Archive for » July 3rd, 2007«
The End of the Private Life
The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. For a new generation of Americans and more, the unexposed life is not worth living. Digital diaries, online posts, life loggers and bloggers and Facebook and bed cams are increasingly making the very idea of a “private life” sound antique, retro, pointless.
Today, millions of people are pouring out their deepest intimacies, digitally, for perfect strangers. Ten years from now, says one, we will all have seen each other in our underwear. And maybe sooner.
This hour On Point: when all our kimonos are open – the end of the private life.
I’ve been peer-reviewed
My first peer-reviewed article “Firefox Search Plugins: Searching Your Library in the Browser” has just been published in Volume 1, Number 1 of The Journal of Web Librarianship. I’m not specifically excited over the fact that it’s a peer-reviewed journal. I’m not an academic so that’s not exactly a requirement for me. I’ve written eight previous books and dozens of articles so I’m not exactly lacking in the publication category. Yes, I’m glad to have another article published (it has been a while and no, Christie, I haven’t forgotten that podcasting article we talked about at CIL) as always, but the peer-reviewed thing at this point is just fitting into that “nice, added bonus” category.
However, I do have one, not so much complaint, as a concern over this whole experience: the fact that an article I submitted to the journal back in July 2006, wasn’t published until July 2007. One year for a technology article to see print. These day’s that’s not even vaguely fast enough. In my specific case, at the last minute (December 2006), I had to get an extra few sentences added to the beginning of the article to say that the code I’m talking about was replaced with a different code/method with the release of Firefox 2.0 but that my code would still work. (Given the opportunity I would have re-written the whole article but the process was too far along for that to happen.)
The world of peer-reviewed journals is not mine. I don’t have suggestions for fixing this, nor will I spend all that much time on it. I just needed to say all this, as I’m sure I’m not the only author with these concerns.
