typo(s), tendency and text

Facebook is really popular in Norway, if you are a resident and you don't have an account, is it almost as if you don't exist. I got a facebook account when I moved here. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered. Facebook has proven time and again, how little it is concerned with users need for privacy protection. When it suits facebooks economic plans, they change their terms and the behaviour of the complex application, making it really difficult for the masses of users to stay educated on what to communicate how without causing drama in their lives.

Facebook is celebrating its 150 million users. Don't count on me: I have closed my account yesterday the other! The book is a Public Domain image by Skander - cc-by-sa

That stinks. And its bad enough in itself. What is even worse, is that it never works for me. This has happened before, but now I have some real new and fresh frustration to shout out here. To comply with the task for the class DIKULT110 at the University of Bergen this semester, I have been trying to streamline the flow of how to communicate in different social media channels for HackBergen. Since it is based in Bergen and facebook is popular with the masses, I hvae been struggling the last days to connect the blog of the organization to the facebook group and facebook page. I have tried three different ways of doing this:

1. Using the WordPress plugin Simple Facebook Connect
Well, that didn't work. It made me go through the process of making an app on the developers pages on facebook, and then connect it with the public ID and secret key of the app. I tried, but all I got was an API Error that I couldn't find documentation for.

2. Using the "notes" app within facebook
Notes is supposed to use the import function to grab the feed of any page, and then automatically post new entried to groups, pages and individual users' walls. First I got an error, then I saw the feed didn't validate because of iframes and object tags which included stuff from Eventbrite, Google Calendar and presentations on Slideshare into the feed. When the feed finally validated I got the some "Sorry there is a problem, we will fix it soon" feedback that I have gotten before.

3. Using the app "Networked Blog"
Here, setting up everything worked and test post worked. Posts were imported. But none of the real blogposts showed up on the walls of either group or fan page.

So, why do I state "Facebook is broken" int he title? Those things should work. But facebook has - with its large user basis - become a monster of an application with a sheer unsearchable vast mass of things you can do with it. And then you can't. This is frustrating. But it is not obsolete, as so many people rely on it to keep and nurture their relationships and conversations with others.

Facebook is bad, for so many reasons. And I wanted this post to be a big sigh about it. What I still really hope for is that the crowd-financed and now open source (in alpha state) Diaspora framework will continue to be developed. But this is another story for later...

What is a hackerspace?

Since I started to use Linux and have been working on my masters thesis about Indymedia Germany from a journalists perspective in 2005/6/7, I have discovered a fantastic culture of amazing people, calling themselves hackers, makers, tinkerers, geeks and other illustrous names. Soon after my thesis I traveled as a jounalist with the Hackers on a Plane tour 2007, and witnessed the preliminaries of a becoming worldwide Hackerspace movement. After those people from the U.S. and Canada traveled through Germany and Austria to visit the existing community driven spaces, weld friendships and learn how a space like this can be made, creativity and openness can be nurtured, great projects like NYCResistor, HackDC, Noisebridge and others were founded.

Edit: It has been a while since I have had a look at the Hackerspace Design Patterns, and they actually say something about documentation, discussion and realtime conversation (wiki, mailing list, irc) in the Community Pattern. But does this really cover all kinds of communication needs?

Whatever happened to HackBergen and what can be done about it?

When I moved to Bergen, I had the profound need to get to know people and hang out at a space that is not work, is not university or school, or home - to work with other creatively. During the 24c3 I started the HackBergen website and mailing list, put it on the Hackerspaces wiki (list), and found someone currently living in Bergen, too, who also wanted to work on this. To our knowledge, HackBergen was the first hackerspace group founded by women. (And its fine, if I am wrong there.:) )

We gathered some other people interested int the same purpose, but ran into problems actually financing and finding a space. As it turns out, real estate in Norway is really expensive - and so are rents. Also, there are few to none open community projects, and creativity seems to be measured by its success, and the D.I.Y. scene is individualized to a high degree.

