Tom Roper's Weblog

Managing digital lives

I filled in a survey as part of the Digital Lives project, which is trying to shed light on the under-investigated subject of how we manage personal collections of information. I look forward to seeing the results. Take the survey here: there's a draw for £200 of British Library shop vouchers. How many do you need for a dame or knighthood, I wonder?

There's a project blog too: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital_lives/

Happy birthday, Donatien Alphonse François

I've been off-air for a few days, thanks to both home computer and laptop malfunctioning simulatneously. But what better day than the Marquis de Sade's birthday to return to blogging.
I've saved up a few things to post:
Matthew Engel on Lewes in the Financial Times
Peter Campbell on the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea in the London Review of Books (subscription required)
A longer post on some of the recent idiocies about class, public schools and Lindsay Anderson is also brewing.

Dating in RSS feeds

Why oh why do people put incorrect dates on their posts? When I read posts in reverse-chronological order in NetNewsWire, I expect to see the most recent posts at the top. But unscrupulous bloggers post-date give their entries, to force them to the top of the list. This is very similar to the practice of certain print publications, who, in the case of a monthly, will put on sale in mid-April an issue labelled Jun.

So in NetNewsWire today, the top entries are:

Homeless man in court over CBD fire The Sydney Morning Herald News Headlines 08 April 2009: this is a clear mis-keying of the date after one too many tubes of Toohey's, though I can see nine other examples of posts with 2009 dates from the same journal's feeds.

Thu August 14th '08 : FREQUENZY FESTIVAL, SALZBURG The Indelicates Live Feed 14 August 2008. This, and two other examples from the excellent Indelicates, whose first album, American Demo, is in the post to me at this very moment, is understandable, though not correct, for they have chose to use the gig date as the posting date.

The Rescue of John Steinbeck The New York Review of Books 17 April 2008. Here is a fine example of a print publishers' post-dating practice polluting their feed, though one would have hoped that the NYRB knew better. 17 April is the cover date; but it is not the date the item was posted.

'...meanwhile I neither write my diary nor read my Greek'

Thus wrote Virginia Woolf on 13 February 1920. I too have been poor at keeping this blog up, and just as poor at Greek, the reason being that my blogging energies are consumed by the campaign blog to keep the sixth form at my childrens' school.
In any case, I do not see this blog as a diary, much more a commonplace book. See the Digital Medievalist for more on these. I hope to write more frequently soon.

Technorati Tags: virginiawoolf

SPLASH: Student Personal Learning And Social Homepage

I've stumbled, thanks to a Technorati update I run for anything that links the sussex.ac.uk domain, this project: SPLASH: Student Personal Learning And Social Homepages. The project pages are here and the project blog here. It's a little unclear, but it looks as if they're trying to integrate blogger and other social networking with the university's rather clunkyVLE.

Blogging course at Sussex

My Technorati watchlist for anything linking to http://www.sussex.ac.uk just threw up a fascinating initiative, a course to be run by Libby Davy for Sussex academics.: http://authenticblogging.com/2007/09/17/blogging-course-for-sussex-staff/

The thousand and first post

There are other possibilities: I could turn this into one of those frighteningly clever blogs which drops Slavoj Zizek's name into every post; or the Fothertington-Thomas school of blogging, posts so sensitive they hurt, about flowers and birds and stuff; or a blog metaphysical, musicological or horticultural.

My thousandth post

This is my thousandth post. What should it be about? Some horse-racing selections, something stolen from the newspapers, a jeremiad against the state of the modern world, in particular  the press, radio and television's obsession with the trivial,  a diatribe against war-mongers, the current government and capitalism in general,  a description of some agreeable food and drink, a philippic against house-buyers, estate agents and solicitors, more about the neglected virtues of Patrick Hamilton, an account of an unusual dream I had last night, the rainbow I saw on Seaford Bay while running early this morning...?
It might be time to reinvent this blog as something completely different. For example, sex-blogging seems to guarantee of a lot of hits. I'd have to make a lot of it up, but I'm sure so do some of the more established names in the field. The closest I have ever been to an orgy is the disco at certain library conferences, but I have an imagination. Or I could write a fashion blog, especially when my suits from Old Town arrive. On to the next 1000 posts, and thank you for reading so far.

Presentation to Overseas Teachers

Today's presentation to Jennifer Book and Andrew Blair's Overseas Teachers 2: using computers and multiledia class is up on Slideshare. The handout (pdf) is here.

The last word on age in Facebook

I promise to say no more on the matter. This man has said it all:

http://www.creativebinge.co.uk/blog/what-will-facebook-look-like-in-40-years/

Technorati Tags: facebook, ageism