Category: Uncategorized

I confess to feeling a little sorry for the much maligned CiscoFatty who seemingly (does anyone have the facts?) lost her job op at Cisco by issuing the following Tweet:

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

Not only did a senior Cisco person receive the tweet and respond, asking her ‘who is the hiring manager?’ but the whole story has hit the blogosphere and mainstream media with such force one wonders just what the real problem is here. First, one might read CiscoFatty’s comment in several ways, not just as a dismissive note about Cisco and the dangers of selling one’s soul for corporate reward. It might be a statement about the conflicting nature of the decision to be made, as in, “I have to determine the importance of money over possible job dissatisfaction”, but who wants to give the benefit of the doubt anymore? Second, just what was that Cisco employee doing replying to a tweet when he might have been doing something more productive with his time? I don’t see Cisco as holding any moral high ground here.

The nature of Twitter throws into relief a distinction I sometimes make between communication and information. We all communicate, and most of our communications are meant to be transient and targeted, gone as soon as the recipient’s memory fades. This is the interaction signal of life. Communications become information when they are recorded in a form that makes them reproducible. Twitter sits at that interface, taking the intentionally temporary and rendering it artificially permanent. Soon, there will be need for new apps or new information professionals, the Tweet-curator. I may have to decide if I want to do that for a fatty fee…….not.

Well not quite, but yesterday in the English Carling Cup Final (yes, they really did name the cup after the current sponsor, a maker of dubious lager beer), the match went to penalties and during the few minutes it took both teams to prepare for sudden-death, the Manchester United goalkeeper watched video highlights on a iPod of his opponents’ penalty taking habits. Think this might overload a man at such a time of stress? Seems not. One of the highlights showed a specific player’s preference for shooting to the right and when the same player stepped up to take his kick, that’s where the goalie anticipated and dived, making a crucial save. Who knew Steve Jobs was a Red?

The Daily Texan asked me yesterday to respond to ‘reports’ that heavy usage of social networking sites could prove extremely hazardous to health. The full story is more prosaic but I have to say, I did wonder just how such stories get started. I noted that computers have always been the source of health risks, it’s just the form of computer application that changes. In the 1980s pregnant women were advised not to sit in front of terminals for fear of danger to their unborn children; in the 1990s cell phones were supposed to give you brain tumors and so on. By the time the data catches up, the myth has morphed into something else. Still, the number of ‘friends’ who apparently want me to befriend them on FB is startling, so maybe there is a health problem lurking somewhere. Meanwhile, I suppose if you want to get famous, create a bogus theory about the dangers of iPhones, iTunes or eye-glasses. The downside of this, apart from the complications of establishing causality between online behavior and life outside, is that the fear of hazards can be enough to induce some of the very problems we don’t think exist. Still, if you think the 100 friends you have online are really there when you want to go out for a drink or need a hand painting your basement, you probably have bigger problems. Myth 1-0 Reality.

Rutgers University SCILS is the latest information and library school to announce a name change, on top of McGill’s recent re-titling. The rather ungainly School of Communication, Information & Library Studies will become the (slightly) less ungainly School of Communication and Information. This change has caused more of a tempest in the teapot than usual as evinced by the recent entry in Library Journal which talked of typos, lack of communication and jettisoning. I am rather intrigued by the existence now of several colleges or schools of communication and information as it suggests these fields are converging, though I’d like to hear some explanation from others on how they see this relationship. Communication programs have their own history of mergers, departmental divisions and label confusion, and programs in journalism have been experiencing many problems in recent years so we may be in the midst of larger shifts than are witnessed by the iSchool movement alone. I believe these name-changes are indicative of positive and profound consideration of our disciplines’ coverage and concerns but it’s easy to lose sight of this in the passionate defense of labels that often surround these discussions.

The blog has been compromised recently -I’ll spare you the details but if you were getting the spam, you probably know. The price of blogging is (apparently) eternal vigilance, so no wonder Wired recently declared the medium dead. But it’s been quiet in Info world too, unless you figure that US News and World Reports is conducting another ranking exercise. Despite the apparent anonymity of the process, the organizers wrote to me twice telling me the they had not received my rankings and would I please do it! I hope this means that when they get reviews, they can factor out the self-rankings since each program can rank itself. And you wonder why people take these ranks so seriously?

Speaking of rankings, here’s a new one for the most literate cities in the US. You can break the data down by category to explore the various facets of literacy, and you may be surprised to learn that Plano TX has the most educated adult population in the country, apparently, while libraries seem to thrive in Ohio.

Library Journal released it’s annual salary survey for graduates from ALA-accredited programs and there was the usual mixture of trumpeting and excuses. Regional differences explain most of the variance but of course JESSE was used, as always, as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement from some quarters. San Jose claimed great success but in so doing annoyed Michigan by claiming the wrong tuition rates, resulting in a public airing of indignation and so it goes. The data come from recent grads of all the programs, most of whom (in my experience) just don’t complete the survey. For grads who don’t end up working in libraries, the motivation to complete the LJ survey is hard to assess but I know from our program that returns are low. Since it is often the folks going into these other careers who earn the largest salaries, the resulting data set is limited in value.

