LISNews: Librarian News

Reveal Day 13 June 2012 – New gTLD Applied-For Strings
ICANN developed the New generic Top-Level Domain Program to increase competition and choice by introducing new gTLDs into the Internet’s addressing system. What is a gTLD? It is an Internet domain name extension such as the familiar .com, .net, or .org. There are 280 ccTLDs but only 22 “generics” in the domain name system right now, but that is all about to change.

The new gTLD application window opened on 12 January 2012 and closed on 30 May 2012. The following list displays all of the gTLD strings that were applied for during this round.

The News-Herald, a newspaper based in Lake County in Ohio between Cleveland and Ashtabula, carries an opinion piece by a philosophy professor at Brown University.

The lead to the piece provides an interesting set-up:

Do you know what your children are doing right now? Would it reassure you to think that they are curled up in the living room, with their noses in books?

It shouldn't. Books pose a major danger to children. Let me count the ways.

The Call of the Future
Now that telephones are virtually everywhere, observed The New York Times, “telephone manners are, quite naturally, becoming equally complicated.” The year was 1986 (when a few people had car phones but the mobile phone was not yet widely distributed). Strikingly, it could have been last week—or it could have been around 1900, when, the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin noted, the phone arrived in his Berlin household, with an “alarm signal that menaced not only my parents’ midday nap but the historical era that underwrote and enveloped this siesta.”

Libraries and the Myth of Mobile Phone Use

Our users don’t want most of the things we think they want. Even if you’re an old hand at user-centered design, they will surprise you. (I never saw using the search box to find a database coming.) Interview a variety of different users, and ask smart questions. Use the answers you get to build composite personas of different types of users. Whenever you are stumped about how to get past a design problem, go to your persona. That will help guide you to user-centered thinking.