Monthly Archives: July 2008
Joseph M. Williams, 1933–2008
It’s amazing what you learn if you do a simple Web search these days. This morning I typed Joseph M. Williams into Google and found out that the author and University of Chicago professor died in February.
I didn’t know Williams but through his books, yet he has been a constant companion with me since I [...]
Trolling Knol
There’s one thing I’ve noticed so far after playing with Google’s Knol, the company’s so-called Wikipedia killer. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol doesn’t specify whether it wants us to write in an encyclopedic style.
You can already see the difference between articles sampled at random. The article on lung cancer is written like an encyclopedia entry, a long encyclopedia [...]
ALA pushes privacy awareness
Ars Technica reports today that the American Library Association has begun a new push to teach people about personal privacy in libraries — making sure patrons know that what they do in a library could raise red flags with law enforcement and, then, making those patrons into advocates for privacy policy reform. The ALA’s beef:
“Law enforcement [...]
Prefer the hyperlink
A lesson of sorts for me today: I was reading through a few old posts on this site and came across one that referred readers to a link in the left-hand column. Of course, there is no left-hand column anymore. I think that was removed one or two site redesigns ago.
The lesson is that the [...]
Michael Becker has been blogging about academia, digital culture and journalism since 2005. He is the Web editor of the
Google counts a trillion URLs