Seen around the interwebz

Oh, my goodness, the whiplash Instagram has given me this week:

• ReadWrite, Why I Quit Instagram And Am Moving To Flickr
• GeekMom, Dear Instagram, We’re Through
• GigaOM, Instagram’s new terms of service clarify how it uses your data for advertising,
• 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, Terms of Service Aren’t Just Read by Lawyers Anymore
• GigaOM, Who’s to blame for the Instagram debacle? Take a look in the mirror
• ReadWrite, Instagram Rolls Back Terms Of Service Changes, Rolls Out New “Mayfair” Filter,
• GigaOM, Instagram changes course and reverts to original terms of service for advertising
• Android Phone Fans, Instagram reverts back to old Terms of Service – Quells user complaints but are we really better off?
• Constitution Daily, Update: Instagram gives in on privacy issues

Meanwhile, Flickr, the place where I’ve stored all my photos for the last four years (in addition to my computer, of course), has a new iPhone app that is really pretty cool: GigaOM, Flickr belatedly joins the mobile photo wars with new iPhone app.

Saturday Night Fever

It’s actually been kind of a slow week, starred-blog-items-wise. In real life, of course, I’m deckin’ the halls and all that jazz. By the way, Happy start of Hanukkah, for those of you who celebrate!

There are a few things I found interesting this week, however. As usual, in no particular order, you may enjoy:

• Instagram Blog, Millions Drawn to Lyon’s Fête des Lumières. Pretty pictures of pretty lights! In France! Really, what more could you want?
• Library Stuff, Bedbugs Hitch a Ride on Library Books. Okay, well, this is just horrific. I may never go to the library again. Or to work!
• HelloGiggles, 20 Years of Awesome: A History of Lomography Cameras. For a while there, the “Lomo Fi” filter on Instagram was my favorite filter, and I didn’t know there was a real-life camera (and movement, I guess) from whence it got its name, the Lomo Kompakt Automat.
• The Flickr blog. I’m all about photography today, I guess! I save all of my photos to Flickr. I know it’s not the most social-media savvy of photo sharing sites, and that’s not primarily how I use it – it’s my back-up repository, for the most part. But I am pretty loyal to it, and they have a great blog with gorgeous photos. You should subscribe to their RSS feed now. A daily dose of beautiful shots! What a nice thing to look forward to every morning!
• And lastly:

This is my new favorite Christmas video of all time:

Bookmark it now for whenever you need a lift.

Saturday Reading

NaBloPoMo is over for a while. I’ve still got my Saturday Evening Posts for you, though!

• The Property of a Distinguished American Private Collector. Holy cow, this auction sounds amazing. Includes:
  • 10 letters from George Washington, “manuscripts by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, James Madison, James Monroe, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur and Ronald Reagan,”
  • “manuscripts by Samuel Clemens, Joseph Conrad, Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, T.E. Lawrence, Hans Christian Andersen, Gustave Flaubert and Karl Marx,”
  • “a rare two-page manuscript Ludwig von Beethoven on the subject of his Ninth Symphony [!!!!!]. Manuscripts by Johannes Brahms, Anton Dvorak, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday, John Lennon, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Puccini, Robert Schumann, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Richard Wagner.”

  And there’s so. much. more. Why are these things not going to some museum?

