LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

The WSJ says Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Once they were hosts to lively discussions about academic style and substance, but the time of scholarly e-mail lists has passed, meaningful posts slowing to a trickle as professors migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook.

"While I am still on a few listservs, it is mainly because they give me no other option for receiving information," wrote Kay Cunningham, an electronic-resources librarian at the University of Memphis. "I find them increasingly annoying —even those with digest options, and for the most part I delete them unread."

More than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report.

The e-mails are dominated by spam adverts for drugs, and general product pitches and often have malicious attachments.

The report found that the global ratio of infected machines was 8.6 for every 1,000 uninfected machines.

Taiwanese firm Elan Microelectronics has sued Apple Computer alleging infringement of two of its touch-screen patents, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

The suit was filed late Tuesday afternoon in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, said spokesman Dennis Liu, speaking by phone from the chip design firm’s headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

“We couldn't find a common viewpoint with Apple, so we decided we had to take action,” he said, adding that the companies had been in licensing talks for about two years.

The lawsuit alleges that Apple products including its MacBook computer, iPhone and iPod Touch use technology that infringes on two of Elan’s “multi-touch” patents, the company said in a statement.

Wonder what this will mean for all those Apple products already in use.

Barack Obama is the first wired president, ready to exchange e-mail with close friends and advisers. When do the rest of us get to read them?

We may have to wait until as late as 2028, depending on when Obama leaves office as president. That's according to leading presidential historians who make their living hunting through records at the National Archives and Records Administration.

"In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update" is the most e-mailed article on the New York Times as of 17 February 2009, 2:28 am EST. Are there that many librarians emailing this article?

LAW-LIB is a listserv where law librarians ask and answer legal questions and help each other find legal resources and trouble shoot unique legal reference questions. Currently the list administrator has raised the issue of whether a specific person should be banned from the list and great debate has ensued. What is problematic is that when a debate on a listserv happens it happens in your inbox. A typically amount of emails from LAW-LIB might be 6-12 in a day. The current debate has thrown this number into the range of 50-75 emails.

I wanted to raise a listserv idea that could be debated on a forum that is more conducive to discussion. The power of listservs is that they have a very strong connection with people because the email goes directly to them. The listserv participants are dealing with a "push" information system. My idea is to have a listserv that operates something like the game show Jeopardy in that things would have to be in the form of a question. The listserv would only be for questions. All answers to questions and discussion would be on a corresponding website. Each question sent to the mailing list would automatically be posted to the website. If you wanted to see the answer to a question or provide an answer you would go to the the website.

Today's Word-of-the-Day from Wordsmith.com is ex libris (from the library), but there's also a mention of spam and where it's heading (it would be nice if it was heading in the opposite direction of our inboxes...surely you've heard from Mariam Abachha in the last few years).

Here's the link to subscribe to A.Word.A.Day.

In the library world, we rely on technology. We e-mail our colleagues and co-workers. We use the web to find information for us and for others. As a profession, and like many other professions, we've grown increasingly attached to digital communications and we'd find ourselves hard pressed to make do without them.

Not so with the highest office in the United States. The President of the United States really doesn't engage in e-mail because of laws regarding the archiving of Presidential communications, but also because of security. While the ability to send a message instantly to POTUS is a powerful thing, if that message contains classified information and it's intercepted by a hacker, then we're talking a matter of national security.

Nevertheless, our new President is a bit of a geek and is addicted to e-mail and his BlackBerry. He's explicitly stated that "They're going to pry it out of my hands."

So how do you provide the security needed by the President when all he really wants is to use the same tools millions of people use every day? Simple. You get him the most secure BlackBerry ever made.

Lookout, Patriot Act...someone is surpassing you. The UK is spending 25 million pounds to track everyone's email.

I can't imagine how this could work. With the number of meaningless emails my friends and I send back and forth...we'd crash the system!

Bunny Burnstein