To solve these problems, communicating better would help. Although we had a website and a wiki from the start, both weren*t used extensively. We got a facebook group, too. What was better used, was the mailing list. But since people are getting their information in so many different ways, using one channel sometimes, and another one at other times is confusing at best, if not really annoying with people who want to get a better impression first before they can decide if they like the idea or not.

Quite soon we were allowed to gather at the Piksel Hut, the office of the organizers for the Piksel Festival. That was great for meetings and ad hoc workshops, but we still really need our own space soon. So the purpose of communication is:

• to reach people who want to tinker,
• to build a member base and
• to gather donations

Why I think communication did not work in the past:

• People in the group are very informed of communication possibilities, have strong opinions and different channels they are preferring.
• People in the group don't like blogging?!
• The blog wasn't very good interconnected, so stuff could be posted there and at the same time spread to other places like facebook, twitter, mailing list...
• We as a group did not give people guidelines or even hints where they can find the information and updates they are looking for

Now, what do I think about this?

The group, every member should ideally be equally responsible to tell about things they are doing, thoughts they are having  in order to help others see what we are about, show diversity, share ideas and let them flourish and develop.

Wiki: wiki.hackbergen.org

The wiki is the groups main documentation tool, to gather iformation about past meetings, work on the legal documents of the HackBergen foundation. Its also the place to document projects in a handbook/tutorial kind of way. The strength of wikis compared to blogs is that wikis track changes a lot better, and make collaborating on texts easier. So meeting notes, documents to collaborate on should go there.

Blog: hackbergen.org

So far a wordpress driven blog with mostly old entries. Even though more people have user accounts, only one person blogs mostly. When people concerned about things happening in the group like workshops, classes and the trek for a sustaining space find things here, there actually are comments. Its important that different voices answer and talk. This can not be the responsibility of one person, because it would be exhausting and not very longlasting as an initiative. Also, building a community means, talking. A lot. By a lot of people. Building a geeky community means talking, too. On the interwebs.

Twitter: @hackbergen

The connection between the twitter account and the wordpress account is working. What is an important question, is if this is something that should be machine generated twittering solely, or if a person should be responsible for updates as well.

Facebook

A group has been existing for some time now, and a page has been made. However, at the time, facebook seem to have problems to connect to feeds or wordpress blogs. I have tried both ways today, but nothing worked. Connecting open source self controlled software to company made commercial apis can have its perks, as f.ex. with the latest change on twitter away from OAuth, where a lot of the many clients didn't work any longer. The group and the page have to be cared for, too. People have to get answers and we should have an eye on discussions there. This has not been working fully optimal in the past, and it would be important to find out why.

Other services:

Flattr, Kickstart, Eventbrite, Google Calendar

Flattr and kickstart can be helpful to gain awareness and fundraise for obtaining and sustaining a community driven space. In the case of flattr, awareness for smaller works and projects. Kickstart is a tool to fundraise money for certain goals and projects you have, where you try to find people with solidarity of your goals and maybe set aside something to give-away for especially generous people.

Eventbrite and Google Calendar can help to make our events wider known, and to keep track of people attending. To build a membership base we want to get to know people, and we want to become a bigger group. After all, we want to share knowledge and make something new and creative out of it.

Other services and technologies we could look at come to mind, like github for social development and versioning of code, the thingiverse for object design for 3dprinting and laser cutting.

Adjustments to further development

As the group grows, as the hackerspace gets found, equipped and filled with activities, shared and individual property, better communication structures will be needed. Already now having only one person holding all the passwords to all the official accounts is a problem, but with time it will probably become a bigger problem. So we should have an eye on the changing needs we have towards our communication infrastructure, and find creative architectures and flows that w can adapt to our needs, while still keeping the group and news about it accessible and open. The challenge here is to use a codebase and connections that is both easy to overview, maintain and upgrade, as well as easy to adapt to our needs.

