Ubiquitous Computing
Mike Underloy has an a fascinating post in which he looks forward to Web Work in a Post-PC World picking up on reports that PCs are losing their relevance in Japan. Apparently PC sales in Japan have been in decline for the past five straight quarters. Smart phones and a whole array of mobile devices make it easier for people to access and update Facebook and MySpace and pretty much everything. It is quite possible that better input devices will be developed before the next generation of nextgens evolve extra spindly fingers.

No two ways about it, the PC is doomed...and not before time either. Being tethered to a big lump of plastic everyday at work seems to be a big price to pay and much as I love all the infinte possibilities the web provides, I do begrudge spending so much of my time face to face with a computer screen in some cupboard of an office.

When I first planned my glorious career, I had anticipated that computers and mobile telephony would allow me to work more or less anywhere, therefore I would choose to work from a beach shack in some exotic locale. This is still the plan, though not yet the reality. The shape and form of future technology will impact on the way we lead our lives, so it makes sense to be at least mildly interested if not actively engaging. Which is all the more reason for using web tools like Google Docs rather having a Word document on your computer, or bringing carrying your files and applications on a USB pendrive using PortableApps. If it frees you from the leaden weight of the PC then the world is well and truly your oyster.

The beach awaits

Blind faith in web tools

There is a lovely story in today's Guardian about what happens when you place too much faith in what you find on the web. A group of Dutch journalists planning a trip to Israel almost casued a diplomatic row when they used the online translation tool Babelfish when the Dutch Consulate requested a preview of the questions that the journalists intended to ask.

The email commenced "Helloh bud, Enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian, and on relational Israel Holland," before posing a number of somewhat disturbing questions along the lines of "Why we did not heard on mutual visits of main the states of Israel and Holland, this is in the country of this".

It reminds me of the time when I used voice recognition software to translate my recitation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 and ended up with a somewhat more surreal version. Sadly posterity has been robbed of this new and improved text, the file was lost in a hard drive partitioning incident, though I do recall the final line "So long lives this, and this gives life to fish"

The name Babelfish comes from Douglas Adam's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is such a brilliant idea, a creature that in breaking down the barriers to communication causes "more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation" Perversely it is by not breaking down these barriers that the online version has caused offence.

There used to be a soap opera in ITV, Britain's first commercial TV company, called Crossroads, whose productions values were so low that the sets would visibly wobble when anyone entered a room. It is well remembered for the time one of its regular characters, a mechanic called Benny, popped out to get a spanner one episode to reappear again five years late with no explanation of what had happened in the intervening time – and no spanner either. Characters re-emerging with little or no explanation are not uncommon however, Sherlock Holmes came back after being killed off at the Reichenbach falls, Bobby Ewing emerged from the shower several series of Dallas after his supposed demise looking none the worse for wear. People do it all the time on the long running BBC radio programme the Archers, but no one bats an eyelid because they never saw them in the first place. So hopefully its no big deal really that my last post on this blog was five years ago. I'd like to to think that this is some kind of a record, but suspect it isn't.

It's not that I totally turned my back on social networking tools, there's my flickr presence for example (which may be possibly give some pointers as to why I have taken so long to get round to updating my blog), and I occasionally get round to entering details of my jogging on mapmyrun, I have 3 friends on BEBO, have been reunited with a few more elsewhere and I do have a wiki somewhere. I'd like to point out that if I don't look as fit in my flickr pictures as my mapmyrun training regimes suggests I should, I am still looking for mapmyguinnessandkebabintake.com

I have been moved to resume my blogging after attending day 1 of the Internet Librarian International 2007 conference. Stephen Abrams in his keynote address recalled the words of British Library director Caroline Brazier's who suggested that librarians are welcome not to embrace web 2.0 – provided they take early retirement first. Clearly we are living in interesting times and I no longer think it is possible to get the full measure of what is happening and what it means to the profession by merely dabbling occasionally. It is also a fabulous opportunity to learn by playing. I missed Phil Bradley's closing keynote, having zipped up on the sleeper to Edinburgh the night before, but fortunately his slides are available because they raise a number of issues which deserve consideration.

Other highlights included Dave Pattern, University of Huddersfield, speaking about web 2.0 and the OPAC, The Impact of 2.0: lipstick, cowbells and serendipity in the OPAC. Brian Kelly, UKOLN, on barriers to blogging and how these can be addressed - The blogging librarian: avoiding institutional inertia and Helene Blowers presentation on the development of "23 things" Learning 2.0: it’s all about play!