Submitted by Tom Peters on October 26, 2006 - 2:04am
Last Sunday I traveled out to California to attend the Internet Librarian Conference—ITI's tenth, my first. I managed to fly to San Jose with nary a directional question, then took a shuttle bus past fields of artichokes and garlic, and dry brown hills mad in the October sun, down to Monterey on the coast.
Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on October 10, 2006 - 9:58am
Last Friday afternoon at OPAL, Jami Schwarzwalder presented an interesting talk online about the information lifestyles of members of the Millennial generation. (A recording of her talk has been added to the OPAL Archive.) Although the name and the date ranges vary, Millennials can be defined as those born between 1980–2000. They constitute the largest generation within the current U.S. population, with the Baby Boomers a close second. (BTW, what are we calling the generation born since 2000, the Y2K Outcomes?)
Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on September 19, 2006 - 10:52pm
Happy birthday to the ALA TechSource Blog, which turned one-year old today. My great colleague Lori Bell, of the Alliance Library System, commented to me that she thought my dog Max had emerged this year as my bona fide muse. I often think about library and information technology issues as Max and I take our daily, early morning walks through the neighborhood.
 So, to honor my muse, I asked Max which walk was his favorite during the past twelve months. He fondly recalled a May morning when an entire family of raccoons sauntered across the darkened street before our wakening eyes.
Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on September 13, 2006 - 5:55pm
Despite or because of its runaway success, the iPod/iTunes service from Apple has more than a few critics and enemies. Some musicians and music companies don't like the strategy of ninety-nine-cent pricing. It smacks of the cheesy dollar-store marketing mindset. I agree with the heat-wave gripes about Apple that Karen Schneider posted to this blog in July, and I can add a few more rants of my own.
Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on August 17, 2006 - 7:43pm
Wowio, an LLC based in York, Pennsylvania, recently launched a free downloadable e-book service. The company's collection at launch is pretty sparse, but it does include both public domain and copyright-protected e-books. During my first use of the collection, I downloaded both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—if for no other reason than to relish Emmeline Grangerford's mournful Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots—and Slaughterhouse Five. 
Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on August 3, 2006 - 11:02pm
 Just when we thought it was safe to return to the snippet-infested digital content pool, HarperCollins came along and launched today its own snippet-dangling service that tries to lure readers, especially "young-adult readers" (is that phrase becoming an oxymoron?) to buy more books (primarily) and read more (coincidentally).
Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on July 26, 2006 - 10:39am
Two news items that scurried across my attention in July have led me to conclude that, in this era of overlapping eras, we have entered yet another age.
The first item was an industry report that Apple shipped more than eight million iPod devices in the second quarter of 2006. That's almost three million per month or 100,000 per day, and the second quarter is not a big gift-giving quarter, unless Apple packaged all those iPods in large plastic Easter eggs. (Remember, you read it here first.)
Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on July 17, 2006 - 2:37pm
It's already mid-July and I'm still thinking about the programs, news, and events from the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans three weeks ago. This means either that it was an unusually important conference, or that I'm slow on the uptake and/or have serious conference closure issues.
Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on July 7, 2006 - 12:18pm
 On June 26th I caught the tail end of Chris Anderson's standing-room-only talk in New Orleans during the ALA Annual Conference. Chris was discussing the "long tail" phenomenon in the new business-and-economics climate of the Internet age. His book on this topic was just published, appropriately titled The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.
Read More »
|
|
|
Soon after 
