rochelle once wrote about a pink vespa, i believe she should have written about a purple vespa with yellow polka dots.

Rochelle actually has a picture of a Pink Vespa, go there to see it.

Penzeys Spices. Global spice source [Cool Tools]

—-

i've always liked penzey's

Promotion and Tenure. To answer George's call for blog entries explaining how an English department works, I'll start by pointing to Jimbo's entry, “The Tenure File.” I'm not yet in a tenure-track position, but from my understanding, Jimbo's suggestions illustrate the factors that… [the chutry experiment]

—–

some people are interested in this sort of thing, i know i am to some extent interested….

Who “manages” the Internet?. These slides present a general overview of the current organizational structure and decision making related to the international Internet infrastructure. The author also indicates that Internet stability should become top concern internationally and identifies key areas where global coordination is… [InternetPolicy.net]

—–

answer…. no one manages it. many people have some say in how some parts are managed.

Piedmont Blog Conference Aug. 28 – Greensboro, NC.

Piedmont Blog Conference

Saturday, August 28. Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro.

Free.

If you blog, are interested in blogs, work as a journalist or in politics, or just like hanging out in cool places with interesting people, please come.

[EdCone.com] [The Mediaburn Radio Weblog]

—–

this might be worth going to, check it out.

Anti-Spam Legislation: Report on non-OECD Countries. This report was originally prepared for the OECD Workshop on Spam held in Brussels (February 2 -3, 2004). Countries covered by the report are: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine. Authors present provide a concise… [InternetPolicy.net]

—-

why don't more people actually research spam?

Disruptive technologies in scholarly communication. Susan Lafferty and Jenny Edwards, Disruptive technologies: what future universities and their libraries? Library Management, 26, 6 (2004) pp. 252-58. Only this abstract is free online: “Christensen's Theory of Disruptive Technologies predicts that mainstream organisations and industries can be made obsolete by new technologies that change the whole paradigm of the industries in which they operate. This paper demonstrates the relevance of the theory of disruptive technologies to academic libraries, higher education and the academic publishing industry. The way universities are organised and how they operate could change radically; scholarly communication could be transformed, placing academic publishers at risk; academic libraries may become irrelevant as new business models emerge. There are strategies that these organisations might adopt to limit the effect of such technologies and/or preferably transform them into sustaining technologies.” [Open Access News]

—-

what is the future, it is something to think about, but really it is something to build.

Starbucker.

I found this story of globalisation and soft power at charlotte street, via bertramonline. As bertram says, you can’t make this kind of thing up.

I had a look at related issues in this piece

[Crooked Timber]

—-

nice bit of glomm and link here, well worth thinking about the multitudes and manifolds of soft power in the world.

Call for OA at a major humanities organization. The Vice President of the American Philological Association (APA), Barbara McManus, has called on the organization to consider open access: “I was somewhat troubled by one element in several of the candidates' statements, reflecting the opinion that electronic editions of research tools have made access 'democratic' or 'available to all.' People at large research universities tend to forget that subscription-only services like the online edition of L'AnnŽe philologique or Project Muse are not available to scholars at the hundreds of smaller institutions that cannot afford such specialized services. When e-publication does get on the APA agenda, it is crucial that Open Access has a prominent place in the discussion, and I hope that continued grass-roots pressure from classicists will ensure that this does happen.” (Thanks to The Stoa Consortium.) [Open Access News]

—-

this is a good thing, but i can't say removing people's profit model is really a good thing. there is alot more to open access than just giving people open access … there is the concern for maintaining production value, employing graduate assistants, etc. there are costs that one model tends to provide for, and the other i personally don't know how they will account for them.