the address bar of the browser. In Internet Explorer, there is no link to Scribe, and the RSS link shows up somewhere on the screen, but not in any set place.

I find the standardized presentation on Firefox much easier to navigate than I find Internet Explorer.