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Still on the subject of perverts ...

This item on the Cinematical blog, "MovieFone thinks I'm a perv", is pretty funny. The conversation with the MovieFone AIM robot began like this:

2:49:14 PM karinalongworth: alfred hitchcock
2:49:14 PM moviefone: That's rude. I'm here to help. Type, help if you ned it.

Jenny's been mentioning IM bots recently, but, as Cinematical's experience demonstrates, IM bots ain't all that. We actually found this out some months back, since we -- even though we don't live in Ann Arbor -- came up with the idea about a year ago to do a library chatbot for work, but it ended up that we couldn't pull it off.

We wanted to give the kiddies who wanted to "just chat" on our virtual reference service a place to go for idle banter, with answers to a few basic library questions, too. We set up a Pandorabots account, including an animated Web avatar and AIM connection, but neither we nor our minion had the time or scripting skill to get the artificial intelligence to work to our satisfaction. For example, we wanted the bot to stop giving out drink recipes and be able to make a few reading suggestions in different genres. Plus, AIM stopped playing nice with Pandorabots.

Snakes on a plane. Maybe we'll give it another go next year.

We've found that users of our library's IM reference service frequently ask whether we're a real person or a robot. They've probably seen us trying to dance.

We've also found that the AIM Yellow Pages robot doesn't recognize our ZIP Code, which has been around for only a couple years, so we can't use it to look up places in our burb. See? Bots ain't all that.

Still, we let our consortium's ILS vendor know a while back that we really, really want an IM interface for our catalog. And about 83 other features. We enjoy playing Veruca Salt every once in a while.

p.s. Wired magazine lists the 50 Best Robots Ever. Understandably no IM bots, but no Robot from Lost In Space? Danger! Also over at Wired.com is a list of 10 Sexiest Geeks of 2005. No one we've ever met is on the list, though we're big fans of Bookslut's Jessa Crispin and of Judge John Jones' opinion in the intelligent design case.

If you're not familiar with the research put out by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, you should be. Them Pew folks do quite a few reports that can help us understand our users' online behavior and preferences.

For instance, anyone who's thinking about providing reference service via instant messaging needs to delve into last summer's report about teens and technology. So, when TPTB ask for data to justify going IM, you can present a nice chart showing that four times as many teens have used IM to talk about school work than have used it to break up with somebody.

This week, Pew released a new report on How Women and Men Use the Internet. This study, too, has some interesting data, though much of it mainly confirms what standup comedians already know. For instance, significantly more women than men use the Internet to get directions. And airplane food, what's up with that?

Pew also found that a lot more men than women go to porn sites. Wow, really? Here's the questionnaire item and the percentage of each sex who answered "Yes":

Q: Please tell me if you ever do any of the following when you go online: Visit an adult website?

Men: 21%

Women: 5%

Another interpretation of this data is shown in the following nice chart:
The Pew report also concludes that men are the geekier sex. Again, no real surprise:

"The data we have collected suggest men are more interested and aware about the world of technology and how their own systems work, from computers to internet connections. They try more new things, from hardware to software. As a natural consequence, men are more adept about dealing in the tech world, from installing filters to troubleshooting repairs. And they are more confident, in their roles as techies and geeks."

We'll interpret this as saying that men are more naturally adept at technology, so male librarians ought to be paid higher salaries. Who are we to argue with research?

Finally, Pew found that many more men have high-speed Internet connections at home, so we extrapolate that men are more likely than women to utter the phrase "fucking Comcast" on any given day. Fucking Comcast.

We finally saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And we find that we're not the only one who's noticed a resemblance between Ralph Fiennes' makeup job as Voldemort and his burny face in The English Patient.

But with a PG-13 rating, how did the makers of HP4 get away with that nude scene with Harry and Kristin Scott Thomas in the bath?

Here's something we just thought of: inverse tagclouds. Which you probably already guessed, if you read this item's headline.

Just like regular ol' tagclouds, but the words which appear least frequently in the set are the biggest and boldest. There'd have to be a separate page for words that appear just once, though. Maybe even for words that are in twice.

We're surprised no one else seems to have come up with this concept, and that it hasn't been spurted across the blogosphere. After all, inverse tagclouds combine folksonomy with "the long tail," two things that bibliobloggers tend to have bukkake parties over. Figuratively speaking, of course.

BTW, "the long tail" is one of those buzz words/phrases that we really don't need to see/hear in 2006. Ditto "Web 2.0" and "Library 2.0" and anything else 2.0 that isn't pencil lead. We're not sure that "tagcloud" is such a great word, either. How about: "tag array" instead? Cuz we could use a tag array and tonic right about now.

A few lines from Labyrinth of Literature:

"Jesus, Rex! How can an organization professional keep such a messy closet?" (p. 10)

"Dear me! I had no idea how vast this labyrinth of literature had become!" (p. 20)

"Well, it is our mandate to shush." (p. 23)

The inside-back cover of RL2 is a hard copy of this write-up about the International Order of Librarians. You can download a wallpaper graphic of the Ordo Bibliotheca's seal, but we wish we could get it on a t-shirt.

This made us laugh ...

Bill O'Reilly -- who's apparently on a kick against department stores having their employees wish shoppers "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" -- had a link on his site that read "Recommended Holiday Gifts" until that bit o' irony hit the blogs earlier this week. Now, it says "Recommended Christmas Gifts." They neglected to change the title in that page's <head> markup, though, since we're still seeing "BillOReilly.com: Recommended Holiday Gifts" at the top of our screen.

Bill does have good taste in teddy bears. Gotta give him that. But we're disappointed that there aren't any loofas for sale in the O'Reilly Christmas Store.

Tom Tomorrow suggests sending O'Reilly a "Happy Holidays" greeting card. Ha!

Speaking of Christmas and other winter holidays, here's a link to the anAACRonisms' classic seasonal tune, "Christmas Time at the Library," for the benefit of anyone hoping for a podcast from our RSS2.0 feed. (Sorry, looks like there won't be any new BibDitties until next year.)

Who wrote the following sentences?

"But it is true that a specific, historically crucial kind of reading has grown less common in this society: sitting down with a three-hundred-page book and following its argument or narrative without a great deal of distraction. We deal with text now in shorter bursts, following links across the Web, or sifting through a dozen e-mail messages. ... [T]here are certain types of experiences which cannot be readily conveyed in this more connective, abbreviated form. Complicated, sequential works of persuasion, where each premise builds on the previous one, and where an idea can take an entire chapter to develop, are not well suited to life on the computer screen."

If you guessed ALA President Michael Gorman, you're wrong. Loser.

Those lines are by Steven Johnson, from Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (p. 185). But doesn't this stuff sound a lot like some of the things Gorman's been saying?

We're not an ALA member, but that has nothing to do with Gorman. We don't hold anything against him. We thought his "blog people" column was entertaining, and the reaction of some librarians to it (including those idiotic Blog Person website badges) pretty embarrassing. We thought his comment about not wanting research to be dumbed down to a "hip-hop level" (we think that's the phrase he used, in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education several months ago) rather clever, if not worded elegantly enough, in the context of a discussion of students using Google Books (well, whatever it was called then) to just sample paragraphs or pages out of books they ought to be reading in their entirety.

If Gorman really wants to be alarmed about something, though, he should see all the parents going to public libraries to do research for their college-student children. We even had one mom in for her MBA-student son. Our jaw dropped.

BTW, if you haven't read Everything Bad ..., you should. Johnson posted this interesting bit from the book on his blog back in April, a thought experiment which supposes that video games were invented before books.