Census Report on Computer and Internet Use

We had 2 Census workshops here a few weeks ago and the presenters handed out some interesting Census reports on different subjects. One that's been sitting on my desk is Computer and Internet Use in the U.S.: 2003. It's quite detailed about usage--by age group, type of task, location of the computer, demographics, socioeconomic data, etc.

One interesting statistic: in 1993, 32% of children had access to a computer at home. In 2003, the figure was 76%. An interesting trend reversal, is that more women than men now use the computer at home. Interesting to speculate why that's changed...

You can find read the report at: http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p23-208.pdf

Whither print journalism?

Have you seen the video Epic 2015? It's a prediction about the future of communications and it's entertaining and scary at the same time. You can find it at www.robinsloan.com/ just click on Epic 2015 to see it. It's under 10 minutes long.

One thing the video talks about is the demise of print as a source for news. Along these lines, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have announced that they will switch to a smaller format--essentially dropping the width of one column. The WSJ will start January 2, 2007; The Times in 2008. Here's a link to the AP story:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061203/ap_on_bi_ge/wall_street_journal_redesign

The law of unintended consequences...

I received an email the other week asking if I would remove the link on our Help Pages to the Martin Luther King website that is the work of a hate group. We have this website posted along with other examples of bogus, spoof, or malicious websites for people to use as examples. The writer felt that linking to this website for any reason was a mistake. His reasoning was, that the more often a website is accessed, the greater its perceived popularity by search engines, and the more likely it will be to come up on the first page of results. Thus, we are inadvertently promoting this website. While I'm not sure that's strictly true, I did delete the site.

There was a link to the blog of the person who sent me this email. The blog posting about this problem was headed "Why do librarians hate Martin Luther King?" As you can imagine, I was very offended, especially since the posting did not explain the heading, but used it essentially as an attention-getter. My first thought was to fire off a comment, but I didn't--I'm not sure I want to communicate with this person. The offending post is at http://tuttlesvc.org What do you think?