What will also become more important is keeping contact to other hackerspaces in the region, and internationally. It is important that we are part not only of the local community, but also of an international community. We can learn a lot of how others do what they do, and they can learn from us, too. But only if we talk about what we do.

To Do - right now

• A short questionnaire of what people feel they need to participate more actively in the conversation. Evaluation of the answers.
• Write five texts: One about how people can contribute to hackbergen with donating some of their time and hold workshops and classes, one about where hackbergen currently stands. One about the state of the international movement, and one about my next class about LaTeX. And finally: One about what communication channels can be used how by the members.
• Be more available, and make my role clearly about enabling conversation, not steering it.
• Make a direct posting method from blog to facebook page.

In 2008 I contributed to the department I work in by introducing wikis for collaboration on texts and documents, aggregating and sharing knowledge about projects. Before that, there were lots of Microsoft Word documents floating around, which was a problem when the number of people contributing to a document became too big. Keeping track of changes was difficult, and when a deadline came close, lots of emails were sent and people tried to write on the document all at once.

There was also a wish to give the collaborating libraries in four regions of Hordaland a tool to work similar with their documents, and on their projects and events.

Enter DokuWiki

I rolled out 4, eventually 6 instances of DokuWiki for library groups in the regions, our own department, a book project within the international library organization IFLA and for one local library. All of the wikis were closed for internal use and their content was visible for logged-in users only. DokuWiki is well-documented and the localization to Norwegian Bokmål (Nynorsk is required for official communication at my workplace, but this was an internal tool, and it was free) is acceptable.

DokuWiki is a Wiki software written in php, which most shared webhosting services support. The main difference to other big wiki applications is, that is doesn't  store the content in a database, but rather in plain text files on the server.  If you use the hierarchical "namespaces" in DokuWiki for sorting your content, DokuWiki puts your pages into folders named after the namespace they are in. (This makes it really easy to use those textfiles in real geeky ways over the command line.  But thats just a sidenote.)

In practice using the DokuWiki installation worked for a while, but there was a huge difference in how frequent it was used and for what purposes by certain users.

The wikis used by the collaborting libraries were used a bit or a lot in the beginning, but after a while people stopped using them. The IFLA-wiki helped to make the process of finding new examples of best practices in libraries for library guidelines editable for all contributors in an international group. But after its purpose was fulfilled, and the project done, it wasn't used anymore.

Two problems: Purpose/design of the tool & missing WYSIWYG

The wiki of the Hordaland State library was not readable or writable to the general public, but all colleagues in the department used it to update their tasks in one long document. Working with one long document was what people were used to before, but the wiki didn't help much to do that.  Certain co-workers used it more than others. Those who used it the least, said that they found it diffcult to use the WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean)- editor for the wiki pages and that it was difficult to remember the syntax, when they were not using the wiki often. Most people are used to WYSIWYG-editors for documents such as Microsoft Word provides. While this is perfectly inderstandable, many WYSIWYG-editors in web applications are known to produce horrible html-code, especially if they have a wide range of operations you can do with them. The existing WYSIWYG editors for DokuWiki match that description - and my time budget too limited to do something about it.

The purpose of what this tool was used for and the way it was used did not really match its design. The head of the section encouraged everyone to use the wiki, but required only the use and updating of the long reporting document before internal meetings. What happened was: The document grew very long. Typical deadline problem: Everybody wants to update the section about their work 30 till 5 minutes before the meeting.

DokuWiki makes it possible to edit a document sectionwise, but everybody edited the document at once. Since DokuWiki tracks changes in documents in order to show differences between the versions and to make an RSS feed of the changes, only one user at a time can edit a page. So people grew frustrated because they could not use the report page when they had to, because a co-worker was working on it.

The reason why I write this in detail is not to complain about the users, my co-workers. I take the difficulties of working with those tools seriously. Which is why after almost two years we decided to take a second look at what tools we wish and need.

