Don't you need a citation for that?
Wanna enrich some data? 
Got OCD? Tired of trying to get a foot in on popular Wikipedia entries? Try helping out with Freebase.
It’s a database. Of stuff. Free stuff. You can mush it however you like. You can compare stuff. You can edit it. And this week? This week you can join a few hundred of your fellow data nerds and join a data mob.
Here’s an update on the current state of the datamob. Go forth librarians! Go forth and link up nodes! For the furture! For the children!
Oh yes. The IRC Rap Battles continue at Linden Lab, creators of Second Life. My friend Bridie is in town, and we decided to bitchslap some suckah MCs…
Bridie:
I got so much chips I swear they call me Hewlett Packard
I got so much chips you can have a bag if you’re a snacker
Me:
Running on energy I stole from Half-Life
Too dark to see gotta use my keyboard backlight
Preying on newbies / I like to watch them break down
Running with Bridie / We start the grid they take down
Both:
Aww. Aw yeah.
I was crawling through my archives this morning and came across this little rant that I wrote years ago, during my first, horrible, post-grad school job at the Cornell University Library. I know several of you Gentle Readers are in school right now, and I thought you might enjoy the sentiment:
First of all, and lets just get this out of the way: a full-time job is actually a pretty shoddy reward for 2.5 years of graduate school stress.
Yes, I’m grateful and all, glad to be here, nice to meet ya, etc. but frankly, I think I was looking for something along the lines of “congratulations on your degree, here’s your houseboat, now get out of here you scamp.”
I suppose having a stable schedule and slightly-more-realistic paychecks is reward enough, but lately I’ve had to face what seems to happen any time you put enormous effort into something. Which is, a rather slow transition into something different that requires enormous effort.
Like learning not to scream when someone suggests you attend the Metadata Working Group Meeting.
I took a stab at writing a Wikipedia stub on one of my favorite Second Life locations, Caledon, the steampunk/Victorian sim. I’m a Wikipedia n00b, and my stub got flagged for deletion (rightly) due to a lack of notable references.
Any of you SL-lovin’ librarians out there wanna take a crack at improving it?
Link to Caledon Stub (fictional places???)
I can’t sort out my head properly, so I’m sorting my books. Plover the cat and I are drinking red wine and water, respectively, and pacing the apartment listening to Motown.
I’m rearranging my books.
I’ve you’ve read Nick Hornsby’s book High Fidelity or seen the movie, you might remember Rob rearranging his record collection. Today is sort of that, but without the breakup.
When I have something big on my mind, usually related to self-definition, I become more interested in music and stories.
The music I listen to becomes Important. The books on my shelves become Me. I download. I read. I sort. I fuss and swap and graze over my books, looking for the right system. And through this, somehow, I describe myself to myself. Whatever is going on in my head benefits from the organization I’m doing with my hands.
I externalize this stuff because it’s easier than neurosurgery and cheaper than therapy.
Behold my books. They are arranged by priority, then color.