• Ecouterre, Saught Upcycles Cambodian Landmines Into Hauntingly Beautiful Jewelry. Wow. This is really interesting stuff.
• NPR, Librarian Nancy Pearl’s Picks For The Omnivorous Reader. Book-gift ideas, from one who knows what she’s talking about.
• Law Librarian Blog, Should Law Schools Form Cooperative Online Classes? This could be something quite progressive and beneficial to students; like the blog post author, however, I doubt law schools would be moving on anything like this anytime soon. Maybe they should, though.
• The Becker-Posner Blog, MOOCs—Implications for Higher Education—Posner, and its companion piece, The Becker-Posner Blog, Online Courses and the Future of Higher Education-Becker. I am not even involved in the thick of these things, and I’m already sick of the term “MOOC.”
• GigaOM, Facebook opens the door to how it organizes your newsfeed. Why, oh why, in the name of all that is good, can’t they just organize my freakin’ newsfeed in reverse chronological order? And not drop anything from anybody, regardless of how unimportant Facebook judges them to be? Wouldn’t that be easier for everybody? All you people who have thousands of friends can just wade through them or organize them in lists for yourself. And those of us with one or two annoying friends who post updates 25 times a day can just mute them!
• The Time Blawg, Tweeting less but meeting more. Like the slow food movement for social media, maybe.
• Mike Stilkey’s Book Sculptures. I posted this to Facebook a couple of weeks ago but forgot to point it out to you guys. This guy’s work – he calls them “Book Sculptures” are so interesting and cool.
• DAVIDsTea, 24 Days of Tea. Ooh, I wish I’d known of this earlier. Anybody who wants to get me a Thanksgiving Day present next year (that’s a thing, right?) can get me this.

Happy December! I doubt I’ll be posting every day for a while, but you never know …

Just a few quick links …

Was in Wausau, WI for the holiday. Cold and grey.

It was a short week. I didn’t mark too many things in Google Reader as being worthy of passing on. Here are a few that made the cut:

• yes and yes: Mini Travel Guide: Ireland. We spent our honeymoon in Ireland. I’d love to go back (protip: tell people it’s your honeymoon when you’re in Ireland. They fuss over you and give you perks. At least, that’s how I remember it).
• Messy Nessy Chic: Color Snapshots of Paris in another Era. I know I link to Messy Nessy every week, but these pictures are so cool.
• The Tangential: An Existential Nihilist Guide to Tying Your Shoes. Hee! “Is the shoe still a shoe when it’s on your foot?”
• The Classic TV History Blog: WKRP’s Turkeys Away: An Oral History. A little late for Thanksgiving now, but very funny. Also, am totally adding this blog to my Google Reader.

And that’s all, folks! Hope you’re having a scrumptious weekend.

For your reading enjoyment …

Sometimes I star things in Google Reader or Twitter or wherever because I want to be sure to mention them in my Saturday Evening Post, and sometimes I do it to remind myself to read something, and sometimes I do it to save “important” things. Then the starred items are automatically sent to Evernote, where I forget about them until Saturday, when I’m looking for something to post. Point is, I cannot remember which particular bucket these items fall into.

This week, it seems especially heavy on the “save ‘important’ things” bucket, so sorry if legal research isn’t one of your major interests. I don’t actually talk all that much about work on my blog, so this provides you with some insight on a lot of the things I think about all day.

• Law.com – Newswire, ABA task force wants to know: What to do about law schools? I guess this is your chance to speak now or forever hold your peace.
  I’m kinda freaking out right now about the future of legal education, so I don’t have much more to add.

• Slaw, Reflecting on Legal Research Instruction. This is another librarian’s reaction to a post I drew your attention to a few weeks ago, along with her feelings about being in the middle of teaching a first-year legal research class. This point seemed particularly apt:
  

  To many students, legal research is sort of the broccoli and spinach of first-year law school courses, and research instruction tutorials come at a time when they’re beginning to feel the weight of their workload. Engagement can be a challenge, as can avoidance of information overload.

   

• RIPS Law Librarian Blog, Reference Coaching for the Short Attention Span Patron. Aside from blaming “Sesame Street” as the beginning of the slide into short-attention-span territory, there’s a lot of good stuff here.
  

  I became concerned because of a reference question I recently received. I had a student working on a research problem. I directed the student to the United States Code and helped her with the index. It was a heavily litigated area and I pointed out the annotations. She looked at them. She looked at me. She asked “How would I know the answer? Would I need to read this?”
  …
  Librarians need to craft reference interviews not to be more entertaining, but to coach the researcher to understand that the answer will not be easy, will not appear on the screen or immediately stand out to them in the book. Students need to be explicitly told that research will take hours, not minutes. That they should embrace this.

  Although this part:

  I told her no one would pay her as an attorney if it was easy to find a legal answer. Her face brightened. I also told her that, depending on the payment model, she would get paid for each hour spent researching.