Audience and organizational setting

Some difficulties to mention here are:

• The rules and regulations which public service organizations have to behave when giving buying goods or services companies
• Public service in Norway has to give access to records in general, unless certain circumstances are met under which the citizens' privacy has to be protected.
• Not everything that is being worked on is ready to be disseminated to potentially everyone on the planet at once. Personal learning or work documents should be able to be protected.
• The corporate brand and identity of the mother organization Hordaland fylkeskommune and its main communication channel on the web, hordaland.no, should not be overruled. Official communications by the library department should still be posted there.
• People working in the department: Their privacy and right to opt out of their work being cached, stored and fulltext searchable. This is a particularly complicated topic, where I am not sure yet where I stand, how to solve it or if it is sovable.

At the same time, especially in Norway, libraries have policies that make them about distributing information, knowledge and cultural narratives and technologies freely to all citizen to enrich a free democratic society. The Hordaland State library works towards enabling the libraries to continually fulfilling and developing their services and skills to meet those goals. So, opening up discussions and the dissemination of information of how we work, what we work with and which ideas we come up with would hopefully help the other library aiding organizations, librarians in the region, colleagues from other places on the cultural sector understand and learn from what we are doing.

Several other public service organizations like the City of Oslo are right now working on a social media strategy, and the Norwegian Department of administration and ICT has published Guidelines for communication in social media based on an open discussion in their blog.  The Norwegian administration discusses initiatives openly.

More specifically in the library field, there has been a library blogosphere for years now, the library lab tries to help public libraries to develop and adopt new technologies, and aids in implementing social applications to their data and media collections.  A good place to start if you want to dive in to the norwegian library blogosphere is this handy collection of library and library blog rss. Some libraries and librarians meet their patrons on facebook, twitter and other social networks.

Purpose

There is a need for collaboration on internal collection of facts, document, processes and progress of projects for official reporting purposes. But their is also the need to share knowlegde, write tutorials and discuss ideas, questions and problems within the process of developing libraries.

What I see as the most difficult task is to embed the reporting part into a communication tool, that is also open to all audiences. If you use a fine granulation of open for all/closed for member permissions system, this might be difficult to understand/remember.

Possible solutions: multiblog cms

We are still discussing options for which software (our preference is something php-based, free and open source software) to use. When we set the reporting task aside for a while, and look at the other things we want to do, we probably want a multiblog system like WordPress's BuddyPress (example install for a creative writing group at Bergen Public Library) or something like Drupal Commons/OpenAtrium, two Drupal-based distributions for collaborating in groups.

I am in favor of a tool, that we can own, as opposed to a tool that is a free service provided by a company we as a department use as long as the company lets us. Using a blog/cms software for the core discussions, and making it possible to let discussions on facebook and twitter get through to us, or let our discussions be linked to on facebook is my favorite way of doing this. That way we won't lose our data on terms of a third party. But I think this process needs some more thought, and some deeper diving into examples, and we need to include the opinion and the way people want to collaborate into realizing the way of communicating.

If you feel like you have missed the panel discussion "Women and Geek Culture", you can watch it now. The spectacular organizing team of the conference have made them available both as ftp-downloads, as well as embeddable videos from the CCC media server.

This semester I am taking two classes at the University of Bergen. INF100 is about programming in Java and learning concepts and practices in programming. DIKULT110 is a short and intensive class about communicating in social media, which has - of course - its own blog. Part of the assignments is to reflect on what we have learned in blog posts. So, bear with me as the next blog posts will be about social media.

Last weekend I attended the SIGINT conference in Cologne, and moderated the panel "Women and geek culture. Whats the problem, guys?". The idea was to explain and show what situations and settings manifest parts of geek culture as excluding women. Although the four panelists and I did come from different feminisms, or at least draw different conclusions, we did not want to give a theoretical overview over feminisms, nor did we intend to discuss them scholarly. The women* on the panel wanted to contribute with what they encounter and wanted to give an idea of how spaces and groups can be inclusive. Of course, it would have been difficult to cover all areas of geekery, so we focused on gaming, education, workplace, conferences and hackerspaces. We thought 105 minutes would be a lot, but in the end we only had 15 minutes for discussion.

