Inside View from Ireland

Acting against Broadcast Flag

ALA -- Nearly half of the readers of this blog come from the States. Anyone living in the US should know that the FCC's Broadcast Flag rule will prevent librarians from being able to distribute or make available copies of broadcast television programs on the internet. It will also require librarians to purchase new electronic equipment so that public and school libraries can be Flag-compliant. The ALA has argued that the FCC had no authority to promulgate the Broadcast Flag rule. Last week, the court issued an order that required the ALA to submit evidence proving its standing to sue the FCC. In order to provide the court with the evidence it needs--and to defeat the Broadcast Flag, which will sharply limit how libraries might be able to use broadcast materials, perhaps in ways we might not yet have even conceived--the ALA needs affidavits.

Simply said, the ALA needs to hear from people who believe the Broadcast Flag harms them. Submitting an affidavit is simple, straightforward, and not very time-consuming. If you are a member of the ALA and you believe it is important to protect the First Amendment rights of librarians, you need to consider your answers to a few simple questions.

Big Heads in Flickr

FLICKR -- I like big heads in pictures and I plan to make my very own Flickrhead collection, starting with Martin Dougeamis. Jamie Zawinski also likes big heads: "I often scan through the wire service photos on Yahoo News, and over the years I started noticing a really strange trend. Many of the photos follow the same form: a picture of a person in the foreground, and on the background, a GIANT HEAD. For no particularly good reason, I spent a year collecting them. Here, then, are the big heads of 2004."

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John Walkenbach -- "Big heads"
Grow a Brain: bookmark it.
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Running the dish

Rate Me Teachers

RATE MY TEACHERS -- Several of the Transition Year students we taught in a week-long Schoolworks program understood that a database drove the results behind RateMyTeachers.ie and all of them knew there were issues about the site. Specifically, many teachers don't like the idea that they were being rated anonymously with the results published on the internet. There are data protection issues at the core of the site, which will leads to questions about its sustainability. The site is based on a stateside model with administrative support that promises to "We respond to subpoenas, court orders or legal process." The data protection laws differ in the two countries. It's a similar issue that has floated around in some third level colleges when comments about lecturers appeared in threads on boards.ie. Comments from Rate My Teachers users have attracted comebacks from teachers using the RMT forum.

Creative Commons Search

YAHOO -- A lot of our classroom notes are in the beta version of the Creative Commons search at Yahoo. I teach courses in media studies, mass communications, PHP, and public relations. The notes are registered with the Creative Commons for reuse with attribution. They appear in searches of the Creative Commons.

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Search for Creative Commons material at http://search.yahoo.com/cc
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Friday filings

KILKENNY -- All the Irish newspapers lead with the resurrection of Nigerian student Olunkunle Elunkanlo from Lagos and if the feeding frenzy continues, his arrival in Dublin Airport next week will receive column inches that could benefit the cases of dozens of others deported by the efficient Irish immigration system. This case has united politicians across party lines against heartless policies regarding the treatment of some of the least fortunate in society. It's as though some government ministers have no appreciation of the turmoil endured on a daily basis when living as a guest in another country. It's a turmoil passed down as stories among my Irish, German and Russian forebears in the States and the root of an important message that I learned as a pre-teen--be kind to those in need. That premise could not underpin a government's policy regarding asylum seekers where draconian measures and an air of omniscience seem to be the order of the day. [DISCLOSURE: I have been refused leave to land in Ireland before and benefit from a first-hand viewpoint of the process entailed in punting people out of the country.]

Yahoo context search

YAHOO -- I dabble with Yahoo! context search occasionally and like its relevance. So it's great to see there's a developer's program out with information about expanding the service to include a revenue stream and more controls on the presentation through use of JavaScript libraries open for tweaking. Jeremy Zawodny uses it religiously and whenever I visit his site I wonder how he's clipping the code into his blog posts. Adding it to a Typepad blog post takes some time. It's not something I'd be able to do when posting mail2blog.

IsoBuster to the rescue

The best thing about U2's music is that it is buy-once, play-everywhere. Not so with Kylie's music and more than 270 million CDs on the market. As soon as the Christmas iPod surge receded, people discovered they could not easily migrate their newly-purchased CDs to their personal media devices. Fortunately, there are work-arounds--like IsoBuster.

Pet Pillows

SEVERAL IRISH TALK show hosts have been filling the air waves with information about stuffing your dead pets. That sounds like a recurring topic whenever we approach feastdays like Easter. We have a faithful goldfish still swimming in circles at home who would look nice mounted on a powder blue wall following his last lap. Now we have an option for our huggable dogs--pet pillows from Jeanettes Taxidermy. "Each pet pillow is hand made from the fur of your pet and made into a pillow that you can display.  On one side of the pillow is your pet's fur and the other side of the pillow is your choice of fabric.  These soft, huggable pillows are a great way to enjoy your cherished pet and is an inexpensive alternitave to taxidermy."I reckon a Pom Pillow is ours for around €100. For those readers with horses and cows, special handling is required. But for small animals, it's as straightforward as making ice cubes--that's what they said on Irish national radio.

Lite Feeds

LITE FEEDS -- The URL www.litefeeds.com/mobile does what it says on the tin. You load your RSS feeds on the webside version and then happily download the first 40 words from the RSS feeds you nominate. This works faster than the mobile version of Bloglines.It ought to--it sends plain text information that it cached within the previous 60 minutes to your mobile device. You only get the first few lines. You leave behind no referrer strings because you've never visited the blog you read--this is pure XML feed service and it's fast.  Note to Robert Scoble: You could claw back quality family time if you grazed with lite feeds. You could make LiteFeed clippings into a link blog in one easy pass. However, if you plan to use a mobile phone for this process, you will miss having folders to manage the hundreds of feeds you consume each day.  Note to Brian Greene: This is a DART-certified way of getting your newsfeeds en route to work. Yours appears just fine in the feeds I've set up.