Kindle launched in UK

After a long time waiting, the Amazon Kindle is now available for order on the international market, according to their UK website today. They will be supplied from the US after 19th October.

There’s a very interesting sentence in the advert:

“Our vision for Kindle for Kindle is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds”.

A very high aim, but I wonder how long it will be before our students are expecting us to populate their Kindles for them?

Twitter and pointless babble

There’s a wonderful story on the BBC news website about a survey by Pear Analytics indicating that 40% of messages on Twitter are ‘pointless babble’, 37% of messages are conversational ( ie they might be more easily conducted by email or instant messaging) and only 9% is of ‘pass-along’ value (ie it might be more effectively transmitted as a blog). As a Twitter sceptic  I’m surprised the babble figure is as low as that…..  Admittedly surveys have shown that blogs are not without their faults, but for me the fact that there are several long-standing blogs I monitor via Bloglines indicates that the medium works for me.  It may be my age, but even as a self-proclaimed  Internet-native I’m still to find any reason to use Twitter…..

Possibly the added value of Twitter is that the 140 character word limit fits nicely onto a mobile phone screen – a new form of texting, in other words. That would explain why it doesn’t attract me as much as others, as I discovered the Internet long before I got my first mobile.  In which case, as mobile phones grown more sophisticated and get larger screens, will Twitter move to longer messages or will the ‘Twitterati’ move on?

Govt goes Twitter…

Most amused to read this morning that the Cabinet Office is urging other government departments to start twittering. It is all to improve its communication apparently. Even better, although Twitter is limited to 140 characters, this guidance has come out in a 20 page document…..

I’m afraid I’m rather sceptical of the idea. I don’t think many civil servants, used to producing the massive volumes of paperwork that fuel most bureaucracies, could limit themselves to 140 characters. And if they did, how would the rest of us find the facts behind the political spin? It seems to me more like the govt is trying to appear to be keeping up with current trends without fully understanding them (maybe better than sitting back, doing things the same way as it alway has and trying to ignore them, as it often does!). Most twitter feeds (and most blogs) don’t last more than a few days or a few weeks as their authors either get tired of writing them, or realise that nobody is reading them. Information overflow is forcing us all to limit what we follow, and positive spin from govt depts wouldn’t be my priority.  Twitter is just the current trend, and like Facebook is going to become just another part of the Internet revolution once the next trend comes along. Only when that happens will we see whether Twitter has lasting value. The trick is to identify the next trend….

E-Books and ownership

Kindle e-book reader

A rather interesting story has just emerged about Amazon’s Kindle and e-book versions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. There is a well-researched account of it at Copyfight. From my reading of this, Amazon distributed the e-books and then found out that the third party which had made them available via the Kindle store didn’t have the rights necessary to make them available. Hence Amazon pulled them from the store, removed them from user’s Kindles and gave them a refund.

I don’t own a Kindle, but if I did I would be worried when I found that something I thought I’d bought was removed from my device without asking me. That ‘purchase’ of an e-book becomes something more like a ‘license to view’, and even the ‘ownership’ of an e-book reader becomes questionable when Amazon can access it and delete items without authorisation. However on the other hand,  as the e-books weren’t fully legal they were in a sense stolen property, and as such the moral rights become blurred. I wouldn’t claim to be a lawyer and I would imagine that Amazon must have taken legal advice before taking any action.  In my own mind I’m undecided where rights here should lie – I sympathise with the people who bought the e-books in good faith, but I can also understand that this was a breach of copyright.  I wonder how many more new questions of this kind await us as we move to new forms of media?

Swan stops traffic

Just driven into work, as usual with the radio on. At this time it is normally interrupted by traffic warnings, but one was a little different. Traffic entering and leaving Shrewsbury by the English Bridge was beng warned that it might be delayed by a large swan (I did wonder whether the swan wasn’t very good at directing the traffic…).  It’s good to be reminded occasionally that the word is bigger than the office!

IBM to buy Sun?

According to the BBC news website IBM have been in talks to takeover Sun. This is a real sign of the financial slowdown – at one time Sun were making massive profits, and it has long been one of the technological leaders in the IT industry.  To be taken over by IBM would probably lead to big changes as both companies overlap in big sectors of the market. I wonder what would happen to Solaris, Sun’s version of Unix? Or even to Java? I think Sun also has big stakes in MySQL and PostgreSQL, the 2 core OS DDBMS – would IBM choose to continue this when it might take sales from IBM’s own DB2? Another story to watch with interest….

Google find Roman villa in Mozambique?

Google quickly moved to dismiss the possibility that they’ve helped searchers to find Atlantis off the African Coast with their new ocean-bed mapping. They explained that some apparent gridlines on the maps were just an artifact of the scanning process. However I don’t think they quite meant the explanation to continue:

“It’s true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth including a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species and the remains of an Ancient Roman villa,” a Google statement said. (from the BBC news website)

I quite like the idea of a Roman travelling to the south-east of Africa to build himself a villa in the middle of a pristine forest, hindered only by unknown species…..

Hard-shoulder running

Yesterday was one of those good days to hide bad news, what with the third runway at Heathrow and the Hudson river plane crash.  Hence a story that the government has agreed to use the hard shoulder of the M6 as an extra carriageway got hidden away in the regional pages.  I wonder how many deaths it will take before they realise that this decision saves money by putting people’s lives at risk? I travel on the M6 fairly regularly, and on most journeys I’ll see a vehicle on the hard shoulder at some point. Indeed I once broke down on the M6 near Stafford myself, and was very grateful for the comparative safety of the hard shoulder. Now, anybody whose vehicle breaks down has nowhere to go, other than under the wheels of some articulated lorry whose driver wasn’t able to stop in time.  There will be a particular risk at night, as some of the sections planned for this are unlit.  No vehicle is invulnerable to mechanical failure, and we should be allowing for this rather than leaping on the cost-saving bandwagon.  Sad to say, but I wonder whether the government will acknowledge the deaths and injuries caused by this decision are their responsibility?

Changes

This is my last week in my current job, and I start my new post in January.  My new library runs Innovative Millenium, so I’m looking forward to getting my head around that over the next few months. In a way I’m sad to be leaving the Horizon community, as I’ve made so many friends over the last few years – even a few within SirsiDynix! I’m always surprised by the openness and generosity of other Horizon users.  Thanks in particular to the genial Dave Pattern, Liz Barton, Tim Fletcher, Chris Leach and other colleagues in the former Dynix Users Group UK.

However times change, so I’m looking forward to  new challenges and opportunities in the New Year. III be warned, I intend to be as open with my criticism and praise for your systems as I have been for SirsiDynix!

A timely reminder

Our staff newsletter today contains some very wise words:

 ”6.2.4 Business Gifts – Business gifts, other than items of very small intrinsic value such as business dairies and calendars, should not be accepted.”

I’m not sure whether we can accept the cattle?