While the video that has been recorded will not be ready for next weeks as we heard, I would like to reply on some points of criticism, and react on some very stereotypical antifeminist "criticism".

The discussion during Q&A was very well on the topic, and positively interested. While we got questions, we were informed that the discussion on twitter that had been going on while we were talking, was mixed at best. In a recap of the twitter search for #SIGINT for the time of the panel, I got the impression, that some people have accidentally or because of bias not heard what we said. At least as I recall it, we gave lots of disclaimers, like saying that we come with different experiences, have different angles and are in different communities. That we would like to talk about sexists, which can be male and female, and that there are men who can be feminists. That we have different feminist theories and practices. We still wanted to talk about problems we meet when interacting in geek groups and spaces. While having in mind that woman* is not the only potentially excluding factor, and that there is a set of "others" aka non-white, non-male, non-ablebodied, not-young, non-rich people that can be excluded from groups such as in geek culture.

Something, that went very wrong, was someone sending this tweet, and it being retweeted several times. It says: "So. Now 10 breasts are talking about feminism... #Sigint" by fussl.

This was unneccessary at best. It objectified the people on the panel, reduced us to our body parts. The only explanation I got from the guy who retweeted this from his friend fussl, was that it was an accurate thing to say. I especially called him on his panel-related tweeting, because it was not only resentful and wrong, but also because he had been one of the people who initiated the process to get a talk or action on gender (in)equality and feminism on the SIGINT. After initiating he never got really verbose about what he wanted and how it would be achievable. All in all the mailing list conversation was uffering from all the people being undermotivated or having little time to put some effort into getting something handed in to the organizers of the conference. Close to the deadline of the CfP, Svenja and I handed something in, all the time informing the list and giving people time to react. Noone cared.

So, after the panel, I was wondering if I should confront the guy, or if I should just ignore him. I less decided, than acted on an impulse and asked him to tell me that stuff he twittered again, and face to face. Here is what he came up with (said in my words, from memory:

1. It was not wrong to tweet the breast-tweet. Because the panelists all have breasts, because women have them.

WRONG. In which universe is it okay to objectify people and reduce them, and what they say to their body parts. Even if the inital tweet was not meant like that, a slip, the multiple retweets of it made it impossible for us to feel like what we say is taken seriously. Also, breasts can't talk. Also, in which universe do most men not have breasts? And nipples? How so is having breasts significant when talking about feminism? I could go on, but I won't and I didn't.

2. He does not give square about gender or gender roles and we did too little explaining and acted as women so we didn't deconstruct our gender enough.

WRONG. Obviously he does not give up his gender role (how would one, this is difficult and you would at least need to make an attempt). And for making a statement like that, you would have to know people on the panel better. How the frakk could we who were sitting up there show our non-binary gender identity to people, who obviously can do nothing but define us into the binaries? Before we even start talking? Also, why in hell are we obliged to give a freakshow? And since when is "femme" not a valid play on gender roles? So, I beg you pardon, but we really don't have to strip our personalities and our innards or outwards to you just to prove you that we really are circus freaks. Period.

The main problem with gender binaries is, that you are constantly being thrown back to them, whether you want to or not. And if you come into spaces or groups, that are (mostly) by tradition, society or self-defined male spaces (because they deal with science, machines and computers). So, if we are treated as women there, and women are treated in specific ways, we have all rights in the world to talk about it. Actually, more than half of the people on stage are defining as queer, if we choose to participate in a panel like that, and we choose the topic and what we want to say, we have our reasons. And the right to do so. You can actually not think any part of queer theories or debates without the existence of feminism, antisexist and antiracist theories and practice.

3. Putting pictures of naked, beauty standard women in ASCII art on the wall of the hackcenter (or any other temporary or permanent hackerspace) was a display of art, and should not be critisized. Also, think about how huge the porn collections on the guys' computers are, this is nothing. This is an act of consent, and for some magic reason consent means majority vote as soon as there is no consent anymore.