  Reminded me that I thought I read something that said clients were being more circumspect about research fees. I guess I did not bookmark that in a way that would make me easy to find it again, though …

• Ecouterre, TerraCycle Upcycles Old U.S. Postal Service Bags Into Chic Accessories. These are more utilitarian than cute, but I bet they last a long time. Also, they reminded me of the “Project Runway” ep where the contestants were supposed to design new Post Office garb, to some hilarious results. Oh, my gosh, that was six years ago. I am old.

• Law Librarian Blog, Experimenting with Experiential Learning in Legal Research Instruction. Ah. Totally marked this to save to read later the article discussed within. Have not done so yet. Am going to remedy that post haste!

That’s all for now. Am planning on writing tomorrow about a meeting I had earlier today with a group of students I like to call LSOT, who tell me everything I need to know about kids these days.

Weekly Round-up

Realized Thursday that I didn’t remember starring anything in my Google Reader or Twitter feed this week. Was nothing interesting, or did I forget about my weekly round-up? Luckily, a few things caught my eye in the last couple of days.

• Yes, We’re A Tech Site. Yes, We’re Suggesting You Spend Less Time Online. I really need to go on some kind of internet break or something. One of these days.
• The Ethics of Twitter Research: A Topology of Disciplines, Methods and Ethics Review Boards. This kind of looks like it could be interesting, but could be one of those things that has little usefulness in my reality. Still, bookmarking it for when I have some time.
• Grammar Gap. I hate to be one of those, get-offa-my-lawn, when-I-was-a-youngster types, but what they’re suggesting about the lack of basic grammar teaching in schools would explain a lot.
• London’s Subterranean Secret: The Forgotten Mail Train. Have I linked to Messy Nessy Chic before? She’s an Englishwoman living in Paris, and there’s something about her site that I just love. A little bit of fashion, a little bit of architecture, a lot of French culture, and all, of course, très chic. Read it, you’ll like it!
• Four Sisters Recreate Childhood Photos Taken Decades Ago. This is one I starred back in August, when I was keeping up on my starring duties, but slipping in my posting duties. The pictures are delightful and slightly wacky. Makes me want to dig up some of our old family photos and recreate them.

That’s all for now; off to enjoy this bizarre 60-degree and sunny weather we’re having. ‘Til next time!

Weekly round-up

Haven’t done one of these in a while, but here are some gems I came across in various places online this week:

• Make Sure to Have Fun and Other NaNoWriMo Tips. This is about the whole “writing a novel in November” thing, but I’ll try to keep some of the tips in mind while blogging this month.
  

  Write for ten minutes a day. … The idea is to create a habit. And ten minutes a day is the beginning of that. On days when I despair because I have accomplished nothing, I take those ten minutes and feel much better afterward.

• #instacane. The story of Hurricane Sandy as told through Instagram. There are other good places to go to find amazing and horrible photographs of the hurricane’s damage, but I like this site because most of the photos are not taken by professional photographers. Of course, as with all things Instagram, some of the photos leave me shaking my head at why the photo-taker tagged them the way that they did, but I guess there’s no Instagram-hashtag police out there. Yet.
• Guiding Principles for Enhancing Classroom Experiences. Trying to keep some of these in mind as I gear up for co-teaching Advanced Legal Research next term.

  Give Up Fear. Law school is a breeding ground for fear and anxiety. Some of that is necessary—just the nature of the beast, but encouraging students to give up fear in the classroom is important.

• Internet Librarian: 50 Great Mobile Apps for Libraries. Am always on the lookout for useful mobile apps. Mostly I use my smartphone for taking pictures. And then manipulating the heck out of those pictures. This brings me to
• My Mobile Legal Apps Libguide. We did a Tech Petting Zoo at work this week (more on that tomorrow? Maybe?), and I’ve been working on a research guide for mobile apps that I think law students would find particularly useful. I really wanted to have it finished last week, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen. If you have any ideas for apps that I’ve missed, or can add some short reviews to some of the apps I have here, let me know!

That’s all for now. See you tomorrow!

