Technozoo at PLA

"Technozoo" presenter at PLA confessed to not being a librarian but that he is married to a librarian, so he should be on the wavelength. Well, he skipped along from Joost (peer to peer technology gaining momentum) to Skype (best for talking inexpensively around the globe) to kiva.org (organized around 2.0 principle) to iPhone (70% of all mobile internet done from iPhone!!) to Microsoft Surface (tactile, a table, to come out by the end of the year) to Sony Reader (better than Amazon Kindle) to gaming, which of course most of us really want to hear about. David happened to be there, too and the average age of 33 for gaming puts us right in the thick of things, right. BrainAge game actually caught my attention and others' too. In conclusion the presenter made one point emphatically: keep the net neutral. Great point.

Google, reference, and Wikipedia

PLA conference in Minneapolis was a blast - so much information, so much great interaction among the 10,000 or so participants. One of the most interesting presentations I attended was given by a professor from the U/W. Besides being a smart, entertaining goofball, he brought up a lot of relevant points. He presented Google (among other things) as a replacement for ready reference, a guide, to be used by librarians, but with wisdom, hopefully, such as using the fine points available before "normal people" become cognizant of them, acknowledging the weaknesses (Google scholar just isn't up to snuff yet, for instance), and proceeding forward, gently, from Google to in-depth resources relevant to the query.

Wikipedia he saw as a necessary evil and advised: if you're not happy with something in Wikipedia, fix it! Get in the fray, do your part and if masses of librarians do, then Wikipedia is ever so much more useful again. Print reference is all but dead, anyway - -