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Track fundraising for over 1,500 congressional candidates
MAPLight.org has announced the availability of "widgets" that you can use on your web site to display the fundraising activity of any of over 1,500 congressional candidates.
Citizens can now track fundraising for over 1,500 congressional candidates with free widgets for blogs, social networking pages, and personal web sites. MAPLight.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group, released today customizable widgets - portable chunks of code that allow content to be displayed on any web page - that make political fundraising more transparent. Bloggers and reporters will be able to easily share the campaign finance data for any number of congressional races with their audiences.
Try it on your own website!
Continue reading
New Broadband Report
A new report on broadband access in California highlights some of the problems of broadband that are often glossed over in other reports.
The report is available in several files including maps and a spreadsheet here: The State of Connectivity: Building Innovation Through Broadband.
The report says that, while 96% of California residences "have access" to broadband of some kind, only half of Californians have access to broadband at speeds greater than 10 Mbps. And though access is available, barely more than half of Californians have adopted broadband at home. Further, "broadband infrastructure is deployed unevenly throughout the state, from state-of–the-art to nonexistent." And 1.4 million mostly rural Californians lack broadband access altogether.
Since by some measures, according to the report, "California remains a domestic leader in broadband adoption", this is not an inspiring situation.
I found the spreadsheet, "Appendix: Broadband Pricing Survey" particularly interesting. It compares more than 100 broadband services throughout the state and shows the price for download speed varies from $3.81 to $144, per megabyte.
Press coverage: California Broadband Task Force Releases Final Report, By Gina M. Scott, Government Technology, Jan 18, 2008.
Continue readingWhen Our Systems Make Us Stupid
This article was first published in 1997 but Government Technology reprinted it this month. Enjoy!
- When Our Systems Make Us Stupid, by Gopal Kapur, Government Technology, Jan 18, 2008.
Lunchtime Listen: “Google Generation Myth” Report
This week the British library released a report of research designed "to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years' time." (See "Google Generation Myth" Report.)
The Library has provided a recording of the press conference of the release of the report at the British Library on January 16, 2008.
- Recording of the Wednesday 16 January launch event (MP3, 77min 22sec, 66.3MB)
The recording includes:
- Lord Triesman, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Innovation, Universities, and Skills: keynote speech (minutes 2-17)
- Ian Rowlands and Professor David Nicholas, the report's authors from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at the University College London (minutes 17-30)
- Dr Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary, JISC (minutes 30-37)
- Dame Lynne Brindley DBE, Chief Executive British Library (minutes 37-46)
- Questions and Answers
“Google Generation Myth” Report
This week the British library released a report of research designed "to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years' time."
- Pioneering research shows 'Google Generation' is a myth, British Library, Press Release, 16 January 2008.
- Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (PDF format; 1.67MB)
The reseach addresses the "media hype surrounding the 'Google generation' [those born after 1993] phenomenon" with an aim "to help library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviours in the most effective way."
Two things jumped out at me in the report. First, the idea that there is a "google generation" that has different information-seeking behavior from other generations because it has grown up with the Internet, the Web, search engines, and so forth, is largely false.
In many ways the Google generation label is increasingly unhelpful: recent research finds that it is not even accurate within the cohort of young people that it seeks to stereotype.
As Ian Rowlands says, there is a lot of "powerpoint puff" about this idea of a very different "google generation" ("Net Generation", "Digital Natives", "Millennials") and "many people have instant opinions" about it, but, until now, we have had very little evidence to support the assumptions. Now we have some research that says that "Many of the claims made on behalf of the Google Generation in the popular media fail to stack up fully against the evidence."
Second, there are changes in how all people seek information and do research. As the report notes: "much writing on the topic of this report overestimates the impact of ICTs [Information and Communications Technologies] on the young and underestimates its effect on older generations" [emphasis added]. The information seeking behavior of researchers, not just young people, but professors, lecturers and practitioners, has changed significantly.
Everyone exhibits a bouncing / flicking behaviour, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically. Power browsing and viewing is the norm for all. [emphasis added]
There is a lot of interesting information in this study and it deserves to be read by every librarian. In its conclusions, I noticed several themes that we've emphasized about government information here at FGI:
The significance of this for research libraries is threefold:Continue reading
- they need to make their sites more highly visible in cyberspace by opening them up to search engines [e.g., Is your search engine finding the government information you need?]
- they should abandon any hope of being a one-stop shop. [Having a one-stop, single repository (GPO's "Federal Digital System") as the only digital repository of government information is not as good an idea as supplementing such a monolithic repository with many subject collections that mingle non-government information with government information. See, Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program]
- they should accept that much content will seldom or never be used, other than perhaps a place from which to bounce. [Preservation of the less-used and seldom used materials will continue to be a cost drain on a government that is using cost-savings as a reason to justify its digital decisions. See, e.g., Be aware: semi-annual regulatory agenda is 1,700-pages online, 483 pages in print and GPO's Budget and Priorities.]
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