Things Douze and Treize

Hah.  My last post just leapt up and bit me in the derriere.  There I was, saying how much fun it was to read stuff.  And then I met Creative Commons.  Phew.  Where to begin?  The commentary descends into legalese pretty quickly.  Certainly it seems great for academia - institutional repositories and the like.  Perhaps it's something you fully get to grips with as you need to, rather than in the abstract.  To some extent, I'm reminded of the mild hoo-ha kicked up by Reality Hunger, a sort of plea for creative plagiarism, by David Shields.  Reading it, Geoff Dyer wrote, "I kept thinking, 'Yes, exactly, I wish I'd said that, and then I realised I had."  Of course, Dyer liked that (it's a compliment and, I'm guessing, he's not overly strapped for cash). But what if he didn't like it?

Things 10 and 11: Social Nitpicking

The first thing in these two-step Things is always fun - just read a bunch of stuff!  Learn stuff you didn't know!  Done!  As to the 'fad' statement, at the risk of sounding like, uh, myself, I'd point people to Malcolm Gladwell's recent New Yorker piece, subtitled 'Why the revolution will not be tweeted'.  Not saying it's the last word - there are plenty of replies to MG's arguments out there - but still worth a look.

Thing 11 is 'Explore Facebook', which I did, I swear, even if I didn't sign up.  I tried - honest I did - but as Ann Lib will tell you, they're picky about names.  And if Napoleone di Buonaparte was good enough for ma and pa, it should be good enough for FB.  More than that, though, I just couldn't, uh, Face it.  And the movie was, like, way overrated too.  Apropos of which, in a terrific essay Zadie Smith puts the two things together.  It's longish, especially if you read it online, but - huzzah! - we have the print copy in the library.  Who pledges to read it?

Things Eight and Nine; or, I'm a Lurker, baby, so why doncha kill me?

Wikis seem great - I can definitely see us using them in the library.  I took a little while to get started because I wanted to be invited at a particular address; I like keeping things in their place, as it were.  Which was a theme that emerged from one of the wiki conversations.  I posted there.  But I didn't add to machinetown's wiki - thereby confirming the so-called 1% Rule, which I learned about via yet another wiki.

Things Six and Seven

Only a month late.  I can see RSS feeds being very useful.  I see the Anonymous Librarian has pointed us to Journal TOCs.  Very easy to set up, too.  I have the weather in St Helena coming in.  (Can you believe it changes, like, every day?)  Serieusement, should we have a feed in the Library?  Hmm.  There's an old saw - originally Irish, apparently - 'What's seldom is wonderful.'  Then again, most times I've heard it, it's been drenched in irony...

I had a go at Bitstrips too.  But it seemed to take longer than the retreat from Moscow.  With time, I presume I could get more proficient, but I've other Things to do...

After a hard day's blogging...

Things Four and Five

Done and done.  Best thing was the Common Craft video!  I can see the merits of Delicious, though personally I'm not snowed under with bookmarks/favourites.  Bit annoying that if you don't type fast enough it seems to chop up your tag.  I couldn't face another sign-in for Diigo...  Tagul seemed to want one too, so that was the end of that.  I Wordled my blog: ho-hum.  The Guardian did something vaguely similar with its Books of the Year.  Oh, look: I just shared it...

About those first three things...

Some feedback.  While grateful for the experience - the spur to learn more - I'm not really 'enjoying' the experience so far.  Mostly it's about privacy issues, and the Googlization of Everything (http://www.ucpress.edu/excerpt.php?isbn=9780520258822).  Signing up, I was alarmed, but not surprised, to be asked for my phone number.  I'm alarmed, too, by how central Google is to the 23 Things experience so far.  All the machines I sit at now suddenly have Google taskbars...  As to iGoogle, apart from giving up lots of information, which is bad enough, it seem to be another classic attention-scatterer.  I don't like to sound so negative, but there you go.  Now, on to the next Things...