I just wanted to mention the survey that The Bookseller has up right now. It takes a solid five minutes to click through it, but it seems worthwhile. So if you’re involved in publishing or just like to keep up with all things book (both e- and p-) then click on over and give your two cents.
If you’re not familiar with The Bookseller site, it’s based overseas, is great and worth keeping up with.
Someone shared Seth Godin’s post The Future of the Library, via Twitter. In it Godin says “Netflix is a better librarian…”. Something that I totally disagree with. I have a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old at home. Ninety-five percent of what gets streamed to my house is kids’ programming. From which the Netflix-librarian-bot makes the following not-so-helpful recommendations:
I took these screen shots today and stopped halfway through Page 2 of the recommendations. Now, none of these are offensive (Netflix once recommended Teeth to us, based on VeggieTales and Strawberry Shortcake) , but I’m not sure which one of these programs my Dora-loving 2-year-old would want to watch.
To be fair, Netflix-bot has gotten better over the past year. We really enjoy the service. But they are a looooooong ways away from being “a better librarian.” I do hope you all read Godin’s post, he does end up highlighting the need for people to curate and determine selections. Even if he does over reach with his esteem for bot-driven recommendation engines. People are still better.
Fantastic does not begin to describe how cool these wallpapers are. These would make great screen savers, t-shirts, tattoos. Well, maybe tattoo is a bit much…. We’re looking to gussy up some walls around the house and I ran across these awesome wallpapers. Some are screen-printed, some letterpress-looking, but all are 100% cool. And Italian. I haven’t found anything local that even comes close. Take a look:
Here’s the site where you can check out all the wall coverings. Just click on the ‘Life’ drop down. There is also a drop down to select the language. Setting it to English is helpful. It’s doubtful that we’ll get any of these exact typographic wallpaper designs, but I certainly have some cool ideas now.
Ok. This is cool. Absolutely cool. Artist Ward Shelley has sketched out a mind map to the history and evolution of the science fiction genre. It’s amazing. Click through to the big image and check out the areas around cyberpunk (upper right-ish) and the “Star Wars effect” (follow the arrow from Star Wars). He used spatial relations too. So the closer a name or title is to a sub-genre the more “canon” it/they will be. Pretty cool way to pick up new titles and authors to track down.
Someone should do this for all of the genres. A biblio-mystery mind map would be cool. I’ll buy the colored pencils! Who’s with me?
