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Central Library Discussion Rooms to be painted

The discussion rooms in the Central Library will be painted next week (9-13th July). The bookings sheets have been blocked out for that period so that the painter can get free access.

There are some rooms booked for PD&R interviews next week. Use of the rooms for this should not be a problem as the painter will not be painting all the rooms at the same time. Students who wish to use the rooms may do so but will not be able to book and will have to move out when the room is needed for painting. THere are also some prior bookings, which can stay but students will not be able to make new bookings until Saturday 14th.

Tim O’Sullivan

RSS, wikis, and social networking in Plain English

There’s a collection of three short videos up at Dotsub.com which explain what RSS, wikis, and social networking are and how they work using a whiteboard, pieces of paper, and a voiceover. They’re great fun to watch – short (2-4 minutes each), very easy to understand and just plain cute.

(Dotsub.com is a small video sharing site, a little like YouTube but if you supply English subtitles, your viewers can translate them into their own language which is then available to future viewers — check out the list of languages available on the RSS video, all user-created.)

comment on Wikipedia from NYT

All the News That’s Fit to Print Out

By JONATHAN DEE
Published: July 1, 2007
When news broke on May 8 about the arrest of a half-dozen young Muslim men for supposedly planning to attack Fort Dix, alongside the usual range of reactions — disbelief, paranoia, outrage, indifference, prurience — a newer one was added: the desire to consecrate the event’s significance by creating a Wikipedia page about it. The first one to the punch was a longtime Wikipedia contributor known as CltFn, who at about 7 that morning created what’s called a stub — little more than a placeholder, often just one sentence in length, which other contributors may then build upon — under the heading “Fort Dix Terror Plot.” A while later, another Wikipedia user named Gracenotes took an interest as well. Over the next several hours, in constant cyberconversation with an ever-growing pack of other self-appointed editors, Gracenotes — whose real name is Matthew Gruen — expanded and corrected this stub 59 times, ultimately shaping it into a respectable, balanced and even footnoted 50-line account of that day’s major development in the war on terror. By the time he was done, “2007 Fort Dix Attack Plot” was featured on Wikipedia’s front page. Finally, around midnight, Gruen left a note on the site saying, “Off to bed,” and the next morning he went back to his junior year of high school. Read more and read it soon