If you're near Kate or Andy when they read this article, please don't trip on their jaws, which are sure to hit the ground.

Ireland to Ban Smoking in Pubs

"Health Minister Micheal Martin is set to announce the major move on Thursday....

The report authors are calling for a ban on smoking in all workplaces in the Republic - including bars and restaurants.

The government plan goes beyond proposals it put forward last November, announcing a ban in restaurants and pubs where food was served." [MetaFilter]

After the Challenger explosion in 1986, I read everything I could find about it. I even went so far as to buy and read the U.S. Government's Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. (The spine on this 3-volume set reads simply "Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Accident," as if there would only ever be just one.)

Even then, "everything I could find" wasn't a drop in the bucket compared to what I've been able to read on the internet in just four days. Back in pre-internet 1989, Richard Saul Wurman suggested that there is more information in one daily edition of the New York Times than a 17th-century man knew during his entire lifetime. Tracking what happened to the Columbia just points out to me the difference between 20th-century Jenny and 21st-century Jenny, and it's only 2003.

Anyway, my point is that there is one area in particular in which the web has really excelled in regards to this tragedy and that is its ability to collect and archive disparate resources. Three outstanding examples include the nixlog collection of infographics (via WebWord), Poynter's Front Page Gallery, the Dallas Morning News' Witnesses to History community site (via Dan Gillmor's eJournal), and Cagle's collection of Columbia Tragedy newspaper cartoons. That last link is a lot more poignant than you might expect it to be.

Party at My Blog!

"Dear Ms. Salo: Your application materials have been carefully reviewed. I am happy to inform you that you have been accepted by the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies for admission for Fall, 2003. Congratulations! We look forward to having you join our school." [Caveat Lector]

Good call, UW-Madison SLIS, and congratulations to Dorothea! Pretty soon, you'll have to officially worship her.  :-)

Now that Copyfight is in my aggregator <grin>, I see that yesterday Donna pointed to Derek Slater's interview with MPAA President Jack Valenti. You can read the best parts on his blog A Copyfighter's Musings (which praise-the-lord-and-pass-the-butter has an RSS feed of its own!) or read the whole thing at the Harvard Political Review.

"If the Verizon decision holds up, I expect the MPAA and RIAA to come back after the universities, to really make them monitor their networks. It's already starting to happen at Harvard.

'HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's 'fair use' rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry?
JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.'

This kind of caught me off guard. I didn't expect him to completely deny the existence of fair use. I know he's read this. I guess he was just trying to exaggerate, because he quickly contradicts himself:

'Right now, any professor can show a complete movie in his classroom without paying a dime--that's fair use. What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself....'

HPR: Why do we need government mandates for copy prevention technologies?
JV: You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules. For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width.
If you don't have tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates, either regulatory or congressional, then, if I'm a maverick computer maker in Taiwan, I can say, 'Hell, I'm not going to play by the rules. I'm going to do it so everybody can copy." Then Toshiba and Sony and IBM can say, 'Well if he does that, then I want to do it.' We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit. That's called a standard.' "

I'm sure our Canadian friends and others outside the U.S. will be thrilled to hear that Jack supports "tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates" since that means his next step should be to help the DVD industry move away from the multitude of regional encoding schemes to a single "standard."

After reading just the excerpt, I am reminded of a time when Saturday Night Live used to be funny - during the 1988 presidential campaign. The cast held their version of the debates and at one point, Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakais listens to yet another inane answer from Dana Carvey as George Bush Sr., shakes his head, and says, "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."

I've gotten a few comments and emails in regards to yesterday's post about the Corante blogs lack of RSS feeds. First up was Kevin Marks, who I must have been channeling because he posted very similar thoughts on Sunday.

"However, Corante hasn't yet managed to generate RSS feeds for them all, so I have to remember to check them manually. This means I read them less often than I otherwise would - that's why they're in the 'weekly' rather than 'daily' section of my blogroll."

