Reading now: The Generation X Librarian

The Generation X Librarian: Essays on Leadership, Technology, Pop Culture, Social Responsibility and Professional Identity, by Martin K. Wallace, Rebecca Tolley-Stokes and Erik Sean Estep, McFarland, 2011.



Extract:

Generation X includes those individuals born roughly between the years 1961 and 1981. This generation has faced unique advances in technology, environmental degradation, and widening economic injustice, all of which affect libraries and librarians. This collection of critical essays showcases the unique qualities and challenges that face Generation X librarians. Topics covered include management and leadership, rapidly changing technology, social attitudes and stereotypes within popular culture, and how Generation X librarians have responded to or developed upon those themes. This book fills many of the gaps present in the professional literature on librarianship and our younger generations.

What to reviewers say:
This is a fine collection that represents a good diversity of perspectives on Generation X in the library. It's a good read, no matter what your age, and I highly recommend it. -- By Kerol Harrod

Blog Review: My Highly Recommended Money Making Programs

The best part of the WWW / Internet / E-Commerce / Web Marketing is: (QUICK / EASY / SIMPLE / ONE-CLICK) Money Making Programs. That is the background. Here we are trying to understand one blog: My Highly Recommended Money Making Programs. And, the click forward from another site, brought me to this: Mailboxmoney and then found a link to another site, stating Want a free laptop?
Ans. Yes, why Not. The process, get, set go. I clicked on the site mentioned to get a free laptop: http://www.notebooks4free.com
Reading the terms and conditions (notebooks4free), it sounds all clear, and more importantly, telling me not to cheat, That's Great. I move on to see if this is a really real scam free deal. The simple catch is: I get 18 referrals. Period. Nope, then complex catch is, two stops, as explained:

Do my friends have to refer anyone?

Only if they want their own free gift. To earn your
free gift, your friends do not have to refer anyone.

How do I get a free gift?

Our free gift program does not require you to pay any fees. You are only required to complete one offer from our sponsors, many of which are free...[read again: all items are NOT free]

Googling for this site (notebooks4free), I found the following:

McAfee SiteAdvisor @ User Reviews (12): One said: "hp Hosts has classified this as a phishing site. Keep clear." [HP Host site]

Yahoo! Answers. One said: "The next morning.... I got 20 new spam messages and the spam folder took more than half an hour to load!"

Note: The interesting (complimenting and supplementing the spree) is the: COMMENT POLICY @ My Highly Recommended Money Making Programs:

Comments on this blog are made DOFOLLOW for the Google Spiders.

Comments are moderated.

Spam will not be tolerated.

The design of the blog is cool, user-friendly, not overloaded with un-necessary content.
Bottomline, nothing is free. So have happy holidays, and relax.

See also on the same shelf:

I Want My Free Laptop Dot Com

The Top 10 Internet/Email Scams

A Pathfinder To Detect Spam and Forwarded Email Scams

WORK-AT-HOME JOBS: Internet Fraud or Gold Rush?
Major Internet Fraud Investigation Reveals Shocking Truth you Must Know before Choosing a Work-At-Home Program
"Are Online jobs the next big thing?
The reality is that the hopes and dreams of honest people trying to make a better life for themselves are being preyed upon and shattered, day-in and day-out.
A Shocking 81.4% of work at home sites were found to be Scams"

Tips for Avoiding Job Scams, from the Internet Fraud Watch

Federated Search - Reading now

The term federated search is also known as, meta-search, cross-search, combined-search, and aggregated-search. First, it is about simultaneously searching, with one-click, in several electronic sources. Second, it is about getting all the search results displayed in a single browser. And the book I am reading is Federated Search by Christopher N. Cox

I recommend the book for a basic understanding on the emerging theme of federated search strategies, especially about American academic libraries’ experiences in this sphere.

Why Google only tells you what you already know by Farhad Manjoo

From the Inside Flap: "In True Enough, Manjoo presents findings from psychology, sociology, political science, and economics to show how new technologies are prompting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact."

* John Wiley; Due: March 14, 2008; ISBN-13: 9780470050101; 256pp.

Table of Contents:

Chapter One: "Reality" Is Splitting.
Chapter Two: The New Tribalism: Swift Boats And The Power Of Choosing.
Chapter Three: Trusting Your Senses: Selective Perception and 9/11.
Chapter Four: Questionable Expertise: The Stolen Election And The Men Who Push It.
Chapter Five: The Twilight of Objectivity, or What's the Matter with Lou Dobbs?
Chapter Six: "Truthiness" Everywhere.
Epilogue: Living In a World without Trust.

An extract from Farhad Manjoo's Blog @ Salon.com:
"True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society" is a book near and dear to my heart. That's because, wouldn't you know, it's my book! I wrote it, and will be discussing it here a bit in advance of its publication in March.

The book examines a question that's long captivated me, a child of the Internet: Is digital technology advancing truth in the world, or is it distorting it?

By truth, I mean what we call sets of observable, objective, empirical "facts." You might argue -- and many do -- that wide access to information has the capacity to create a more knowledgeable, more tolerant, more rational society. [source: Tech News Review]

NB. I am waiting for the book release. An,d this is nothing to do with a similar blog: http://theytellusnothing.blogspot.com

From those who stumbled upon

PS. This review of StumbleUpon is not mine and this stumbling has nothing to do with a Mughal king who stumbled in his royal library at Delhi--In the words of the British orientalist Stanley Lane-Poole, "Humayun stumbled out of life as he had stumbled through it."

"I must say I was disappointed to find out that Ebay had recently bought Stumble, though. It seems that all the sites I most love are being snapped up by these huge corporations. One cannot blame the site developers, really, after all there is serious money to be made, and yet, my idealistic self would love to see these types of sites unfettered by corporate for-profit ties. But I guess that, across the board, things will be moving more in that for-profit direction rather than less… take a look, in fact, at my next post to see another chilling move in that direction." Read the full article @ Bookishdesi's blog

Putting Librarian Expertise to Work:
"StumbleUpon is a browser add-on for finding and sharing great websites. Unlike directories or search engines, StumbleUpon uses member ratings to form collective human opinions on website quality." [via MetaFilter]
This is somewhat similar to the tool I want for librarian pagerank. Instead of "good" or "bad," a site would be "authentic" or "trustworthy."

See also:

Good Gear Guide - StumbleUpon - Reviews - Software - Utilities - Desktop Search

Google it

Thanks to Dr. Smith for sharing his knowledge of how he stumbled...

Come see why The Wall Street Journal says:
"Next time you want to wander the Web, forget about Googling it. Stumble it."
– Chief 
drsmith@dr-smith.com

Harry Potter book pages found online

Kevin Griffin, CanWest News Service
Published: Monday, July 16, 2007
A 33-year-old Vancouverite has downloaded what appears to be about 60 per cent of the seventh and final Harry Potter book — even though the children’s novel isn’t supposed to be officially released until midnight Saturday. continue reading

See also:

Read the review of the new "Potter" movie

Much more @ Google's

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means

by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, the nation's foremost expert in the new science of networks,

Linked: Networks from Biology to the World Wide Web
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, professor, physics, Notre Dame @ WGBH Forum Network

Best comment @ Amazon:
Cotton Candy--Lots of Air, Some Sugar, No Bibliography, June 3, 2002
By Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
"I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is coherent, thoughtful, and tells a story about the emerging science of networks that anyone, who can read, can understand. This is a non-trivial accomplishment, so 4 stars.
However, the book is also--being brilliantly designed to be understood by the lowest common denominator, an undergraduate--somewhat shallow and empty.... especially when compared with Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", 1197 pages not counting the index, which is at the other extreme.
Although there are good notes, there is no bibliography, and the author fails to use network methodology to illustrate and document the emerging literature on networks--called citation analysis, this would have been a superb appendix to the book that would have taken it up a notch in utility."

From Publishers Weekly
"Information, disease, knowledge and just about everything else is disseminated through a complex series of networks made up of interconnected hubs, argues University of Notre Dame physics professor Barabasi. These networks are replicated in every facet of human life: "There is a path between any two neurons in our brain, between any two companies in the world, between any two chemicals in our body. Nothing is excluded from this highly interconnected web of life." In accessible prose, Barabasi guides readers through the mathematical foundation of these networks. He shows how they operate on the Power Law, the notion that "a few large events carry most of the action." The Web, for example, is "dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, or hubs... such as Yahoo! or Amazon.com." Barabasi notes that "the fittest node will inevitably grow to become the biggest hub."

see also:

Business : Your Network - What type is it?
by Ellis Pratt (Technical Authors) on 16-Jul-05 10:39pm

Can Internet run your life? Re-Mind

"Don’t take it personally, Mark Lawson says, "A speech by the chief executive of Google raised the possibility that websites will soon know enough about users to suggest which job to apply for or where to go the following day...

"But (this is) based on the assumption that the user would take the advice. How many of us refuse on principle to buy any book recommended by an online retail site…?" continue reading

See related posts from my blogs:

Disconnects Between Library Culture and Millennial Generation Values

Google to Digitize 8,00,000 Books at Mysore University

Add Sense to your AdSense: Visualizing the Return on Investment?

Wheels for Google, Google on Wheels

Google Trend - Another Way to Visualize the Blogosphere