Access, Openness, and Political Economy

Posted on October 20, 2011 Written by

I’m in Vancouver this week at the annual Access conference for libraries. It is always a good opportunity to learn more about libraries and technology, but this year’s program organizers have done a particularly great job, with several sessions on openness — including open data, open standards, open source, and open access — all topics that fit in well with this week’s ECI 831 lecture. The slides from my own pre-conference presentation on selecting and evaluating open source software are available on Slideshare. I added Slide 7 (on the use of social media to find out more about open source and to connect with others with similar interests) late on Tuesday night after class, based on our discussions that evening!

The opening keynote of the Access conference this morning, “From Access to Interactivity” by Jon Beasley-Murray, was particularly interesting, as it brought some political economy into the discussion of libraries, technology, and openness, and provided an important connection between pre-industrial enclosures (which saw the privatization of common agricultural land) with modern-day digital enclosures — where capital takes the products of common production (such as our uploaded photos, videos, etc., as well as our taxpayer-funded university research output) and monetize them for private profit — either through the addition of advertising (e.g., YouTube) or via high journal subscription prices to university libraries (where the taxpayers get to purchase the content they themselves funded). In his talk, Dr. Beasley-Murray made reference to the brilliant David Harvey (a hero since my days as a geography student), including his concept of the “accumulation by dispossession” — where private wealth is amassed not through capital growth but through the appropriation of the products of the commons (more here too). I’ve been involved in the open source and open access movements for several years now, but I really appreciated Dr. Beasley-Murray’s historical contextualization of this issue. It reminded me of not only of the importance of building connections with other people to bring about more openness, but also of the need to maintain our connections with the past. Openness isn’t new at all, in fact, but actually goes back a very long time indeed.

Filed Under: Presentations, Technology, Thoughts Tagged: ,

Tracking Your Traffic with Google Analytics

Posted on October 15, 2011 Written by

Has anyone else setup Google Analytics for their blog yet? It is a great tool for tracking your traffic, generates a really nice report, is easy to setup, and — best of all — is free.

Getting it going is basically a two step process. First, go to the Google Analytics web site and create a free account. Second, go into your WordPress dashboard and install one of the many Google Analytics plugins. You’ll enter your tracking code here and then just need to wait a few hours for Google to start tracking. Here’s a snapshot image of my Google Analytics dashboard.

We may not see huge amounts of traffic on our blogs, but it is interesting to see exactly how much is coming through, where it is coming from, which posts are most viewed, etc. It is well worth the little bit of effort to setup!

I’d be interested in hearing about other WordPress plugins people are using. I also like EZPZ One Click Backup, which makes backing up a snap — and automatically drops a backup copy of my blog in my Dropbox folder every night.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged:

Surviving Google Reader

Posted on September 25, 2011 Written by

I don’t know about you, but I had long found keeping track of RSS feeds overwhelming. I managed to get a couple of dozen into Google Reader, and it soon became very difficult to manage. I tried a variety of tools, such as incorporating it into my Thunderbird email client, but that only made it worse — MORE email? No thanks.

I recently came across a great tool, if you happen to be an iPad user. It is an app called the “Early Edition“. Essentially, it takes all of the posts from your Google Reader account, and creates an easy to read daily newspaper for you. I now have about a hundred sites in my Google Reader account, and that serves up about 12 – 15 pages a day of reading. Most you can just scan over, but you can quickly find ones worth delving into. Better yet, the app allows you to post directly to Twitter, send it to Delicious, or add it to Read It Later to well, read later :-)

Here’s a sample screenshot of what it looks like:

I don’t want to sound like an ad for this company (full disclosure, I could only wish to have been smart enough to get financially involved with these guys), but it has really made my personal information management significantly easier. Any one else here have a favourite tool for keeping the info deluge at bay?

Filed Under: Technology, Thoughts Tagged:

WordPress Makes Me Smile

Posted on June 25, 2011 Written by

This site operates using WordPress, which is an amazing system for personal blogging. I’ve been messing around with it for a few years now, helping friends or clients build relatively basic web sites on top of it. I’m so impressed at the work the community has put into it, and how polished it has become. I recently needed to do an upgrade and was blown away by how easy it was. With the right plug ins in place, backing the system up takes one click and doing the upgrade is another. That’s it. For anyone interested in building a blog for teaching purposes, or looking for a straight-forward CMS, it is a very good choice. With every version there are significant improvements, many of them which just make me shake my head and smile at what the “crowd” can accomplish.

I also work a lot with the Drupal content management system. Both the reSearcher and PKP web sites run on Drupal, as does the SFU Library’s site. I’ve also installed it on my own test server and played around with it quite a bit. One of the best things about Drupal is the committed community of users and developers. I don’t think I’ve come across a problem yet that wasn’t solved by a quick google search and an answer on a support forum or someone’s personal web site. The fact that libraries in particular have picked up on Drupal is great to see, too. Sites like my colleague Mark Jordan’s Drupalib and the drupal4lib listserv have resulted in a tremendously useful community of users with knowledge of specific library needs. I’m not a software developer, but I know from working closely with them that Drupal is robust enough to meet pretty much all of their needs. Follow the threads on the listserv and you’ll quickly see what I mean.

One of the downsides that you often hear about Drupal, however, is that it has a steep learning curve and a less-than-ideal user interface. It is an incredibly powerful, complex program, but it isn’t always the easiest for end-users to work with. For example, a typical library web site will be administered by a systems tech, who more often than not is thrilled to be working with Drupal. For the librarians or library staff tasked with adding content, however, they are not always quite so enthusiastic. I’ve been working with my local library association over the past few years, helping them improve their web presence. We first decided to go with Drupal, based on its known robustness. What was interesting to see, though, was that their needs were very basic and none of the power of Drupal was really required. On the other hand, many of the end users who needed to add content found it too difficult to work with. We recently switched it over to WordPress, and everyone now seems quite happy. It turned out to be a great example of the importance of doing a careful needs assessment with the community that will be using the software. Sometimes simpler is better.

Filed Under: Technology