Saturday’s all right for catching up on posts

I’m not actually here. I’m enjoying my college reunion in Northfield right now (among other things, I’m getting AG a new shirt. Class of 2031, represent!).* Hopefully I’m not getting rained on.

But because I care so much about you, Dear Reader, I didn’t want to leave you bereft of my Saturday Evening Posts post. While I am tripping down memory lane, you can enjoy some of these posts that caught my eye this week:

• GeekMom, How Kids Benefit From Chores. Yeah, my kid has one chore, and she already thinks it’s a chore. She’s not really much about the satisfaction of a job well done, apparently.
• Boing Boing, Smart people are especially prone to stupid mistakes. Well, that’s my excuse, anyway.
• SarahGlassmeyer(dot)com, The Culture of Curation. I totally get this, and sometimes I feel this way, too, lately – “bored with the Internet” – or like people are too busy posting status updates regarding what they’re doing to actually enjoy what they’re doing – so. I don’t know, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about lately and trying to work on, myself.
• Instagram Blog, Instatypes: Make Faux Tintypes at Home. Cool, or super-annoyingly-hipster-y affectation?
• GeekMom, Babiators: Sunglasses for Destructive Children. But do they come in purple with sparkles? ‘Cuz if not, they’re not going to get worn in my house.

*Totally had no idea Captain Jack would be there. Def would’ve been down there yesterday had I known.

For your enjoyment …

Ugh. It’s too darn hot. Perhaps you’d like to peruse some things that I found interesting on the web this week?

• ReadWriteWeb, OpenSky is Pinterest For Shopping (But Wait, There’s More: Frictionless Sharing!). I love shopping on the internet, but I don’t think I’m going to sign up for this thing (also, isn’t Pinterest “Pinterest for Shopping”? I thought I read all those blog posts about how retailers were getting significant traffic from Pinterest). I friggin’ hate frictionless sharing. Mostly posting this because it reminded me of something I heard about on MPR yesterday – I can’t remember what program – a service called “Personal.com” that is intriguing to me.
  

  OWN IT:

  You create valuable data every day.

  And yet, it seems like everyone but you has access to your data. Take control of your digital life and own your private information by storing it in a single place you can access anywhere: a secure data vault.

  And what, you might say, does this have to do with shopping? Well, on the radio program, they were saying something about how you could sign up with the service and put in your preferences, sizes, etc., and retailers would contact you with deals, instead of you contacting them. But now that I try to search for the radio program to get the full deets, I’m not finding it, and I may be mixing up social media sites here. But still – doesn’t that sound cool?

  *Sigh.* I really gotta do a social media audit and figure out what I got goin’ on out there and what I want to do with it all.

• ReadWriteWeb, Avoiding Password Breaches 101: Salt Your Hash. In response to the LinkedIn password breach. This – perhaps combined with Personal.com? – may help me to re-think my whole password situation.
• Ecouterre, Goodebox Delivers Eco-Friendly Beauty Samples to Your Door Every Month. Okay, so my “beauty routine” pretty much consists of slapping on some sunscreen-enriched moisturizer, but some of you may be interested in this. I think if it were $5/month, rather than $16, I’d be seriously tempted. I loves me some good-smelling lotions and hair products.
• beSpacific, A Study of “Churn” in Tweets and Real-Time Search Queries (abstract and link to article).

  The real-time nature of Twitter means that term distributions in tweets and in search queries change rapidly: the most frequent terms in one hour may look very different from those in the next. Informally, we call this phenomenon “churn”. Our interest in analyzing churn stems from the perspective of real-time search. Nearly all ranking functions, machine-learned or otherwise, depend on term statistics such as term frequency, document frequency, as well as query frequencies. In the real-time context, how do we compute these statistics, considering that the underlying distributions change rapidly? In this paper, we present an analysis of tweet and query churn on Twitter, as a first step to answering this question. Analyses reveal interesting insights on the temporal dynamics of term distributions on Twitter and hold implications for the design of search systems.

  I’m not sure I’ll actually read this. But I feel I should.

