Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Hello internet....it's been a while...

Not really, I just haven't posted. Re-acclimated to time zones, allergies, etc. Back being fairly active doing...stuff. Not too much, really. Got a talent agency and am looking to do film/tv extra work while I'm back. Next step is headshots etc. Makes me feel slightly dirty.

Re-read 1984. Different from what I remember. I'm reading far too little and infrequently for my comfort lately. There's a stack of books on my desk that goes unread. I really want to, but some inertia stops me. This internet article seems revelant:

"what do we really know about the typical profile of members of the Google generation? As a group, according to the Ciber paper, they were "turning away from being passive consumers of information", as revealed by the decline of television and newspapers. Though they were generally "more competent with technology... older users are catching up fast". And some of the more critical claims made about them seem to apply across the board: "From undergraduates to professors, people exhibit a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, 'flicking' behaviour in digital libraries. Power browsing appears to be the norm for all. The popularity of abstracts among older researchers rather gives the game away."

So is it not just a particular generation but the whole academic world that has been Googlised? There seems to be some evidence for this. "With Google Scholar and Google Library under way," Library Journal reported in 2006, "Google strengthened its claim as the ubiquitous front door to the web and all of its content... 72 per cent of scholars surveyed for a report on self-archiving confessed to using Google to find scholarly literature on the web. Journal publishers of all sizes and importance are shaping their business plans around this phenomenon, sharing metadata with Google and other web crawlers in hopes of drawing users to content behind their tollgates.""

Full article: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402225&c=1

Also, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a LONG time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obIGsb-IZMo

And I've discovered Craig's List....really good for LA, useless for Scotland, but some cool stuff, from internships to this agency that I'll hopefully be doing stuff with by late next week.