Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

Mick Jones, famed Clash guitarist, has opened his Rock-n-Roll Public Library in London. The repository is based in an office near Portobello Road, west London, close to where Mick Jones formed The Clash with Joe Stummer in 1976. The "guerrilla library" will include 10,000 items from the guitarist's private collection. The Telegraph articles are here and here . There's a video too...it's below.

For immediate use: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 ibiblio helps found open-source advocacy group CHAPEL HILL – ibiblio , a conservancy of freely available information on the Internet based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , is a founding member of a new group aim ing to promot e use of open - source technology by the f ederal government. The new group announced today, Open Source for America, is a cross-section of more than 50 companies, universities , communities and individuals hold ing that government can and should become more transparent, participatory, secure and efficient by us ing open-source software . The group also holds that the open- source community can drive collaborative innovation for government; and that a decision to use software should be driven solely by the requirements of the user. For more information about Open Source for America, visit http://opensourceforamerica.org . The term “ open source ” refers to software that is distr...

This is just too ironic, or is it coincidental? Anyway, on Thursday Amazon began e-mailing several hundred Kindle owners to notify them that AMZN had deleted their electronic copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 . Amazon did refund the $0.99 purchase price of the books, but nonetheless... I am not sure this is legal and it is totally Big Brother creepy. The press has called it digital/electronic/virtual book burning which seems apropos. I did read a rumor that the FCC was looking into the legality of this too. In a related note, I read that Apple also possesses a remote "kill switch" for apps on the iPhone, though AAPL hasn't used this and says the kill switch is only for apps that might be malicious to the iPhone as a device. There are two stories on the AMZN brouhaha....TechCruch here and Information Week here .

I had read about this in InsideHigherEd about a week ago and the story recently got some play on the local news. Until the left is willing to work harder and collaborate a bit more effectively, this is our hegemony (and IMHO it's not all bad). Being an ex-community college instructor, this seems like important work in a pivotal and crucial educative space. Lastly, a lot of the Gates Foundation pilot work was done at Portland Community College in their alternative high school problem. My partner taught in this program and she had nothing but praise, well almost nothing but praise. So, here's the InsideHigherEd blurb and the local WRAL link follows. New Gates Grants for Remedial Ed at Community Colleges The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and MDC Inc. are today announcing $16.5 million in grants to 15 community colleges in 6 states to expand remedial education efforts that appear to be having significantly more success than the norm. More than 133,000 students take ...

Here's a video of my very talented UNC English Department colleague, LF, participating in the Beaver Queen Pageant. It's a shindig to raise money for the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association. Here's a link to an article in Durham Magazine , if you want some basic info on the event.

Details of a comScore study excerpted verbatim from TechCrunch : The comScore study found visitors in Russia to spend 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month on average. To put that level of ‘engagement’ in perspective: the average world-wide is 3.7 hours and 525 pages per visitor. Among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Brazil ranked closest to Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The United States is ranked number 9, with 4.2 hours and 477 pages per visitor per month. According to comScore, 65 percent of the worldwide Internet audience engages in social networking activities. More precisely, of the 1.1 billion people age 15 and older worldwide who accessed the Internet from a home or work location in May 2009, 734.2 million visited at least one social networking site during the month.