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I need your help...

You might remember that last fall I did a presentation titled, "Is Book A Verb? The Social Future of the Book." The big idea in it is that we are in the midst of moving from a Literal Tradition of sharing and passing on culture to a Social Tradition.

This weekend I will be updating and expanding that presentation to deliver it again on Friday at The Future of the Book Conference sponsored by Florida State University and Florida's Panhandle Library Access Network (PLAN). The help I'd like from you all is feedback and criticism, links and suggestions, in comments or via email, to make the presentation stronger.

I used Prezi, the zooming online presentation program. When I presented it in the spring, the students really liked it; some of the adults complained of way too much zooooming. A 13 minute video version...

The full Prezi presentation...

Is Book A Verb? on Prezi

My presentation from this week's Future of the Book symposium at Georgia College.

Source...

Is Book A Verb? (abridged) on Prezi

Is Book A Verb? by Joe WIndish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.joewindish.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://vimeo.com/19598466.

Last year I did a presentation on Search for parents at Baldwin High School. Afterward, in a conversation with the principal and GCSU's K-12 Community Liaison Revel Pogue, we cooked up the idea of outfitting a bus to take the computers out into the community.

Now, eighteen months later, it's done. Dubbed "Bus Hope" by the Parents Advisory Council, it will make its inaugural run on Saturday, November 15, to the Wal-Mart parking lot. There GCSU students will teach parents "Computer 101" workshops. Captain D's will provide day care. Kudos to everyone involved!

Microsoft has a new initiative, "PlaysforSure" obviously intended to buttress its position against rival Apple's iTunes. Freedom to Tinker read the instructions and concluded it's PlaysMaybe.

Cool:

2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet. These programs all work in slightly different ways, but they share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in the time it takes to have a sip of coffee. Put those two elements together and you have a tool that will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did.

For example, he's working on a project involving the London sewers. He does a search using "sewage" and gets a result explaining the way bones evolved in vertebrate bodies. That sends him on a tangent that leads to a whole new idea.

Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously, the computer wasn't conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I'm not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.

Or a Mac. Not a Sony.

Now, truth be told, I've had to go back and forth with Dell support enough to make me crazy. In the end I still bought another Dell. But then, we're a Dell shop.

I missed it. The Macintosh turned 21 on Monday. kottke.org has the 1984 video of Steve Jobs introducing it.
Via The Last Minute. (If your timing is right, mine wasn't, you could find a coveted G-Mail invite there.)

UPDATE: As it happens some Apple folks are visiting campus today, one from Cupertino. I gave them a tour of the Mac labs. We're on their website (4 pages!) for our iPod project. Maybe we will get that larger article in the New York Times.

Firefox continues to make impressive gains against Internet Explorer. Not only do people download it, they're using it. Some of it's a "simply not being IE" effect, some because it's more secure, and some no doubt because it's good software.

We put it in the labs here at Georgia College for security reasons. The recent discovery of a security vulnerability makes it likely that malicious coders aren't far behind. And though the threat is really minor, I expected something more from the folks at Mozilla. No patch, no word, on their website to date.

You won't find Amazon's Customer Service number anywhere on its website.

Amazon sees no reason to apologize for its decision to leave the customer-service phone number off its Web site. "We've found that customers really do appreciate the self-service features we've got," said Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman.

Not everyone agrees. An underground movement to publicize Amazon's customer-service number, 800-201-7575, along with other numbers for Amazon noted on Ms. [Ellen] Hobb's site, has spread across the Web.

From Customer Service: The Hunt for a Human in the Circuit's section of today's New York Times. Bet they change it?

Think Secret says a $499 Mac (sans monitor) will be announced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld Expo on January 11.

I'm a Technology Support Specialist at Georgia College & State University. My main area of responsibility is the campus computer labs. I've been noting all the blogger buzz about Firefox, and that tech folks coping with the consequences of IE all recommend it. (For more general anti-Microsoft news, visit The Evil Empire).

My media background ("they all use IE, let's just give them what they want") had me resistant at first to my co-workers universal opinion that we should load Firefox on all our machines. I've come around. As we ready the computer labs for next semester, we're loading Firefox on all of them. We'll see how it goes and may even follow Penn State University's lead and take steps to encourage students to use it.

I recommend you try it. Download it free from here. And for those pages that require IE click here from your installed Firefox browser for the plug-in.

UPDATE: My friend Howard says I'm sooooo behind the times... Also please note, you still need to use IE for Windows Update. Always update!

In a story on iPods in the classroom, Georgia College (my department!) was mentioned in the Circuits section of The New York Times today:

While Apple says Brearley's mandatory-iPod program is the first it has heard of at the secondary-school level, there have been comparable efforts at universities. This fall Duke issued an iPod to each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen and has tried to incorporate the device into several courses, including music, language and engineering. Last year, Georgia College & State University began lending the devices to students for use in several humanities courses.

A moment in the spotlight. My colleague and yoga buddy Rob Viau is a mover behind the iPod program here. He says there's a possibility of something larger in the future.

I've worked in and around technology for all of my professional career, but only recently have I been so hands on. Last spring I was asked to build a website for a friend in New York. Shortly thereafter I decided to build my own. To build it I started with Front Page but moved quickly to Dreamweaver, and got some help from students and friends. My web hosting service is icdSoft. Love them! They have great rates, great features and great customer service. I found them through a google search, checked out their ratings, and couldn't be happier.

A couple weeks ago I started building my blog. Little did I know what I was getting into. I thought I wanted a simple design, one page with entries, the ability to sort by date or topic. What's so tough about that??? I started with a Dreamweaver tutorial that was way too complicated and much more than I wanted. But I figured that I could adapt it once I built it. After a few days I learned quite a bit but threw in the towel and moved on. Bblog was next. It's a nice free full featured php based blog package. I got it installed, learned a whole lot more, got it working, then found that modifying the templates to make it look the way I wanted was a bigger challenge than I was up for at that moment. Next up, Movable Type. I picked it because it had a template that I liked. Later I found that the small adaptation I wanted to make would lead to days of trial and error. More learning.

Today it's working (last night, it wasn't). And I LOVE THEM! The Movable Type people. It's free if you're just doing a small blog. I like ti's features. (Search my blog!) The support forums are good. Right now my trackback isn't working, I want a link to the main page from the topic page and I want to add some links to the sidebar. But for the moment, I've had enough so this will just have to do! Anyway, after all these weeks, it's finally time to author entries...