Access to Information in the Third World

There's a nice article in this weekend's New York Times Magazine about how enhanced access to information improves living conditions in the third world. "Ah hah," I'm sure all of you librarians out there are now thinking, "Further proof of how wonderful libraries are!" Actually, no: the story is about how cellphones allow the global poor easy access to information that was either completely unavailable or prohibitively expensive before. (It's an interesting mental exercise for a librarian, actually, to read this article and try to figure out how a library could function to meet the sorts of information needs that are featured in it.)

By the way, the article mentions in passing the story of the fishermen of Kerala, India, who provided some of the first evidence of how important access to information is for the global poor. That story by itself is fascinating. If you're interested, here are a paper from the Quarterly Journal of Economics and a Washington Post article about the research that has been done on these fishermen.

(Yes, I am aware that it's been almost a month since I updated this blog. Yes, I am aware that this makes me a bad blogger. Blogging will become more regular once I finish packing up all of the junk I've acquired in the past 6.5 years and moving it 500 miles.)

Another Advertising-Related Link Roundup

There's been a big dust-up in Britain over the past couple of weeks about targeted advertising. As somebody who thinks that advertising-supported content is a good thing (and yes, I still do at some point intend to do a long and thoughtful post about why I think that), I don't necessarily find all of the arguments against targeted advertising to be persuasive. But I still think they're interesting and worth listening to.

So, here are a few of the better entries in the debate:

A Liberal Democratic politician says, in relation to targeted advertising on MySpace, “I think it's absolutely wrong if you haven't been notified and given the opportunity to opt out.” My take: Notification is definitely a good thing, but opt-out is a very different question. MySpace can only afford to give you a free account because advertisers are willing to give them money to show you advertisements. Why should you be able to say to MySpace, “I want you to give me my free account, but I refuse to help you make the money to pay for that account”? It seems to me that the opt-out option is, “If you don't like MySpace's advertising practices, don't use MySpace.”

I don't know much about the details of this Phorm system, but it's interesting that there's one story praising its privacy-protecting features, another a few days later saying that there isn't enough information to know if it's acceptable privacy-wise or not, and another one saying it's illegal. (More on Phorm.) And Tim Berners-Lee has come out against not only Phorm, but all systems that track online activity in order to provide targeted advertisements.

Yahoo! Search Is Going Semantic

Or so the Yahoo! Search Blog said yesterday, anyway. Details are still a little thin, but Dublin Core is first on the list of metadata schemas that will be supported....

More on Privacy, Data and the Government

Apropos of the comments I made a couple of weeks ago about privacy and the government, there's a nice article in Wired right now that addresses some of the same issues.

(Hat tip: Slashdot, where the comments are actually pretty interesting too.)

How Did I Not Know about This?

There is an entire blog dedicated to quirky numeric data, with a strong emphasis on visualizations thereof.

I am in heaven.

Thanks to Marginal Revolution for pointing this blog out and making my day.

Link Roundup

The Atlantic has a very interesting article on Internet censorship in China. (And there's also a Web-only interview with the author.)

The Encyclopedia of Life, an open encyclopedia that aims eventually to have comprehensive entries on every single species of living thing, has launched.

A Personal Announcement

As you've probably noticed by now, this isn't exactly a "personal" blog. But kindly indulge me as I make one personal announcement.

I am no longer a job-hunting librarian! As of July 1, I will be the data services librarian at Grinnell College.

And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.