October 2009

Evolving digital technology has provided a steady aid for people in their quest to remember virtually everything. Social networking sites remind you of friends’ birthdays, digital calendars send you reminders, and photos posted online preserve memories indefinitely.

But Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, argues that now is the time to reintroduce our ability to forget. The indelible digital memory can be as unforgiving as it is helpful. Mayer-Shonberger suggests an expiration date for information.

Mayer-Shonberger talks about his book, Delete, with Neal Conan, and makes his case for why forgetting is essential.

Listen to full story on NPR

This is a tip for anyone who wants to get any web working done while you’re traveling and/or in transit for any reason. If you’re going to be in areas of questionable network access, you’d better have the ability to get work done offline at your disposal, and you should also be ready to dig in for extended periods of time without a connection.

For some tasks, you absolutely need network access, but for others, a rich and varied stock of offline-accessible information and research resources should provide plenty of fodder for getting things done. Your iPhone or iPod touch can be a great supplemental resource for exactly this kind of thing. Here’s how to turn your device into an offline road warrior.

It should not have come as a surprise to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and her publisher that somebody would take the title of her upcoming memoir, flip two letters and come up with a parody.

That’s exactly what’s happened. As Entertainment Weekly reports, editors of The Nation plan to publish Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare on Nov. 17 — the same day that the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee’s Going Rogue: An American Life hits bookstores. NPR offers a poll on which title is more to your liking.

It’s all about access. Find out if the site you can’t access is down, or if it’s just your computer having the problem.

Twitter has signed deals to put messages sent via the microblogging service into the Microsoft and Google search indexes, BBC News reports.

The deals will see messages, or tweets, show up in Bing and Google search results almost as soon as they show up on Twitter.

Microsoft has moved quickly to set up a stand-alone Twitter search page accessible via its Bing site.

Google said its Twitter search service would debut within the next few months.

Follow-up on yesterday’s story about the potential banning of a book relating the real-life home invasion crime that took place in Cheshire, Connecticut.

Today’s blog in the Hartford Courant proposes that the community keep the book ( In the Middle of the Night: The Shocking True Story of a Family Killed in Cold Blood by Brian McDonald) on the shelf and the librarian, Ramona Harten, in charge of the library.

I rise in support of Ramona Harten, the embattled librarian of Cheshire. I understand the pain and outrage that would lead a large group of Cheshire residents to resist the notion of having on their shelves a book written from the point of view of an accused killer. But it’s a book. It’s quite relevant to the town. It belongs on the shelves. If we ban books because we find them distasteful, we narrow our collective field of vision, and we risk replacing one of our precious freedoms with a popularity contest.

From Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” to Norman Mailer’s “Executioner’s Song” to several attempts to write fiction from the perspective of Lee Harvey Oswald, mind-of-the-murderer literature seems to have a place in the overall canon. I have no idea whether McDonald’s book is any good. Most books like this are not particularly good. But the only way to sort out that question is for interested parties to read it and discuss it.

Robert Hallett, a longtime Baltimore County school librarian who invented a spandex-clad superhero named Red Reader to motivate children to read, died Monday of a rare form of leukemia. The Reisterstown resident was 60.

Mr. Hallett, who was called Bob when not assuming one of his alter egos, spent much of his more than 30-year career as a library-media specialist at Riderwood Elementary in Towson, where staff, parents and students described him as central to the school’s spirit and culture.
Baltimore Sun reports.

SAN DIEGO — By shelving a new downtown library, the city could save as much as $63 million over the next five years, according to a fiscal analysis by San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio.

DeMaio, who is opposed to the project, issued a memo yesterday to his council colleagues and Mayor Jerry Sanders that outlines how much the city would save if it abandons the project.

The goal of the memo was to refute assertions made by library supporters that the project won’t take funds from the city’s $1.1?billion general fund, which pays for daily operations such as fire, police and parks.

DeMaio said the city should redirect redevelopment funds set aside for the library to cover the annual costs of the city’s debt service on Petco Park and the Convention Center. That would free money in the general fund to help solve the city’s projected budget deficit of $179 million for next year, he said. —C.G.

Original article

The “Wong Fook Hing Book Store” chose the perfect name:

(Thanks Don!)

Last week, Wal-Mart cut the price of some popular new books to just $10, a slice of over 60%. Not willing to be out-done on home turf, Amazon matched them. Wal-Mart went down to $9. Amazon went to $8.99. Target jumped in tardily at $8.99. Then Sears jaunted into the battle and dropped some serious knowledge: books for free.

How? Buy any one of those deep-discounted books at Target, Wal-Mart, or Amazon, and send Sears the receipt and they’ll give you a credit of $9 towards anything you buy from Sears online.

Sears says this is part of some campaign called “Keep America Reading” which would be more appropriately called “Keep America Buying Books”. And buy books they’ll do, if the $10 price point sticks past the holiday rush.