May 2, 2024

Tennant’s Technology Tenets

tenet — a principle or belief Having worked in libraries my entire adult life (I began by volunteering at 17), I’ve seen a lot of technology come and go. I like to say that I’ve forgotten more library technology than most young librarians know. And mostly I’m happy about that. If an acoustic coupler modem never […]

Mea Culpa: Wikipedia Comes Through

Recently I wrote about a Wikipedia issue based on the best information I had at the time. I know better than to rely upon sources that are irreputable, but I clearly made a mistake relying upon the reporting of the Guardian. Normally, I would check the actual source of the information, but I find Wikipedia’s […]

Wikipedia’s Waterloo?

Update: Please see this follow-on post for what really happened in the end. If you are involved in technology at all, you no doubt have heard about GamerGate. Normally at this point I would say that if you hadn’t heard about it, go read about it and come back. But that would be foolish. You […]

When the Astonishing Becomes Commonplace

Recently I’ve been thinking about the recent past and the not-too-distant future. Mostly in terms of what we have been able to achieve in imaging our world. For example, do you remember what the world was like before you could see a map and a photograph of any spot on the planet? It wasn’t all […]

How Some of Us Learned To Do the Web Before it Existed

Perhaps you really had to be there to understand what I’m about to relate. I hope not, but it’s quite possible. Imagine a world without the Internet, as so totally strange as that is. Imagine that we had no world-wide graphical user interface to the world of information. Imagine that the most we had were […]

My Online Stalker

No one enjoys being stalked. Well, at least no one I’ve spoken to. So recently, when I discovered I was being stalked online I felt…uncomfortable. Creeped out. Even freaked out. But this kind of stalking wasn’t even as freaky as the usual kind. I’m being stalked by retailers. And so are you. Of course I’ve […]