WRONG. Even though it might be art, showing it in a place where a minority of women* come, is potentially excluding them. Saying this was an act of consent means there is a democratic poll every minute another person walks in. If someone disagrees, and is not listened to, they are being defined out of the group. So, if a woman disagrees, she is not part of the group anymore. This is excluding and sexist. Now, to me the ASCII naked woman was not particularly excluding, though I liked the "looong cat" better. But someone did not feel comfortable, and so the picture should be taken down. Because it is not a "boys room", but a room for everybody.

Also, calling me on naivety, really? Of course, you boys are all supposed to have huge pr0n collections, and I am supposed to be a "sex-positive" feminist, and if not, to shut up. I don't think, feminism has ever been "sex-negative". And being called for naive is certainly not a first for feminists. Any feminist, actually. This would actually be a rant in itself. However, watching pr0n does not make you a hacker. Hacking does. Critical thinking does. Listening to others and learning from them, and applying knowledge to form something new spectacular, does. Inspiring each other to reach new aims, does make you a hacker. So why don't you try to read up a little on feminist criticism on the topic (aka RTFM), and try not to make a hackerspace exclude less-privileged (by society and groups) "other-than-you's"? What you watch in private on your computer is your deal, while what you show in public or semi-public spaces concerns everyone who enters. Is that so hard to understand?

I feel like I could go on and on. I'll leave it at that, and maybe contribute in comments or write more posts if I feel like it.

Let me just once more thank the volunteer group organizing this community-driven event to give us the stage to talk about this topic. Special thanks to Nika, who really supported us contentwise and with practicalities. I hear there have been lots of thinking about and discussions on the panel afterwards, and that makes me really happy we did this. Also thanks to Heather, Ella, Leena and Svenja to get up there together with me and talk about the F-word. More blogging about this at I heart digital life.

So, the good news on ebooks. The Gutenberg Project has vast resources of free ebooks for shich the copyright has expired. You can get all sorts of formats there. Both the nook and the Kindle (afaik) accept non-DRM ebooks in pdf, the nook also in epub-format. There is alo the Baen Free Library for Science Fiction books. Feedbooks and FreeTechBooks are other resources for free books. Wikibooks is a project from Wikipedia.

There are many books available for students who looks for free textbooks. Ask your public or academic library for advice on their databases and which books or article could be relevant to your research. In Norway there is an excellent service with volunteering librarians who answer your questions via phone, email or chat - and most recently also facebook and twitter. It is called Biblioteksvar.

The synchronizing of content that doesn't come from the store your device is locked to, can, however, be a pain. Calibre is a tool that can help you there. The software collects all your ebooks in a library, you can convert them to other formats and push them to your reader when it's connected via USB. Calibre has also predefined tasks of collecting news from feeds, converting them to easily readable ebooks, and pushing the daily news to your device. This works for Google Reader and ReadItLater, too.

The nook is root- and hackable. It runs Android, and if you follow the instructions of the nookdevs, some neighborly concerned Android hackers, you can get around some of the nasty restrictions when you have bought a nook and want to use it outside of the U.S. It voids your warranty, though. You get a web and file browser, a feed reader and lots of other functionality. Someone has even started developing a twitter client, Twook. You will also get the chance to get familiar and comfortable with the Android SDK, and you should be comfortable about using the command line to do all this.

I recently have become the owner of an e-book-reader. The "nook", which is developed and sold by Barnes & Nobles. I have been hesitating for a very long time if I should buy such a device, and which one. What has been putting me in this position is not that I don't have use for it. Nor that I can't pay for it. Seen from a capitalist market POV, this makes me a customer.

What has been putting me in this position, and what continues to be a great problem for me in acquiring ebooks in a "white" market way, is: DRM on ebooks. The decision-makers in the publishing industry who are dinosaurs. Who think they can decide for me what I can read on which screen, in which manner and on which medium.

