Bob Robertson-Boyd › Comments

Many years ago I tuned out of mass media. Completely. My argument for doing so was that all the media covered as stuff that was too far removed from me (Iraq, Wash. DC, etc.) and my experiences. I argued that I cared about local stuff, stuff that impacted me, my friends, family and neighbors. I took a lot of grief ...from many people for what they saw as a callous POV. I still feel that way and look forward to hyper-local media sites that provide the kind of "news" suggested in this article. (BTW: The "landrush" is just big media's latest attempt at keeping our eyeballs on their ads.) - Bob Robertson-Boyd

Love the bit about iPhone blinders. And the fact that Web-enabled devices are getting more use than smart phones--re: Opera's Mini Browser--is important! - Bob Robertson-Boyd

I've found that reporters are very similar to librarians. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

I found the CRS reports when I first started working at the US House. Most/Many of the reports were freely available on House Web properties, but those were all taken down after 9/11. It's wonderful to think these could come back into the hands of tax payers. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

While accurate, this post leaves out the most important point. You cannot use or understand social media unless you are participating in social media. Consider this analogy: You over hear two people talking and jump in and start talking and talking only to realize that you 1.) were not invited to the conversation and 2.) you're just talking about what was said earlier before you started listening. (Or worse, you misjudged the context and got the whole thing wrong ... insert foot into mouth.) - Bob Robertson-Boyd

Bob - completely agree - you need to "walk the talk". Thanks for reading the post - Andrew Grill

Dumb and dumber. They just keep getting dumb and dumber. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

OCLC has proposed an panel at SXSW 2010 to help identify the issues and challenges around exposing deep Web content. Libraries have access to licensed databases but how many people know that? Vote for our proposal if you think this is worthwhile. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

Google get closer to Facebook territory. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

online communities mimic off line ones. Like their offline counterparts, in my experience close nit, dedicated communities usually close in on themselves and become insular. And implode. Or maybe I'm just bitter from real-world experience? - Bob Robertson-Boyd

I'm becoming very interested in the white space of product design. By that I mean the value of NOT providing this or that feature. I think I'm behind many others in coming around to that way of thinking. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

"Over time I have made Devonthink a central part of my book writing process. The first crucial stage is a disorganised capture of information, where I grab paragraphs from web pages, digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text. This goes on for months; I read widely, in an unplanned and exploratory way, increasingly online, thanks to Google Books and other sources. Each snippet I drop into Devonthink, with only a brief citation. By the time I’m done, I have somewhere near a thousand separate snippets of text on my computer." - Bob Robertson-Boyd

Years after Hypergene published "Amazoning the news" (google it!) we might finally see relevant news on the Web. It's all about providing context to aggregation. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

A better more reliable web! When!? - Bob Robertson-Boyd

Very true, but not nearly as brutal as it should be. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

Simple description of Linked Data. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

Children's search engines - Bob Robertson-Boyd

Bob: Found by way of AlistApart.com. Site: 'People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done. ' - Bob Robertson-Boyd

"iBreadCrumbs allows students, researchers, and professors to organize the world's data into narrow research "breadcrumbs" or click-streams." - Bob Robertson-Boyd

It might be time to look at these folks again. I remember when they first came out a year ago, but the Firefox plugin was buggy on the Mac. - Peter Murray

Bob: Love the idea of "choosing our words with care." Seems strange to have write an article about it, but words have meaning. Imagine that. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

"If digital reading takes off like many think it’s about to, we have to assume Amazon could be intending to raise an Inferno. The pending announcement of some kind of mobile syncing and/or a possible mobile app indicates that the embers are being sown far and wide. If things do ignite, then Amazon would have a complete dominance of the online social reading space, which, as anyone who attended this years TOC knows, is an important space for the future of publishing." - Bob Robertson-Boyd

One of my current work projects is to get business leaders to think of environmental sustainability as congruent in the long term with business sustainability, and to think of both in the context of risk management. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

The first turning is a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order becomes established after the old has been dismantled. Next comes an Awakening, a time of rebellion against the now-established order, when spiritual exploration becomes the norm. Then comes an Unraveling, an increasingly troubled era of strong individualism that surmounts increasingly fragmented institutions. Last comes the Fourth Turning, an era of upheaval, a Crisis in which society redefines its very nature and purpose. - Bob Robertson-Boyd

"MarkMail is a free service for searching mailing list archives, with huge advantages over traditional search engines. " - Bob Robertson-Boyd

Bikeshedding "turns out to be an excellent word for describing a lot of what goes on in online communities." Found on: http://www.equalsdrummond.name/ - Bob Robertson-Boyd

"How we'll live when information surrounds us" Recorded at the ALA MidWinter 2009 OCLC Symposium David Weinberger and Nova Spivack moderated by Roy Tennant - Bob Robertson-Boyd

"Library systems are a very promising application area for behavior-based recommender services. " - Bob Robertson-Boyd

site: "What you do and say on the web, however, is a different story. It hangs around. It’s like a digital tattoo – it’s pretty permanent." - Bob Robertson-Boyd

"the Journal of Comparative Neurology now costs $25,910 for a year's subscription; Tetrahedron costs $17,969 (or $39,739, if bundled with related publications as a Tetrahedron package); the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490; and the ripple effects have damaged intellectual life throughout the world of learning" - Bob Robertson-Boyd

"Brainify will include features tailored to students and faculty members, ... One function allows users to browse bookmarks by academic subject area in categories..." And "Limiting access to those with college e-mail accounts could create a “walled garden,” excluding those not traditionally considered to be part of academe," - Bob Robertson-Boyd

"The primary objectives of this research paper are to explore the concept of social search, evaluate the performance of Facebook as a social search engine, and to understand the relationship between social networking sites (SNS) and social search. The author's intention is to examine the possibility that Facebook presents as the future of on-line search and the implications for libraries. " - Bob Robertson-Boyd