Thanks to Laura Crossett for posting a link to this video in the LSW room in FriendFeed.
Library School: Hurts So Good
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Monthly Archives: October 2010
My Favorite Bookmarklets (the Sequel)
I regularly use bookmarklets to speed up everyday tasks, such as:
- adding a blog to my Google Reader account
- bookmarking a page in delicious
- rendering a page more simply so I can focus on the text and not all the sidebars, banners, etc.
- saving a blog post in a “to be read later” location
Over the years, I added lots of these little bookmarklets to the bookmarks toolbar and saw my toolbar get more and more busy. Recently, I discovered a tool that will take all my bookmarklets and combine them into one single button on my toolbar. When I click that super bookmarklet, I get a tiny window that allows me to select which bookmarklet I want to use.
The tool I used for this is called Bookmarklet Combiner. You can build your own on the site (the developer’s blog offers instructions) or you might just want to use mine (the site can save your bookmarklet and assign it a unique URL).
Here are the bookmarklets that are in my instance of the Bookmarklet Combiner:
- Subscribe (uses the official bookmarklet from Google Reader that lets you subscribe to a feed without having to leave the page with that feed; this bookmarklet is found in Google Reader >> Settings >> Goodies)
- Readability (uses the Readability bookmarklet to clean up web pages and make the main body of text much easier to read)
- Read Later (uses the Instapaper bookmarklet to save the page to my Instapaper account)
- Printliminator (uses the Printliminator bookmarklet to re-render the page you are viewing and let you select elements you want to remove before you print)
- MarkUp (uses the MarkUp.io bookmarklet to let you annotate web pages and share them with others)
- bit.ly (uses the bit.ly bookmarklet to generate shortened URLs for whatever page you are on)
Jon Udell on Calendar Curation
This 27 September 2010 episode of the Technometria podcast features Jon Udell speaking with host Phil Windley and Scott Lemon about Udell’s elmcity project. For the past several years. Udell has been working to encourage people to think about ways they can ensure that calendar events could be published online in ways that make syndication possible. This project he launched makes it easy for people to curate a calendar of local events that can easily be syndicated and repurposed elsewhere (e.g., published on other web sites automatically and available to be incorporated into people’s own personal calendars in Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, etc.)
One interesting aspect of the pub/sub model that I hadn’t thought of before is that if I publish content with feeds (blog posts, bookmarks, calendar events, tweets, etc.), the idea of people subscribing to my feed and viewing my content in a personal aggregator is only part of the picture; the easiest model to envision is the feed readers people use to subscribe to my blog posts. Udell, though, wants the idea of subscription to a feed to also include subscription by machines, as in the case of a calendar feed I create being automatically ingested by some service and maybe republished via that service.
Renaming This Blog: Beating the Bounds
I’m about a third of the way into Lewis Hyde’s latest book, Common as Air, which looks examines the idea of a “cultural commons” in America. In an early chapter, Hyde gives a thumbnail sketch of the idea of a commons as they once existed in England before the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries. Before most of the commons were lost to land grabs by private owners, there were a rich set of traditions and practices governing the use of the commons. One of the more interesting annual traditions was known as “beating the bounds,” which occurred around the Christian celebration of the Ascension. During the celebration, villages would march around the commons, looking for fences, hedges, and other illegal encumbrances and enclosures that had been secretly erected there; when they found such affronts to their shared space, they smashed and destroyed them.
I found myself unable to resist romanticizing the image of everyday people marching about, removing the barriers to places that were held in common. As a mark of my solidarity with efforts to promote open access to scholarly and creative commons and as an indicator of my interest in removing the technological wickets and tangles that keep our silos of licensed resources from working more in concert with one another, I am renaming this blog from “Stephen Francoeur’s Stuff” (a massively unimaginative name) to “Beating the Bounds.”
Introducing Students to Copyright and Fair Use
At lunchtime today, I just started reading Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain, a fantastic comic book by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins. I haven’t finished it yet, but I already know that the next time I teach my 3-credit course, Information Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, I’m going to have my students read it. It’s a great way to introduce folks to some rather thorny questions and legal concepts. By looking at the headaches that documentary filmmakers have to contend with as they decide what can and can’t make the cut in their films, the authors of Bound by Law? illustrate quickly and clearly the way that copyright law has increasingly become a burden on artistic expression.
The book’s publisher, Duke University Press, has thoughtfully made the full-text of the book freely online in various formats. If you want to grab the PDF for the book, you can do so below.