Then John Robb suggested I use RssDistiller to scrape the feeds myself. Unfortunately, I tried this last year without success, and I tried to scrape Copyfight using Stapler last month. Both attempts failed, mostly due to the fact that I'm too much of a newbie at this, but also because we need some step-by-step documentation for both of these tools. Consider me the equivalent of a 1998 AOL subscriber on Usenet when it comes to creating RSS feeds and you'll understand the level at which these tools need to be explained for them to be used by an average Jane.

Actually, I had stopped trying to scrape the Corante sites myself after Yale's Revenge of the Blog conference last November, because I thought Hylton might realize they were going to be assimilated anyway, so he might as well control the RSS feeds for the sites himself, rather than ceding them to an unknown third party. But every time they launch a new blog without an accompanying RSS feed, I'm disappointed that I won't be reading it, hence the latest call for help.

Andrew Wooldridge pointed me towards MyRSS.com in case I wanted to scrape it myself using a third party service. If I've seen this site before I don't remember it, but before I could even get home to look at it, he wrote to tell me that he's saved me (and you!) the trouble. And the heavens parted and welcomed Copyfight into the RSS fold and it was good.

There's an RSS version 0.91 feed, a version 1.0 feed, a Javascript include, and even a Microsoft SharePoint Web Part! Thanks, Andrew!

The caveats are that item links go to a page on the myRSS site for 20 seconds, and the channel is updated only once a day. Both of these settings can be changed if someone "sponsors" the channel, so that's how myRSS is staying afloat financially. Sponsoring will run $10, $25, and/or $40 per year, depending on which options are chosen. I suppose if Corante doesn't want to run their own RSS feeds, I could sponsor Copyfight and make y'all worship librarians, but I have a feeling Hylton will have a change of heart.  :-)

Lori Bell, who really needs to get her own blog now that she's abdicated her Handheld Librarian title, had told me that NOLA (the folks behind the ListenOhio Audible program) were launching a new initiative in February. All of a sudden, it's February (I'm still working on catching up to that one), so Lori forwarded to me the following announcement.

The Performer's Showcase

"The Performers Showcase has been an exciting project to coordinate at NOLA. NOLA has taken the State Library's list of performers and created a database that is searchable and has video clips of many different performers. We have sent letters to over 120 performers and have received over 35 responses including performers that have sent us videos and others who have come to NOLA to have their performances captured.

This project was started so that no one needs to travel to Columbus to the Performers Showcase. Instead of a trip south you can simply turn your computer on and go to www.showcaseohio.org and view at your leisure a storyteller, magician, and many other performers. NOLA will roll out the first website for performers in Ohio with video clips of their programs."

I can't seem to get to the site yet, but I really like this idea. We're heading in a slightly different direction for video at SLS because we plan to use Flash instead of MPEG-4 for video, but there's no reason we couldn't add this type of functionality to the existing Parade of Programs database of performers recommended by Illinois librarians. A most interesting idea!

On a side note, if any of my SLS colleagues are reading this, check out the NOLA newsletter from which the above blurb is taken. I really like the way the second page highlights their accomplishments and teamwork. We don't do enough of this, and I think we need to change that. Our members don't understand everything we do (and can do) for them because we don't do a good job of telling them.

While I get myself back up to speed blogging, you should be checking in with Frank Field's Furdlog. He's posting a lot of the stuff I would have for the last week, including pointers to Big Champagne (a Nielsen-like rating service of the most popular songs being downloaded) and today's FoxTrot comic about Kazaa users and Disney.

As for me, I got around to doing a few things last week that I'd been putting off. I'm pretty much caught up on my print Entertainment Weeklys, and I noticed an ad in last week's that made me look twice. It's for Allegra allergy medicine, and it shows a woman using a laptop out on a patio. I'm pretty sure she's accessing the internet wirelessly, but I can't be sure. So now Wi-Fi has become background for ads!

I started playing with my Archos Multimedia Jukebox more. I took some video of Brent's basketball game, and I plugged the Archos directly into my ReplayTV to record the wonderful Danny Kaye-Louis Armstrong duet "When the Saints Go Marching In" from the movie The Five Pennies. Of course, it's only an MP3 file since Archos hasn't released the video recorder yet, but I still like having it. I'm thinking of testing RSS enclosures with it, because I'm starting to really like the idea of getting audio and video in my news aggregator.