I like paper. I really do. I am a big fan of paper hacks, book binding and paper as a note taking tool. But my fandom only bears so far. I do not wish to carry a big stack of heavy paper books with me when I am traveling, which I do. Or when moving. I do not wish to break my back, or the backs of my helpers. Not every book is worth reading twice, and when it comes to design and typesetting only very few books are that beautiful that you want to collect them because typesetter, printers and book binders have done such a good work. So the ever so often sigh of librarians ("but, what happens to the books!"), well... Let's just say, I am not very worried.

So, why the nook. Right now there are only two devices to my knowledge that feature what is important for me in an ebook reader on the market. (Like, really on the market, not long waiting lists for especially interested people.) Both the Amazon Kindle, and the Barnes & Noble nook have wifi and 3G capability. Both of them have a long battery life when reading, and both seems to be somewhat longlasting. Also, both of them have e-ink screens. (I consider the iPad to be crippleware and not an ebook due to little battery capacity and backlighting. I like shiny devices. But not this one so far.)

I like the nook better, simply because he has a touch screen instead of a keyboard. And because he runs with Android as OS, which also runs on my phone. Although I do not wholeheartedly agree with Google on development decisions and privacy issues, Android is pretty great when it comes to smart phones. Its somewhat open character makes problems set by Google and carriers circumventable.

What made me hesitate to buy either of the two devices, was the decision of the two book stores (and others along with them) and the book publishers to lock down the reading material as much as possible. Every ebook you can buy on Amazon are only readable on the Kindle reader. And you can only buy ebooks from Barnes & Noble if you have a US IP adress and a US billing adress.

Of course, there are other book stores. But a lot of pubishers have said no to selling their material outside the US. I fail to find the appropriate words for this stupidity. I am still looking for ways to buy books. Not to talk about checking out ebooks in a library. Apparently inhabitants of Denmark and Sweden can already do that. But in Norway, librarians and politicians are still busy with letting themselves get scared off by the lobbyists of publishing houses.

I don't want to be locked to Amazon. I buy the occasional book there,
because they have almost everything. I knew before about how tightly the Kindle is linked to Amazon. But experiencing how you really can't use any book that they offer in their store on your *reader, whatever reader that might be, made me really angry. And sure, there are ways of circumventing the lockdown of the Barnes & Noble store. But I ask: why should they be able to do that? Why should publishers and book stores be allowed to be so strict? Why would anyone want to prevent someone from reading a book. Let alone a book he or she wants to purchase?

Ebooks can be a great device for students, people with problems in reading can increase the font size to their liking. If people have their books with them, they will have so many good reading experiences, it could actually make reading popular. Or at least better apprehensible for those with attention deficits. You have a full-fledged full text search at your finger tip with every book that you read. What kind of information society locks down reading of books?

People, some of them librarians or teachers, are worried that people read less books now that there is the internet. Well, do you have to kill trees and emit lots of chlorine in the water, not to speak about the resources used for Transportation of physical books? Only to read a texts longer then 20 pages in a proper more or less linear manner?

Even if you are not against DRM in general. Trust me: You don't want DRM on ebooks.

Two small community libraries, Fjell folkeboksamling and Meland bibliotek, have said yes to a new experience: Making a film about what people can find in the library.  Two groups of students from a seminar at the Institute for media and informations science, University of Bergen, had the task to find out what the libraries had - and how they could present the material.

The outcome is quite fascinating. While the one about Meland focuses on words and animations with the (very nice and sympathetic) head librarian as, the other one focuses on the youngest target group of potential patrons: A - mostly silent - kid boy with his curious discoveries in the library. Both the films are charming. I like the approach of presenting the librarian as a person and give the library not only a lot of meaning, but also show a friendly and smart human face. And I also like the approach of the other film that shows very well how you can go on a discovery in the library - and find besides the fishing rod (that you really can borrow at this library" and all the other stuff, what could be an interesting discovery for you.

The film about Meland bibliotek:

The film about Fjell folkeboksamling:

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
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