• ReadWriteWeb, Millennials: They Aren’t So Tech Savvy After All. (I’m really RWW heavy this week. Y’all should totally follow this blog; it’s quite useful and informative.) One of these articles seems to come out every six months or so. Seeing as how one of the things that most excited my Internet Legal Research students last term was learning about “Ctrl-F,” I can’t say I disagree with many of the findings here.

Stay cool out there, guys!

Random thoughts and weekend round-up

It’s my anniversary weekend! Spousal unit and I got hitched 12 years ago tomorrow. To celebrate, we’re dropping AG off at my parents and going to see The Avengers, ‘cuz we’re romantics like that.

Still have not gotten my IFTTT recipe for posting blog posts directly from Flickr photos the way I want it yet. It keeps wanting to make the photo too wide for the theme that I’ve chosen. I suppose I could change my theme, but that seems like too much work right now.

I finished and turned in my book review on Tuesday, so I feel like I have a lot more time on my hands to read. I’m finding myself drawn to all the other books out there about Supreme Court law clerks. As I suggest in my book review, for something allegedly so secretive, there are a lot of such books out there. I’ll let you know which is the juiciest.

Meanwhile, here are some things that caught my eye this week:

• Ecouterre, Charlize Theron Wears Dress Made With Beetle Wings in “Snow White and the Huntsman”.

  Trimmed with thousands of discarded jewel-beetle wings from Thailand, where the insect is a delicacy, the dress is a brittle, decaying carapace that mirrors Queen Ravena’s own physical and psychological deterioration.

  As an entomophobic, this kind of grosses me out. But it’s also sort of beautiful.

• ReadWriteWeb, 9 Photo Filter Apps to Enhance Your Mobile Photography. I’ll basically get any photo app Read Write Web tells me to (I’m not downloading the Facebook photo app, though. That just seems stupid).
• GeekMom, Battle of the iPhone Cases. Just ‘cuz.
• ReadWriteWeb, Mary Meeker Re-Imagines Nearly Everything. Bits and pieces from a presentation at the D10 Conference (I have no idea what that is) on internet trends.
• Free Range Librarian DPLA West: It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an API!. I subscribe to a few “regular” librarian-type blogs (read: public library, rather than law library), and I always feel like I should be paying more attention than I do to what’s going on in that realm – especially with regards to eBooks. Even if I don’t work in a public library, I use one pretty much every week. This post is about the Digital Public Library of America movement.

  The event displayed “a cacophony of wildly disparate visions.” Stakeholders were not in agreement on “the whatness of the thing,” to use an old literary expression, nor were they aware of this.

  …

  As became clear in the discussions, what public libraries (ahem — real public libraries) want, for the most part, is the ability to purchase/license and share current ebook titles: the much-coveted product of the Big Six publishers. They want Hunger Games, not someone’s pre-1923 travelogue. The think-tank nerds want government documents digitized (and who can disagree with that, even though it’s not the top priority for public libraries). The developers want an amazing tool, and so on.

• The Tangential, What It Means To Be 36. I am … a little bit older than 36, but this post resonated with me and how I’ve been feeling lately.
  

  [At 36,] I’m now just six years younger than Alan Alda’s character in The Four Seasons. I sure don’t feel nearly as old as he does, and I don’t think I’m the only 30-something who feels that way. In fact, I know it: in a recent New Inquiry post, Autumn Whitefield-Madrano considers the changing face of 36, which is her age as well as mine. The header graphic for the post shows three women at the age of 36: Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson (!) in The Graduate, Phylicia Rashad as Clair Huxtable in The Cosby Show, and Reese Witherspoon today. Not only do today’s 36-year-olds feel younger than Clair Huxtable and a lot younger than Mrs. Robinson, Whitefield-Madrano points out, they’re still treated as young in pop culture.
  …
  Every 30-something has surely felt a version of what Whitefield-Madrano describes: a weird sense that 36 is “supposed” to look and feel older than it does.

  When my mom was my age, she had a 16-year old. I, on the other hand, still often feel like I don’t really know what I’m going to do with my life!

With that parting thought, I’m off to get ready to celebrate my marriage by seeing a movie about a bunch of comic book superheroes.