The bigger problem here is the continual ranking push that has LIS programs shouting from the rooftops about their ‘rank’ (no matter the scale, the method, or the lack of established correlation between any measure of rank and real program quality). And on top of this, US NEWS has just circulated a survey ranking all LIS programs in which people get to rank their own program! JESSE has become a vehicle for telling everyone else in the tiny community just how important you are, how connected you are or how some minor award given by your friends is really an index of your excellence- all submitted under the pretense that you are just sharing info. The rest of the time it’s an excuse for the true believers, the self-selected protection squad to find some trumped up reason to berate the infliltrators (info-traitors?) from the dark side. Real, substantive discussion among educators has taken a back seat to the shrill shouting. Where are you, Jesse Shera, when we need you most?

I learned today that at our university, the Ironport spam protection software actually blocks 97% of incoming mail to UT. Can you fathom that? More than 9 out of 10 mail messages are blocked before you even see them? Apparently the take down last month of the infamous Herbal King spam servers reduced net traffic across the globe by 3% alone. Iron Port itself claims 91% of all email messages on any given day are spam! Unintended consequences of technology, you say? Google to the rescue (not) but they have produced a calculator to let you know how much spam is costing your organization: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/roi_calculator.html, which of course is part of a promotion to tell you how quickly you could recoup the cost of purchasing a package from them…..it’s all a bit sinister, no?

According to today’s NYT, Obama will be the first president to have a laptop in his White House office. Could this be true? He’s giving up his Blackberry for security reasons and apparently this is going to be a major hardship, proof that he’s as human as the rest of us who are tethered to email. I am not convinced I am more productive with a pda, but accept that there is a certain peace of mind that comes from being able to stay on top of email when moving about the world. Downtime though almost never exists, which proves again that email is not really about mail at all….it’s a time and process management tool that spreads influence and control as much as communication about the world. For all this, there is something amazing that happens when you manage to wean yourself off for a couple of days. You start not to miss it too much and when you return, you get a better picture of just how much of it is unnecessary. There needs to be an index for this which we can apply to info-work.

How many times do you have to be presented with a data point to understand a simple fact? Seems this is not even the right question because people can be inundated with the facts and still not hear them, no matter how many times it’s repeated. If you ever doubted this, just note that over 20% of Texans who were asked to state Barack Obama’s religion (this October) answered: “Muslim” and a further 28% did not know. OK, let’s see…. on just how any TV shows, newspapers or websites was this ‘fact’ about the leading presidential candidate discussed? Answers to the nearest thousand, please…..

You have to wonder about the power of IT to mess up business practices when you receive three bills in one month for the same phone. I just did. To add insult to injury, it was three different bills, each demanding a different sum. To add further injury to the insults on top of the original injury, the last one to arrive tacked on a late fee to a bill that was not due to be paid for another two weeks. A quick call to customer service, you say? Sure thing — cue the “we are experiencing high call volume and anticipate significant delays in answering your call”. And this AFTER spending 115 seconds navigating their menus to find the operator.

I gave up twice before persisting three days later and getting through to a pleasant but befuddled operator who after much back and forth, including leaving me on hold for minutes at a time (my minutes???) confessed, “we don’t know”! Apparently their system was ‘set up’ this way so that even though it billed me three times and included a late fee, it was apparently not really a late fee at all but a legitimate charge that was part of my bill(s). Oh, that’s good customer relations! I asked if I would get 3 bills a month from now on for the one phone but she thought not, maybe two for awhile (she was not even slightly intending to be funny). When she asked me at the end if there was anything else she could help me with, I told her to haul out for public hanging the accounting folks who designed this practice. I was intending to be funny (at least that’s my defense if the authorities come knocking). I think I detected a smile at the other end…..

One cannot put a price on the costs of such design stupidity but it seems now we are at a stage of having no control over AT&T and their kind, you just have to pay what they ask, when they ask, as you know it will only cost you time, money and a few grey hairs to get to the bottom of their thinking on this. If I believed they actually knew what they were doing, I might have at least some grudging admiration for this cynical approach to obtaining $$$ from customers, but I suspect it’s all a bit too much even for them.

One final note of irony here: when I picked up my phone from the AT&T store, one of the staff audibly complained to another when told that to complete the process she would have to ring through to customer service. “Oh no, not them” she groaned. Man, the people selling this stuff can’t stand their own customer service system. Should have been warned…..

Post script — Irony upon Irony, the day after I wrote this entry I received a Thank You letter from AT&T, telling me how happy they were to welcome me as a valued customer.