Weekly round-up

Which, I apologize, I have not done in awhile.

Here are some things that piqued my interest this week*:

The Amelia Bloomer Project blog: “Recommended Feminist Literature for Birth through 18.” Great; now I can start AG’s LibraryThing reading list.
The Faculty Lounge, How to Write a Good Abstract for a Law Review Article. Because as part of the Faculty Scholarship caretaking that I do, I need to write abstracts of faculty work.
Read Write Web, It’s Like Facebook For The Art World. What a cool sounding app! I’m sure I’m too much of a philistine for a social network “populated by art professionals, including auction houses, galleries, museums and art collectors,” but I bet they post really cool photos of stuff.
Read Write Web, How To Find That 1 Thing You Lost Online. I definitely am not as organized as I should be about keeping track of interests, documents, photos, etc., that I come across online. And this article mentions some intriguing apps. The thing is – which I’ll talk about more later, if I ever get to discussing all the articles I starred this week re: Google’s new privacy policy – how can I be sure that any of these tools are going to be better about my privacy than Google is?
ecouterre, TOMS Shoes Introduces Print-Clad Ballet Flats for Spring. Because what would a post round-up from me be without shoes?
Information Wants to be Free, Classic blunder #1 – Let’s just try it and see what happens!

Sometimes things fail in libraries because they weren’t a good idea or fit, but sometimes the failure is caused by the approach taken to creating change. And those failures truly can be avoided. … One thing I’ve learned is that while in some cases the “try it and see what happens” mantra is a very reasonable way to approach things, other times, it can be a disaster.

Ooh, I think a lot of us librarians are guilty of this. Because (1) who wants to be the naysayer to an idea? and (2) oftentimes, trying things can be fun!
Read Write Web, When’s the Best Time to Blog & Share? Sometimes, when I’m feeling delusional (or I just don’t want to do whatever it is that I should be doing at the time), I fantasize that my blog will catch fire with the interwebz and I will somehow be able to make a living off of this blather that I spout. And I think, well, I should comment more on others’ blogs, attach more catchy tags to my posts, and pay more attention about what/when/how I post. But, most of the time, I post things when I have time. And I could save the posts for later (my WordlessWednesday and FashionFriday posts in particular are usually scheduled in advance), but most of the time my life just doesn’t work out that way, nice and planned ahead like that.

So, here you are, stuck with this late night Saturday post about posts, which is probably not gonna get widely read.

If I think about it, though, I’ll try to post more on Thursdays. And/or Mondays. And preferably before noon, EST.

*Actually, the overwhelming number of articles I starred in my Reader and Twitterfeed this week were articles about Google’s new privacy (or lack thereof) policy and what to do about it. There were so many articles that they would take over this post. So, I decided to either not write about them at all, or make a whole new post about it later on.

However! I did want to note this article by Kashmir Hill at Forbes, “Why Google Thinks You’re An Old Dude.” It discusses how Google’s Ad Preferences Manager often gets users’ age and gender wrong. And I wanted to point out that Google got my gender right (not sure if that’s a good or bad thing; may try running lots of fake Google searches to confuse it), but it thinks I’m 25-34 years old. Yay, me! My searches are so youthful!

And these are the categories Google associates with me: