Weekend Reading 2/4/2011
Another week of trying to keep up with events and developments around the world while working and parenting.
I’ve been more interested in the protests in Egypt than any other protest around the world in years. I’m not sure why but I get the feeling that this is going to be really big. Maybe not but it looks like it could be. It has me wondering what I would do if something similar happened here. Would I be out in the streets protesting? I honestly can’t say. I’d rather not find out.
This week’s Phillips Digest is below and as always can be downloaded in a few different formats here. Maybe one day I’ll have a clever name for these posts…
- This post at gigaom describes the role social media plays in many current events. Social media is not the catalyst of protests. It is a tool used to spread the word.
- ReadWriteWeb gives us a good summary of the past week’s events in Egypt from a technologist’s point of view. They provide links to other posts explaining how the internet was shut off in Egypt, how some people were able to get around that cut off and much more.
- This is an interesting post from the Harvard Business Review comparing rebels and leaders. Good organizations need both. Rebels question. Leaders decide. Many celebrated leaders were perceived as rebels in the beginning.
- Eric Hellman has written a good recap of the recent Digital Book World. Definitely worth a read. The paragraph about Overdrive is especially interesting.
- Bohyun Kim has given me something to think about with her post about tag lines. What do we want ours to be? “A Nationally Recognized Public Library” isn’t going to cut it.
- Barbara Fisher gives us much to think about in the Library Journal article. She touches on the recent Digital Book World conference and a question someone asked the CEO’s of publishing houses. The problem of easy vs. free is an interesting dilemma we are/will be facing in the eBook arena. She encourages librarians to seek different ways to provide electronic content than what is currently available. How? Don’t know.
- Gigaom reports on a prediction by Cisco on mobile data use. It is staggering how much data is being used now and how much more will be used in a few years. Most of it is driven by mobile video. One stat they include that stands out to me: “Global mobile data traffic in 2010 was three times the size of all global Internet traffic (fixed and mobile) in the year 2000.” We’ve come a long way in a relatively short time.
- This post at ReadWriteWeb caught my eye this week because it may offer an alternative to purchasing new computers as frequently as we do. Our computers are aging and our budget is flat. If we can use this (or a similar service) it may save us some money and keep our computers more up-to-date. It may not. It’s worth investigating.
