I’ve been trying to avoid the bittergate news, I’m just tired of the back and forth and I have a great deal of confidence in Obama and his ability to handle himself under fire. I don’t need the aggravation of people making political hay out of statements that, to my ear, sound perfectly reasonable. That said, some of it slips through and once in a while I’m glad it does. TechPresident pointed to this wonderful peek behind the curtains at HuffingtonPost where this story was broken by an Obama supporter and amateur journalist. It is an instructive case of high standards and lowbrow MSM mixed into a campaign firestorm.

Perhaps not surprising to anyone who would find this posting here on a blog, but the NYT reports that youth (surprise!) copy, link to, and share video and news. In fact, they seem to be replacing traditional filters (think CNN or NYT) with social filters (think Facebook and email).

Rather than treating video-sharing Web sites as traditional news sources, young people use them as tools and act as editors themselves.

“We’re talking about a generation that doesn’t just like seeing the video in addition to the story — they expect it,” said Danny Shea, 23, the associate media editor for The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com). “And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message.”

The Times notes, for example, that even at the NYT site the transcript of the Obama speech last week was more emailed than any story their reporters wrote about the speech. Why does that make me feel so good? Imagine, people are learning to reach out for primary sources. On the web!

Well, a lot has happened since I last blogged. I don’t suppose I’m much of a blogger after all. I did keep quite a few notes about our trip to Austria last year on our Austria 2007 web site. But since leaving the University of Minnesota last year I’ve been looking for a way to move my blog off UThink. Unfortunately, even though I asked for it years ago, there is still no “export” available from the U’s Movable Type installation. So I finally took a deep breath and spent 90 minutes moving all the entries by hand. I guess it’s a good thing I was not more prolific! So, from here on, this blog will be hosted at my own eric.clst.org site.

We had a wonderful visit from a crew from Spain today. Gave an overview of our digital initiatives. This entry is part of a demonstration of UThink.

Sigh. It is easy not to blog, I find. Too much going on day to day to leave much behind. I’ll take yet another stab at it, though. Sorry about the extended silence!

It looks like the University Libraries blog service is now up and live. I didn’t really follow through with any blogging in the past couple weeks, so I’d better get on the ball. I do want to congratulate the team in our Digital Libraries Development Lab for getting this service off the ground. We will be introducing the service to two University Senate committees in the next two weeks and I hope that we can help them grasp what an exciting opportunity for scholarly communication this represents. Kudos to Shane and Company for nurturing this concept!

Well, I had to get rolling some time. I set up Mary’s blog a year ago and Alex has been blogging for quite a while. Today a wonderful presentation by Shane about blogs at the university for LLC made it clear that I can’t stay on the sidelines. I’ve been encouraging Shane and the Lab to pursue this course and I do believe blogs are an exciting new tool in the scholarly quiver, but it is time to get my feet wet. So here is a first entry. I wonder if there will be a second.